They let the journalist into the cell because the man had asked for her by name, and because the man, restrained behind a wall of reinforced glass, was the most hated person alive.
He did not look like a monster. He looked like a tired accountant, which, he told her, was closer to the truth than the headlines. "I can see them," he said. "The branches. Every choice, every consequence, fanning out. It came with the power; I didn't ask for it. I see that if this man lives, a thousand die in eleven years. I see that if this child grows up, a war does not. And then I see that everyone else is too squeamish to act on what I can plainly read — so they let the thousand die, and call themselves good, and call me the devil for spending one life to keep the books from ending in red."
She had come to expose him. She had her questions sharpened. But he answered each one with arithmetic so clean it frightened her — the names of the saved, the dates of the catastrophes that never came — and she realised the story was no longer the one she'd planned. The story was the page in front of her: his full confession, every life he'd spent and every multitude he claimed it bought. She could publish it as the ravings of a murderer. Or she could publish it as it was, and let the world feel the thing she was feeling now, which was the unbearable suspicion that he might be right.
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