I pulled a chair away from the small kitchenette and set it down in front of Toussant, then sat down with a sigh and eyed the man impassively. The anger, that cold, calculating, scheming anger, was still there. It was still plotting, still Machiavellian in its patience, but right now, my expression, my demeanor, and my voice were as calm as a windless mountain lake. Everything about the way I looked at Becky's murderer just sang of indifference. Not indifference for him, of course. He knew by now that my capacity and willingness to inflict unimaginable suffering upon him was almost endless. No, my indifference was concerning his fate.

He would give me what I wanted, or he would die the sort of death that horror films were made of. I just didn't particularly care which one happened. Success would give me answers, but it would rob me of the satisfaction of seeing him die. Killing him would mean I'd need to find my answers elsewhere but would grant some small measure of justice for Becky's death.

Behind me, on the sofa, was Charlotte, looking decidedly less impassive than I was. Her face was a mask of impatience and rage, but I had allowed her to sit in on this whole thing on the condition that she kept quiet and didn't react to anything. Behind her, leaning against the wall on either side of the front window, were Jerry and Fiona. There was no real reason for them to be here, but they were still in the area after cleaning up the debacle at Mary's house and were curious if this could be done. More than that, they knew the Conclave better than I did. They might have questions that wouldn't occur to me. Leaning against the door frame to her bedroom was the newly exonerated Evie. She was nibbling nervously on the end of her finger. She didn't want this, and she certainly didn't want to watch it, but she understood that she had been dragged into a war, and she was more eager to know why she had been involved than she was scared of the methods I would use to find out.

"Before we begin, I need you to understand something," I said calmly and levelly to the heavily breathing Toussant. "You... are already dead. You died the very moment that Becky did. From the second that bomb went off, your death became an inevitability. The only thing that has kept you breathing since then is the fact that I haven't killed you yet. I have just prolonged that last second between life and death. You are not alive, which means you are not a human or an Inquisitor. You are a thing. And as a thing, you are neither entitled to nor do you even qualify for concepts such as mercy. You are no more capable of receiving compassion than a piece of lumber that is to be sawn. I can... and will... do anything and everything necessary to get the answers I need.

"That, however, leaves me with something of a dilemma. I cannot trust a single word you say. You might tell me exactly what you think I want to hear just to make the pain stop...and there will be a lot of pain. You could lie, or you could tell me the truth. There is no way for me to know. That is made more complicated by the fact that you have no vocal cords and can't tell me anything, even if you want to.

"Unless I break you," I held the man's eyes for a few pointed seconds.

"Now, my friends here," I went on, gesturing to the two Evos at the back of the room. "Tell me that nobody has ever even attempted to break the mind of an Inquisitor before, let alone be successful. Conventional wisdom, they say, dictates that Inquisitors are immune to Evo powers. Therefore, your mind is simply beyond my reach." Toussant huffed a soundless breath. "The thing is, I know they are wrong. You see, at the party, when your people attacked mine, I felt the minds of those Inquisitors just as clearly as I feel the minds of a human. It was like running my fingers over a shape in the dark. I couldn't quite make them out properly, but I could feel them. More importantly, I could feel them cracking. I could feel the weakness. Of course, if it were as simple as just repeating the process, there wouldn't be all this build-up. The problem, at least for you, is that I don't really know how I did it.

"So, I am going to sit here, and I am going to bore into your mind like a drill. I don't know if it will hurt or not, but considering what I am about to do to you, I would imagine it is going to be excruciating." I could almost hear Toussant's heartbeat increasing in his chest as the killer let his fear overtake him. "This isn't torture, at least not in the physical sense that I'm guessing you have been trained to resist. There will be no way to block out the pain. You will not be able to use the mind tricks to distract yourself because it is your mind that will be hurting.

"You don't need to understand the processes here, but I have the minds of hundreds of Evos, hundreds of lifetimes in my head. I have seen true suffering through their eyes. I have seen men withstand terrible, horrible things. Pain, degradation, and despair, the likes of which you cannot possibly imagine. Do you know what is most remarkable about all of the suffering I have seen inflicted by one man upon another? None of the victims talked; they all kept their mouths shut. And do you know why? Because they believed in something. They had a purpose greater than themselves, they dedicated themselves to a cause, and they would rather die an agonizing death before they would betray it.

"Is that you, Jean-Pierre? Are you a true believer? We are going to find out together, one way or another. But when the pain comes...and the pain will come...we will see how deep your faith really runs. In the back of your mind, you are already thinking of the ways that I could break you, you are already thinking about your limits, and you are already asking yourself how much you can take before you snap. As the pain grows, you will feel that resolve breaking; you will feel those limits getting smaller and closer, and every time they shrink, you will know... Your belief is a lie.

"But before we start, I want you to take a look around," Toussant's eyes blinked and then scanned slowly around the room. "Do you see them? Do you see how they have all made themselves comfortable? It is because they know that this is not going to be over quickly."

"Now. Let us begin."

********

Perception is a tricky thing. It is influenced as much by what you are looking at as by how you are looking at it. Whether you are watching a cloud taking on a familiar shape, picking a side in an argument, or deciding which political faction best represents your values, perception is as likely to offer clarity as it is to lead to mistakes. After six hours of inflicting unimaginable pain on the captive Toussant, I sat back with a huff and began to wonder if my own perception was leading me down the wrong path.

Because this wasn't fucking working!

I should explain.

There was something intrinsically defiant about the mind of an Inquisitor. It was the mountain face that couldn't be climbed, the ocean that couldn't be crossed by plane, the land-speed record that couldn't be beaten. But these were not absolutes; they were just things that hadn't been accomplished until someone came along and accomplished them. This motherfucker's mind was my K-2. The difference between those intrepid climbers and me, however, was that I had seen the top of the mountain. I had thrown the vengeful fury of my mind at the Inquisitors who attacked the party. I had utterly destroyed the bodies of those I could reach and then hunted for those that I couldn't. I had tracked those impenetrable voids - the absence of thought that represented every human and every non-blocking Evo on earth - and I felt them crack.

As powerful and dangerous as my vengeance had been that evening, however, it had also been wildly uncontrolled. I had lashed out at any semblance of a threat and utterly crushed it. I had taken the rage, the fury, and the grief of losing Faye and channeled it into pure, unadulterated violence. What I had done to crack those minds was more the result of my emotional outburst than it had been a conscious effort.

So - my obviously flawed logic dictated - if I channeled that power, focused it, harnessed it, and targeted it directly at Toussant's mind, his' would crack in the same way.

It did not.

The pressure I put on my captive's mind had been enormous. The power I poured into him lit up every single nerve ending in the man's head. To him, it felt like his skull had been put into an industrial car compactor while it was on fire, and a colony of exceptionally ravenous fire ants had slowly peeled the flesh from his head, all while being kept on a healthy supply of pain-enhancing drugs. No human being had ever survived this level of suffering, at least not while remaining psychologically intact, and although I could accurately say that Toussant was not human, the level of pain he endured was still beyond imagining.

But he had not broken.

A convincing argument could be made around severity, but when it boiled down to it, all I had done was give the man a headache.

I'm not sure Toussant would agree with that assessment any more than the victims of the Texas Chainsaw Massacre would say that they had gotten into an altercation over power tools, but the simple fact remained that I was no closer to breaking his mind than when I started.

The gargled, strangled, silent screams that wheezed from the man's lips, however, were simply beyond description. They were the things that haunted dreams. Despite this, there was not a single moment, not one, where that cold, calculating, patient anger that resided in my chest even considered showing mercy.

I looked over my shoulder at the others while I reached for a drink, bringing it to my lips and letting Toussant watch me drink it. He hadn't had more than a token amount of fluid in days, just enough to keep him alive. Even without my prompting, his muscles randomly spasmed, and cramps ripped through his body. Not being able to move, being forced to sit there and endure the pain made them even worse.

I expected Evie to retreat into her room, but at some point in the previous six hours, she had moved to sit next to Charlotte. Her face looked drawn and harrowed, her eyes were wide, and the color had drained from her normally rosy face. Charlotte was still looking completely unmoved by our captive's plight but offered me the smallest of supportive smiles. Behind her, Fiona and Jerry were just looking bored. Fiona had taken to staring at her phone, the slight musical dings of some mindless candy game echoing quietly from her place against the front wall. Jerry was alternating his attention between watching the agony on Toussant's face and periodically checking outside for movement. The revelation that I may not have finished off all of the attackers made him nervous, and he had nominated himself for guard duty while I was occupied.

I rolled my neck and turned my attention back to the haggard remains of the once mighty Jean-Pierre Toussant. A deep voiceless groan whispered into the air as the pressure smashed into him again.

Another hour later and I was starting to get frustrated. I was missing something. I was looking at it wrong. There had to be something I wasn't thinking of. There were only two parts of his power that I was able to focus on, his void and his aura. Over the course of his torture, I had quickly realized that his aura didn't technically exist, at least not in him. It seemed to be a physiological response within Evos. Whatever it was about him that made him different from us was the exact thing that allowed me to unconsciously identify him as an Inquisitor. Attacking that aura was not only pointless but impossible. His aura was the equivalent of the vibrations in a spider's web, the scent of blood in the water near a shark, or the movement of prey to a cat's eye. It was simply an effect of his presence on my mind. Attacking that would have been like attacking a shadow. That only left his void.

Ramping up the pressure to the point that my head started to hurt, I stood over the man and stared into his upturned eyes. "I'm going to get in!" I hissed at him, drumming my finger against his forehead with every word.

The void rippled.

I blinked and froze. In the entire time that I had been hammering my power into Toussant's mind, his void had not so much as flickered, let alone cracked. Yet a few taps of his forehead had made more of an impact on it than hours of immense power expenditure. Jeeves saw it too, and the cogs of his reasoning started to spin. I tapped him again, and the void rippled. I tapped him harder, and the void rippled more vigorously.

I frowned

Then I punched him. The eyeball that was still hanging limply from its socket swung wildly as his head whipped to the side. But the void seemed to shake violently. I squinted and pressed a finger against the fractured bone around his eye socket, the result of its impact with Charlotte's boot heel, and pushed.

The smallest of cracks flashed brightly over the void, then disappeared.

My eyes widened, suddenly realizing what I had been missing all this time, and I whispered into Toussant's ear. "So that's how it works."

********

The look on Evie's face told everyone in the room that she was trying to follow the conversation and failing miserably. She didn't have a clue what we were talking about but silently listened anyway.

"I'm sorry, Pete. You are going to have to explain this to me again," Jerry frowned. To be fair, that frown had been the only change in his expression since the look of utter bewilderment had washed over it a few minutes earlier.

I sighed. "Okay, this is all about perception. We have been looking at this all wrong. All of you, look at him. What do you see?"

Evie had the good sense to understand that I wasn't talking to her. "Nothing," Fiona said, her frown matching Jerry's, "Obviously. He is an Inquisitor."

Jerry nodded.

Charlotte had to agree. "I don't see anything either; it's just... blank."

"Exactly!" I grinned. "You don't see nothing. You see the blank. The complete absence of something is not nothing. It's like seeing a patch of perfect darkness in a bright room. It is conspicuous in its complete absence of anything. It's the same method astronomers use to find black holes in space. You see the void."

"Alright," Jerry said pensively. "Fair enough, but how is that relevant?"

"We have always assumed that Inquisitor minds are blank because they are immune to our powers, right?" I waited for the three confused-looking nods. "Wrong. I don't think they are any more immune to our powers than the average human; they just have some sort of... shield, for lack of a better word. The void that we see is not the absence of their mind but a projection from the biological process that defends them from us!"

"You mean..." Charlotte squinted, her eyes flicking over to Toussant. "...he is blocking us?"

"Yes!" I grinned. "Except his blocking is not the result of conscious thought like ours are; his is physiological. It is literally built-in."

"Built into where?" Fiona frowned, her eyes following Charlotte's

"His skull." My grin spread a little more. "It's like a cell jammer or a faraday cage. It emits some sort of 'bubble' around him that neutralizes our power and doesn't let them through."

Jerry groaned. "And that is why you haven't been able to break in. You have been attacking the bubble. You've been going after the effect, not the source."

"Exactly. At the party, they were cracking because they were injured. The voids that were cracking must have been from men who had taken a blow to the head. That is why the Royals or other high inquisitors are more resilient to us. Their skulls are literally thicker. Selective breeding over countless generations has promoted that advantage. A thicker skull means a larger, more powerful bubble."

"Okay, I admit, that is pretty fucking impressive," Fiona smiled at me, her eyes dilating a little. "But how does it help us? How are you going to break through it?"

"Oh, that's easy."

"Is it?" Jerry asked in surprise.

Charlotte chuckled, suddenly realizing where I was going with all this. "He's going to cut open his skull."

"Yup, while the piece of shit is still awake!" I turned and grinned maliciously over to Toussant. "You hear that, old chum? I'm not going to bore into your mind like a drill anymore. But how do you feel about circular saws and craniotomies?"

*******

There had been a flurry of activity around the house that Toussant, nailed to a chair as he was, had been forced to watch with visibly growing terror. Fiona and Jerry had gone shopping. It was a weekday, but it was still pretty late in the afternoon to be going out shopping for power tools, let alone all the minutia needed for the rest of this exercise.

At that moment, Charlotte and Evie were pinning plastic sheeting to the walls and hanging a curtain of it around our captive. Charlotte had started her nursing life as a surgical assistant, and although she had never been involved in an operation that included the skull, her expert knowledge told us that cutting into any part of the head would involve a lot of blood. Luckily, her experience also gave us ideas of how to avoid the inevitable mess.

Hence the sheets.

Jerry was setting up the handheld Dremel he found at a local hardware shop. It was, as Charlotte kindly pointed out, absolutely nothing like a surgical saw. Those things could be adjusted down to a fraction of a millimeter to avoid injuries to the brain through over-penetration. This one could not. I would just have to be careful. The contraption that Jerry was constructing - because, of course, some assembly was required - was designed to cut through jewelry and sheet metals. On the balance of probability, we all agreed that it would work on a skull.

Fiona was offering moral support.

Which translated to her reading the instructions and telling Jerry how to put it together properly.

Yes, apparently, that concept transcends the boundaries of species.

Finally, we were ready. Fiona, Jerry, and Evie retreated out of the plastic sheeted tent that had been constructed and were all watching from the sofa. Charlotte was inside with me, acting as my lovely assistant. I was decked out in full surgical costume - literally; they had picked up my outfit from a fancy dress shop - and a plastic face shield. Charlotte had warned that the blood spray would be more extreme than I thought it would be, and getting that shit in your eyes was not only messy but potentially extremely dangerous. There had been zero, absolutely zero, medical research done into the differences between Evo and Inquisitor blood, and mixing blood types between humans could prove lethal. She didn't want to even consider the effect of mixing between species.

"Sooo," Charlotte side-eyed me. "We want to keep him alive, right?"

"That is the plan, yes."

"Then how are you going to keep him still?"

"What do you mean?"

"Well, if he wants a quick end to his pain, all he has to do is jerk his head, and the saw will eviscerate his brain. Hell, even if he doesn't do it on purpose, if you hit a nerve and that causes a twitch...."

"Hmmm, I hadn't thought of that," I admitted. "How do they do it in hospitals?"

"Shit loads of medication and heavy-duty clamps."

"Do we have any of those?"

"Nope."

"Ideas?"

Charlotte thought for a second. "Do you have a screwdriver?"

"I... um... yeah, why?"

She held her hand out, waiting for me to reach onto one of the side tables, pick up the screwdriver and drop it in her hand. "There was a rare and particularly brutal medical procedure used in, I don't know, like the 1400s or something, as a means of curing epilepsy," she said, keeping her eyes on Toussant. His eyes followed her fearfully. "When a patient presented with convulsions, they thought that their bodies had been possessed by evil spirits and - in their spectacular medical wisdom - decided the epilepsy could only be cured by letting the spirits out."

"O...kay..."

"They came up with two foolproof ways of doing this. One way was to cut a hole in the patient's skull, but this had the same problem you are facing. Most of the time, they damaged the brain and either killed the patient outright or lobotomized them. The other technique was a little less risky but much harder. They severed the spinal cord at the base of the skull. It paralyzes the patient completely, but if it is done wrong, that could affect breathing and heart function, it could cause internal bleeding, and it risked disrupting blood flow to the brain. All of which caused death."

"And you can do that with a screwdriver?"

She nodded firmly, watching as Toussant's breathing started getting more and more rapid, and his eye flicked in terror between us. "It's a pity he can't scream; I would have liked to hear that," she looked up at me, realizing that I had asked a question. "Yeah, I can do it. He isn't going to last long afterward; paralysis comes with all sorts of complications on its own. He would need a lot of medical intervention to keep him alive for longer than a few days because we are basically turning him into a quadriplegic. If this works, you can heal him, but if it doesn't, he was going to die anyway," she finished with a shrug.

"Are all nurses this scary?" I smirked at her.

"Psssh, don't fuck with medical staff. We don't need to make your death look like an accident. We can make it look like natural causes," She grinned. "Now, pull his head down."

I turned to Toussant, his eyes wide with absolute terror as his heart rate went through the roof. "Do you want to hear the funny part?" I said, leaning to whisper close to his ear. "Even if you survive all this and never feel a physical sensation for the rest of your life, I am still going to make sure that the mental suffering never ever ends for you. The last thing you will feel before you are finally granted the mercy of death is the same agony you have suffered today."

A tear rolled down his cheek from his one remaining intact eye.

I gripped his hair and yanked his head forward and down, pressing his chin to his chest as Charlotte reached behind him and started carefully tracing the ridges of his vertebrae. Toussant's shoulders started to bounce as he silently sobbed. I allowed a small sadistic smile of satisfaction to curl my lips at the knowledge that he had finally been broken.

Charlotte found the spot on the back of his neck and pressed the blade of the flathead screwdriver between the fingers that held it steady. Then, with a quick, powerful swing over her arm, she slapped the palm of her other hand into its base and drove the tool into his spine.

********

Half an hour later, caked in blood and having asked Charlotte to wipe the spray from my face shield for the sixth time, I slowly pulled the small square of bone away from the rest of Toussant's skull. I had originally planned to remove the top half of his skull, lifting it away and turning it into an ashtray. But, as Charlotte explained, more cutting meant more risk of damaging the brain.

That, and I didn't smoke.

Toussant remained perfectly still, but his breathing became labored over the course of the procedure. Apparently, this was a normal side effect of blood loss and shock. Charlotte had administered some sort of medication to correct whatever was happening and assured me that our captive was at no risk of dying immediately. The tears that streamed down the man's face, along with the rolls of his eye as I sawed into his skull, let me know that not only was Toussant awake, he was feeling everything.

As soon as the bone fragment came free, his mind opened up to me like a well-wrapped Christmas gift. Charlotte, Fiona, and Jerry all gasped at the same time as the void around his mind collapsed, and his entire being was laid bare before us.

"You did it," Fiona whispered in reverent awe.

Jerry, looking utterly astonished, simply nodded as he pulled a twenty out of his wallet and handed it to Fiona without even looking.

"I need some time alone with Mr. Toussant," I said coldly. I did not take my eyes from the Dura Mater - the thick membranous sac that held the brain - as the light from the room flooded into it for the first time, I realized, in his entire life. As a general rule, your brain being exposed to light was not a good thing.

Charlotte looked up at me, not even remotely surprised by my request, but Fiona and Jerry seemed quite disappointed. Evie looked confused. "For Becky," Charlotte whispered to me, reaching for my hand and giving it a soft squeeze.

"For Becky," I answered, returning her gesture with none of the warmth I should have felt with it. The anger that had simmered and waited for so long was starting to sense the presence of its target and was uncoiling itself inside me, ready to strike. All other emotions were being blocked out in the process.

Slowly, everyone else filtered out of the room. Evie waited for Charlotte to peel off her surgical gown, and they both retired into Evie's room. Fiona and Jerry said something about going to find somewhere to eat and headed out the door, leaving me alone with Jean-Pierre.

I pulled the cheap wooden chair from outside the plastic tent and set it down in front of him. His head had been duct taped to the chair to keep it still, but his one eye was rolling, probably a side effect of the medication that Charlotte had given him.

I took a deep breath and sighed heavily. Neither of us had slept since the morning of Christmas Eve, and the time since then had been utterly exhausting by anyone's standards. I was now using the power plants in my city to keep myself going. Toussant, between the fear, the pain, and the sleep deprivation, had simply broken.

"I have heard it said that forgiveness is the key to one's own happiness," I said softly, not even sure if I was talking to him or myself. "That you cannot live a happy life while holding a grudge. There may be some truth in that. But do you want to know something? I don't care. Becky was a good person; she was so much better than you or me. She was the sort of person who brought light into the world when people like us only bring darkness. I feel so lucky to have met her and known her. You could have let her go. You could have let her live. You could have let me save her. You could have made that one decision, that one small act of mercy, and all of this could have been avoided.

"But you killed her. You killed her, knowing that you would be captured, thinking the worst I could do to you is kill you. I am about to harvest your mind for information; I am about to burn the heart out of you. I am going to completely destroy everything that makes you who you are. When I am finished, all that will be left of you will be a hollowed-out husk. I need you to know that everything that has happened in this house, and that happens from this point forward, you brought on yourself."

I took a deep breath, closed my eyes, and smashed my mind into his.

********

The mindscape, as far as I understood it, was the general term given to the environment where Evos exist when inside the mind. It didn't matter if it was their mind, someone else's mind, or the minds of a whole group of people, it was all called the mindscape. The cities in Evos' heads were formed in the mindscape. The space between those cities where duels were fought was the mindscape. Even the Conclave's vaulted cathedral, being a construction of a multitude of minds, was in the mindscape. The only real exception to this was each individual Evo's bunker. That place was without form or location. It was simply a representational means of interacting with one's own psyche.

The mindscape, for want of a better definition, was the broad, green, open land on which cities and cathedrals could be built. The only pure form of it that I had ever seen - that almost any Evo had ever seen - were the verdant green meadows that stretched out around the cities' walls. It didn't matter if you were in your own mind, communicating with another Evo, examining the mind of another human, or dueling; it always looked the same.

Bright sunshine, cloudless skies, and no weather. As a Brit, it was the perfect holiday destination. There had been only two occasions when that had been different for me. The wind that had puzzled me so much during Marco's visit - a puzzle that nobody else seemed to have experienced and I was yet to solve - and the storm that battered my city walls during Sterling's attacks.

Toussant's mind would be the third.

For starters, it was dark, like nighttime had finally fallen over the eternal sunshine of the rolling meadows. There were no stars, no moon, and there didn't even appear to be any clouds; it was just dark. More than that, it was fucking freezing!

Being British, we are used to it being pretty chilly, but this felt like standing outside in your underwear and trying to stare down a snowstorm. I had to wrap my arms around myself and tuck my fingers under my armpits to stop them from going numb as I looked around for Toussant's avatar.

I was starting to wonder how the hell I was going to find him in the pitch dark when I noticed a faint glow, as if from a firelight, a little way off in the distance. I pulled the collar up on the coat I materialized for myself, pushed my hands into its pockets, and started to walk.

Finally, after what felt like an eternity, I started to make out the shape of a man. I had finally found Toussant.

I felt the gasp escape my lips as soon as I was able to see him clearly.

From the neck down, Jean-Pierre Toussant was no different from any other human or Evo I had ever encountered. He was perfectly normal. His head, though, was horrific.

To my admittedly untrained eye, it looked like Toussant had been made entirely out of one of those glass plate negatives that 19th-century photographers used to use. Or maybe he had been sculpted entirely out of very brittle glass... It was the glass that was the important distinction here because his head looked like it had just been blown to pieces.

Frozen in place, shards and splinters of glass were hanging motionless in the air around the right-hand side of Toussant's head. Each shard was like a disassembled puzzle showing the hideously contorted and agonized features of what his head would have looked like if the puzzle were still whole.

It was like someone had taken a photograph of the man, fired a bullet through the part of the picture containing the man's head, and then frozen the whole scene in time a microsecond after the glass had exploded. Except the look on Toussant's face suggested that he had felt - and was still feeling - every part of it.

"Jesus," I muttered to myself as I stepped closer, then yelped and stumbled backward as his eye - contained in a shard of glass almost a full foot away from where it was supposed to be - moved to look at me.

The entire right-hand side of the man's head had exploded, and I don't mean that as in the result of an explosion, but exploded as in the mechanical term of visually dismantling something and separating its parts.

"Have you come to view the fruits of your labors?" He said, his voice hoarse and weak. What was most disconcerting was the fact that only half of his mouth was attached to the rest of him. The other half was spread over three or four individual shards, and none of which were attached to - or even anywhere near - each other, and all of them were moving. "Or have you come to gloat?"

Well, his avatar talked... that was new.

"I see you got your voice back," I answered calmly after taking a moment to compose myself.

"You didn't answer my question."

I took a deep breath and shook my head. "I removed your vocal cords in the real world, but I did nothing to your hearing. I know you heard what I said to you. You knew what was coming. I cannot gloat over something that is already dead, and...." I swept an arm around me "... there is no one else here to gloat to."

Toussant seemed to nod, although he never actually moved his head. "It was as you said it would be. My faith fled me, and my mind broke. You have achieved something that both of our people thought to be impossible. I should congratulate you on your victory."

"Do I look like I came here to be congratulated?" I scoffed. "You're not some noble vanquished knight. You are a terrorist and a murderer of innocents. How many? How many have you killed over the years?"

"One hundred and seventy-four," He answered, looking as surprised by the answer as by the fact that he had answered at all.

I smiled condescendingly. "I'm guessing you've never been in here before," I gestured to the dark mindscape around us. "You are no more powerful than a common human; if I ask you a question, you have no choice but to answer it and answer it truthfully. But maybe your loss of faith is a good thing because if you were right about it, you would have to face judgment for all of them."

Toussant sighed and nodded again, his spirit broken as much as his mind.

"Do you know what I am going to do to you?" I asked, raising my eyebrow. Toussant slowly shook his head, again without actually moving it. "Your mind is split into three parts:" I explained malevolent, like a TV villain monologuing. "Function - that is the part that controls your body. Movement, breathing, heart rate, and so on. Memory - the sum of your knowledge and your experiences - and personality - who you are, your loyalties, your values, and all that good stuff. First of all, I am going to harvest you for information. I am going to strip every single bit of usable intelligence out of you. Then once I have done that, I am going to carve out your entire personality, everything that makes you who you are, and I am going to destroy it. Then I am going to replace it with mine."

A look of resignation, mixed with terror, washed over the features of the once proud Inquisitor. "I will fight it," he said, neither of us believing he meant it.

"You can try, but that isn't how this works," I said, still devoid of emotion. "I ask, you answer. That is all there is. We are going to be here a while, and I don't have the energy or the patience to deal with small talk, so I am going to provide you with something of a demonstration."

"What kind of demonstration?"

"You see, in the real world, if someone asks you a question, and you don't answer truthfully. Your mouth might say that lie, but your mind will always think the truth. It's how the brain works. I can ask you anything I want, and your mind will automatically give me every single piece of information it can think of, whether you want it to or not. It will give me everything. Your last moments as a sentient lifeform will be spent watching your own mind betray you. So, let's start with something vague yet profound. Something that will demonstrate how powerless you are, so we can forgo any need to have this conversation again."

Toussant gulped, his lips parting to say something before I interrupted him again.

"I want you to tell me something that you think I would really want to know."

The parts of his face still attached to his body paled as the darkness around us swirled with light and color, as a memory, shown through his eyes, displaying itself over the tapestry of darkness that surrounded us.

Soon, the picture cleared. It was looking at the masked face of a man. One I instinctively understood to be another Inquisitor and a now-deceased member of Toussant's team. There was a flurry of hand signals before the view dropped down as an arm reached out and unlatched a familiar-looking wooden gate at the end of a familiar-looking garden.

The view raised back up to look ahead.

I felt the knot tighten in my chest as a house came into view. One I had spent years dreading the sight of. There was no mistaking that front door, despite the apparent paint job it had received in the years since I had last seen it. The view looked around, keeping tabs on the two men to his left and the two to his right as they fanned out and advanced up the garden. All of them were armed, and each of them had their weapons raised to cover one of the windows overlooking the approach. Toussant had his own weapon raised, aiming it at the door.

Approaching the edifice of the house, Toussant looked down at the white mailbox that had been bolted to the wall just next to the door. One I had seen countless times over my life. His eyes focused on the single word that had been ornately and carefully painted onto the white steel box that hadn't changed since I was a child.

"Roberts"