Chapter 18

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.