NewU Pt. 26

"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"