Vigor Mortis

Chapter 109: Epsilon-One

Even the outside of the Epsilon-Class prisoner’s cell is different enough from every other to set me even further on edge. All the way at the bottom floor of the facility, where I know I will probably be killed by my own allies if I try to walk too far down the hallway, I follow Vicki to a heavy-duty door set in the wall. Two Templars flank either side of it, positioned to be able to see through the tiny glass windows into the cell as well as watch any of the entryways to the hall. Vicki shows them authorization papers, something that we never needed for any other prisoner, so I pull out mine as well.

They unlock the door and let us in, revealing nothing but another, tiny room that’s completely empty beyond the second armored door on the other side of it. They lock us into the room, and only then does the second door open and let us through.

The first thing that assaults my senses when we enter is the smell. Shit, piss, blood… immediately, I’m on edge. Something is wrong here, and I look around for it. There were other Class-One prisoners I visited today, so to some extent I expected sparse accommodations. The bed and the toilet are both in full view of the windows, in the same room. There are no books, games, or other pleasantries for the prisoner to bide her time with. Unlike other Class-One accommodations, the entire room is padded to prevent injury. The worst part about this soft, cloth environment is that it allows new and exciting molds to grow, mixing with the bloody fecal smell into a truly putrid combination. I also hate the way it reflects sound; from the muffling walls to the one-way sonic enchantment on the windows, the entire room is a constant irritant to my echolocation.

It’s a fairly large room, about twenty feet in diameter, though splitting the room in half is a line painted onto the ground. No objects are on our side of it. It’s a horribly mute cell, enchanted so that no sound or light gets in from the outside. The windows just appear black, light coming from a non-permanent inscribed metamancy enchantment on our side of the room. Using a metal enchantment for light would be a bit of a waste, and I suspect that there is enough metal in the design of this facility that it’s dangerously pushing the limits of perception event risk.

And then there’s the prisoner herself. I’m not in the habit of paying much attention to people’s souls yet, since Watcher knows I don’t need yet another addition to my delicate sensorium, but it’s impossible not to look at this girl and see souls. They are everywhere, from her forehead to her toes, stuffed in every inch of her body. Every texture, every color, they crowd inside her, lying inert as they wait in vain for their god-given promise of the Watcher’s embrace. It’s a chilling sight, but one soul clearly stands above the rest: a brilliant blue cat’s eye, from which extrudes a bright spiderweb of energy all throughout the already-crowded body. Thick tentacles, not unlike those of my own god, grow from the core as well, though they rest motionlessly. Her physical body does the same, and when I make an effort to focus on it instead of the many souls inside, it paints a much different story.

In the physical world, I don’t see a dangerous, monstrous blasphemer but a sleeping, injured girl. She lies in a heap on the ground, eyes closed and not moving. If not for the fact that she’s clearly breathing and her heart works just fine, I would say that she looks dead. Both her arms are bound tightly behind her back, fingers held immobile to prevent casting. Likewise, she has the standard metal collar of any prisoner Gamma-class or above, but added on to it is a face mask that covers her nose and mouth, forcing her jaw shut and completely disabling speech. Her raven-black hair has been completely shaved, and scabs around her head leave no guesses as to the source of the bloody stench.

The moment I take all of that in, however, I start to see more and more off with this girl. Today I have witnessed more nonhuman sapients and physically modified humans than I have throughout the entire rest of my life combined, and still something about this girl’s body puts a lump of dread in my throat. Diagonally above her left eye sits another bulge, a seam of flesh waiting to open and reveal whatever’s underneath. Her pale skin has the slightest hint of blue, faint enough that even I almost miss it but unmistakable now that the thought passes through my mind. And the sleeve of her right arm bulges in odd ways, as if there was a snake curled around her bicep… one that’s also filled with souls. In aggregate, the girl is just human enough to make every nonhuman part that much more disturbing.

Vicki’s heart rate quickens the moment she steps inside, and she takes a deep breath to steady herself before walking past the line painted on the ground and kneeling down next to the prisoner. I follow her, remaining standing and flanking slightly behind my partner. She lightly taps the girl’s face, snaps her fingers a few times, and moves her hand back and forth in front of the prisoner’s belly as if to check whether the brilliant, tentacled eyeball inside it tracks her motion. Throughout all of it, the girl does not react.

“Well, the good news is it’s a quiescent day,” Vicki mumbles at me.

“Quiescent?” I ask, taking the risk of saying something, despite instructions not to.

“She’s not responding to anything,” Vicki answers, taking my pseudo-insubordination in stride. She isn’t actually my boss and can’t tell me what to do, but she is way more experienced and probably has justifiable reasons to prohibit me from speaking. “This happens from time to time, it usually lasts a couple days.”

“We have a prisoner that just randomly drops into a short-term coma, and nobody thinks this is a problem?” I respond, a bit incredulously.

Vicki shrugs.

“The biomancers can’t find the reason for it, and she doesn’t answer when we ask. But she doesn’t really do anything while this happens, so… no, it’s not a problem. Frankly, it makes my job way easier. I promise you, this is what a good day looks like.”

I nod and return to keeping my mouth shut. Vicki, meanwhile, sits the prisoner up and pulls her pants off, underwear and all. The stench of feces in the room immediately multiplies, and I very nearly have an episode as it overwhelms my senses. The prisoner has, apparently, crapped in her own trousers during her ‘quiescent’ state, and I’m instructed to assist with gathering water, cloth, and a spare change of clothes while Vicki cleans her up. After that’s all taken care of, Vicki undoes the mask over the prisoner’s face using a key and guides me through shoving a feeding tube down her throat, down which we pour a modest amount of water and some biomancer nutrient goop, since it’s liquid enough to make the journey. Right when we take out the tube, however, I get the scare of my life when the girl’s eyes flash open.

All three of them, and I’m not referring to the eye-like core of her soul. That odd flesh seam next to her temple opens as well, revealing an extra eye that stares my way even as the normal pair lock onto Vicki. Immediately, the soul tentacles around the prisoner’s core rear up like furious cobras. Instinctively, I leap backwards, but my senior Inquisitor stays right where she is.

“Vita,” Vicki says calmly. “Put those away, please.”

The next thing I know the spiritual tentacles are gone, as if they had never been there. Vita doesn’t move an inch from her spot on the floor, leaned up against the back wall of the room in the same position we had her to help force food into her stomach. Vicki glances at me, her helmeted head turning meaningfully my way. I nod. There was a bit of leniency before when the prisoner wasn’t responsive, but now I’m expected to follow my senior’s instructions: say and do nothing. This is easily one of the most dangerous prisoners in Site 4, and I need to be absolutely sure I don’t screw something up. I approach again, standing at the ready behind and to the side of my partner.

“I’m glad to see you up so soon,” Vicki says politely.

“Liar,” Vita flatly accuses. The girl’s voice is hoarse with misuse and bland to the point of inflectionless.

Vicki sighs through her nose, but presses on.

“Are you going to be cooperative today? Can we have a conversation, or is this just going to be a waste of my time?”

Vita’s eyes unfocus, whatever she has in her sleeve squirming restlessly.

“We can talk,” she says. “Congratulations, by the way.”

“On what?” Vicki asks, confused. “My new partner? This is Inquisitor Jelisaveta, by the way.”

“No, not her,” Vita dismisses. “Congratulations on your pregnancy.”

The room goes silent. I can smell the panic on my partner, sweat congealing underneath her armor as her heart rate rises.

“Excuse me?”

I see the first hint of emotion on the prisoner’s face as her lips quirk up in a mocking grin.

“Victoria, you can’t be that stupid,” the Epsilon-class laughs. “Your period was supposed to be two weeks ago, you know that.”

Okay, more than I needed to know really, but now I’m stuck trying to think through all the ways the prisoner could know that. I’m starting to get a bit nervous, and Vicki seems even more chilled.

“Vita, I don’t really think discussing my personal life is conducive to—”

“Oh, I think it’s pretty ‘conducive’ to my situation,” Vita sneers. “It’s only fair to your new partner that she knows you might need to take maternity leave because you like getting done raw in the locker room. …Not that you should keep it.”

I hear my partner shaking underneath her armor, ever so slightly.

“You are on thin ice, prisoner,” she says evenly.

“Oh no, not ice, whatever will I do,” Vita answers blandly. “I feel like I’m not the only one, though. I mean, fucking your partner has to be against Inquisitorial policy, right? But you and him were never much for following policy, were you?”

Vicki’s fists clench.

“Don’t speak of him,” she spits. Literally, in fact. I hear some of the droplets hit the inside of her helmet.

“Oh, don’t get so fucking worked up,” Vita hisses back. “He never loved you. Not even a little.”

A crack rings out in the cell as Vicki smashes her armored elbow into the side of Vita’s head.

“We’re done here,” she growls. “You do not get to talk about the man you murdered like you knew him.”

The prisoner just laughs in my partner’s face.

“I know more about him than you ever will, and you know it.”

Something snaps in my partner and her fist raises back. I keep my body firmly still as Vicki starts hitting the prisoner over and over, furiously smashing her gauntlets into Vita’s face, who only responds with more laughter. The girl just sits there and takes it, receiving nothing but superficial cuts and bruises against pounding blows that would probably knock me straight unconscious. I’m horrified, standing silently to the side as I follow my instructions anyway, saying and doing nothing as my partner violently beats a girl half her weight.

“I told you, Norah,” the prisoner cackles. “Hypocrites. Violent hypocrites, all of them!”

As she says those words, her brilliant sapphire soul points its pupil in my direction, the blows still raining down. I don’t know who Norah is, but it’s easy to tell one thing about those words. This is bait. I know it’s bait.

But she’s also right. Standing back and watching is no better than punching this prisoner myself.

Stepping forward, I catch Vicki’s arm as she pulls it back for another blow. She twists her head my way, breathing hard. Crying, a little, behind her helmet. I silently stare back at her, holding the arm firm until she finally relaxes her body. This is not what the Templars were made to do. What we are called to do. I don’t care if it’s official protocol to beat the shit out of a mouthy prisoner, but this is not right. …I’m also pretty sure it’s not official protocol. Hopefully.

Firmly, I pull Vicki away from the girl, swapping our positions as I kneel down next to Vita and start casting the one healing spell I know. It’s nothing fancy, it just speeds up the body’s natural regenerative process in a certain area. The spell fizzles, my meager magical skill hitting the prisoner’s resistance like a brick wall. I frown, but decide that’s her call and move to secure her jaw-securing mask back on instead.

“You have no idea what you’re doing,” Vita sneers at me. “For all you know you’re about to get fired.”

“Yep,” I grunt in response, and then lock her jaw down.

Holding my hand out, Vicki unceremoniously passes me the key and I finish re-securing the prisoner. Then I get up, turn away, and start to walk right out of the prison cell, praying desperately to the Watcher that Victoria will just step in line behind me if I put enough confidence in my posture. She does, thank goodness, and shortly afterwards we are out of the cell. I take my helmet off, dreading the amount of washing I will need to get all the poop smell out of it. I take a deep breath of the relatively clean air and let it out as a slow sigh.

“Okay,” I tell Vicki. “Can you tell me what the fuck that was?”

My partners fists are still clenched, drops of drying blood congealed on each of them.

“Sometimes prisoners have to be reminded who is in charge,” she grunts. “It’s not a fun part of the job, but—”

“Vicki, that’s bullshit,” I say, cutting her off. “She was goading you. Hitting her doesn’t even hurt her.”

“She killed Elliot!” Vicki snaps. “She killed Elliot and she has been rubbing my fucking face in it for the past month and I’m just supposed to stand there and take it? I just—aaaagh!”

Vicki rips off her own helmet, throwing it furiously at the ground. It clatters against the stone and bounces, loud and sudden enough to make me visibly wince. The two door guards politely and firmly ignore us as my partner starts sobbing in the middle of the hallway.

“I know he d-didn’t care about me that way,” she stammers. “I know that. But I did. And he’s dead now, and she’s right I missed my period and I don’t know what to do! I thought maybe it was just late, but…”

I let out a controlled breath, glancing through the one-way window towards the Epsilon-class prisoner. She’s sitting exactly how we left her, almost motionless except for her breathing. But as I watch her that brilliant, burning blue soul turns to stare directly at me… despite the enchantments that supposedly prevent her from seeing outside the cell.

Carefully, purposefully, I hold in my urge to shudder as I return my attention to my partner. We just did our first check up on every prisoner for the day, but most have needs that need to be seen to more than once. From here, we can take a short break, but are expected to do this all over again afterwards. Vita needs to be checked three times a day, as we have to personally feed her, clean her, and so forth. Victoria has been with this girl, by herself, three times a day, every day, for the past month. She has been forced to interact with a girl that seems to be fully capable of carving out someone’s insecurities with a glance, one that seems to actively despise her, while overworked and apparently pregnant.

I’m not entirely certain that I wouldn’t have ended up beating the shit out of a prisoner under those circumstances. I can admit that. That doesn’t make it okay, but… I get it. As much as Templars need to be above that, need to be held to a higher standard, we are still human.

“Well, here’s the first thing we are going to do,” I tell Vicki. “We are going to go on break. And during break, you and I are going to hash out who deals with which prisoner. And I’m going to be taking Vita.”

“You can’t do that,” Vicki insists, wiping her face as she goes to pick up her helmet.

She says that, but I’m pretty sure I can’t not do it. There is no universe where I subject Vita and Vicki to each other any more than they already have been.

“Look, I know I’m the newbie, but I’m not incompetent,” I argue. “I’ve got the Epsilon protocols memorized, and you desperately need a fucking break from this girl. I’ve got this.”

That is, of course, a brazen lie, but I’m pretty sure I can memorize most of the protocols before I roll back around here later today. Probably. At least the important ones. Victoria doesn’t take much pushing to accept the way out, though, and after our break I spend every moment walking from cell to cell trying to make good on that boast, pouring through every bit of information we have on Epsilon protocol and especially Vita herself. Shamefully, I don’t think I end up giving all my other inmates the attention they deserve because I’m so caught up in it. Vita is just a captivating case, though.

If I’m reading this right, Vita was here for nearly two years as a Class-Three, and then, out of nowhere, she just had an ‘altercation’ that ended up with my predecessor dead? I mean, I guess not out of nowhere-nowhere. You know, since we apparently beat and torture her. We obviously don’t have the capacity to remove the souls she’s keeping trapped if we’re resorting to barbarism like that, but what’s much more interesting to me is the question of why she isn’t just giving them up. It’s weird to me. There’s so much information that I would have expected to find in her files that just isn’t there. I don’t have any records of interviews, I don’t have any psychological evaluations, I don’t have anything that would actually be helpful for cracking this girl. But ostensibly, that’s what my job is before anything else. We want to get those souls out of her. We want to educate her. We want her to cooperate. So why don’t I have a single bit of information on why she isn’t cooperating?

First things first, before heading to her cell I go to the mess hall and grab something that isn’t fucking nutrient goop, if only for my own sanity. If I am going to be stuck smelling the wretched insides of that girl’s cell (which are primarily scented like her own wretched insides) I’m going to bring some goddamn roasted chicken to offset it and nobody can stop me. Which is, I’ll admit, a pretty nice perk of being an Inquisitor in the animancy prison. I’m top dog to the point where most non-Inquisitors aren’t even allowed to ask me questions.

Plus, I figure that girl doesn’t want to eat nutrient goop any more than I want to smell it.

Four hours after our first meeting, I start our second. I have the chicken, which has been deboned and placed on a plate made mostly of soft fiber. The utensils I brought are checked by the cell guards before I’m allowed to bring them in, but I ensured they’re made of some kind of floppy material that is just barely firm enough to work like a fork but would bend before breaking skin. No potential weapons, only delicious chicken.

I then step into the room and get a sudden reminder why this girl mainly just gets nutrient goop. Once again, she’s passed out on the floor and completely unresponsive. Well, shit. I can’t get this stuff down a feeding tube unless I mama bird it, and fuck that.

So, I spend some time trying to wake her up. I do the things I remember Vicki doing, lightly tapping her cheek and snapping my fingers and whatnot. That doesn’t work, so I start talking to her. Well, talking to myself, mostly, but doing so as if she can hear me. I figure I either successfully call a bluff or nobody but the stoic guards know how much of an idiot I’m being. That doesn’t work either, but I don’t want to be a maximum doofus and walk out with the same chicken I walked in with, so I scoot back a little, take my helmet off, and start to eat it.

Vita wakes up. Or at the very least, her soul twitches a bit, but that’s good enough for me. I stare right at her soul as I munch down another bite of delicious chicken and finally she starts to move, each of her eyes opening and twisting my way as she starts to scowl.

“Is this some new kind of psychological torture?” she grumbles at me blandly.

“Nope,” I tell her. “Want some?”

She nods, slowly, and I’m a bit surprised how she immediately trusts me to feed her. Obviously, she can’t feed herself with her arms tied behind her back, but it still feels a bit incongruous that a girl who recently got the shit kicked out of her by someone wearing my uniform would so readily let me near her face with a fork. Her emotion-sensing abilities, perhaps? Maybe the same skill she uses to know that I’m worried about losing the job I just got demoted into lets her know that I have no intention to do anything other than let her eat. Which she does do, quite voraciously in fact.

“You need to pee or anything?” I ask her, getting some water for her to drink.

“No,” she grunts.

I nod and let her slurp down as much water as she wants, then sit down in front of her.

“You need anything else?” I ask her.

“Nope,” she deadpans.

“Mind if we have a chat?”

“And if I say yes?”

“Then I leave,” I tell her.

She scowls, studying me.

“Well, I mind.”

I nod and exit her cell without another word.

Our routine continues like this for a few days: I bring some food, I feed her the food, I ask to chat, I get politely told to sod off and then I do. Sometimes I will share a brief, amusing anecdote or talk about something that happened to me recently, but she mostly ignores it. One day she asks why I keep bringing different kinds of fresh food, to which I honestly tell her it’s because her cell smells like shit. She snorts with amusement and I record the interaction on a log I’ve been keeping, because I figure if I get killed I should at least try not to put my successor in the same position as me.

About ten days into my job, I start to get up and walk out of the cell before realizing that for the first time she didn’t decline my request to speak.

“Wait, did I hear you right?” I ask her.

“You tell me,” she grunts. “You’re like, the opposite of deaf.”

I frown.

“Okay, first question then: how do you know that? I’ve never talked about my talent.”

“It’s not really that hard to figure out,” Vita dismisses. “Your soul is full of sensory elements and you’re constantly reacting to even the slightest movements.”

Wait, seriously? Sensory elements? Now that I think about it, I guess I get the impression of smells, sounds, feelings, and so on when I look at my soul, even though it doesn’t actually have those things. Is she saying that hints at my talent? That would make a lot of sense actually, but mostly I kind of take offense to the idea that I react to small movements. I feel like I’m really good at not visibly reacting to all the bullshit my talent detects! I guess I’m going to have to get better at that. I am, in fact, making quite a valiant effort to ignore the frankly disgusting sound of Vita swishing her own saliva around inside her mouth, and—she’s smirking at me, this is entirely on purpose, isn’t it?

“You react on the inside,” Vita clarifies, apparently picking up on my train of thought there. ‘Possible cognimancy’ my ass.

“You can read minds,” I conclude.

She shrugs.

“I told you people no before and I say no again now. Your soul just reacts to things, it shows your emotions. If you actually pay attention, you can probably figure it out too.”

I nod slowly, trying to decide how much I believe that. I guess for now I will take it at face value, if only because dismissing trust this early on in the conversation would just be stabbing myself in the foot.

“It’s generally safe to assume that I haven’t been told much of anything that you have told my coworkers,” I tell her. “Apologies if I ask you to repeat yourself.”

She snorts.

“You’re weirdly sincere,” Vita comments.

“Being sincere probably shouldn’t be weird,” I muse, “but I guess it is a lot of the time, isn’t it?”

“I tend to get a lot of bullshit lip service considering how much blasphemy I’m being accused of, yeah,” Vita agrees.

Well, that’s a segue if I’ve ever heard one.

“Speaking of,” I say, “why do it? Like, what’s with the soul collection?”

The three-eyed girl sneers derisively, and for the first time I see her shakily start to stand up. She’s… bad at it, worryingly so. If I didn’t get the impression that she’s standing up to make a point I would absolutely be trying to help her. She reminds me of a puppet, lifted by strings and jerking upright as if she’s forgotten how. She stumbles, catching herself on the wall as she lifts to her full height… which happens to be barely five foot even.

“I don’t believe I can commit blasphemy against a religion that is objectively wrong,” she declares, glowering down at my position on the floor. “Unlike your knockoff spells, I can see what I see at any distance as long as there isn’t anything in the way. I have watched your pathetic excuse for a god pull souls down into its toothy spiritual maw and chew them apart. You fucking idiots think that you’re asking me to save the people in me, but all that’s waiting for them is annihilation. There is no afterlife.”

I nod slowly as her tirade ends, which doesn’t seem to be the reaction she’s looking for but oh well, I’m here to feed her chicken, not reactions. Still, her claim is interesting. Assuming she really believes this—again, because I have no incentive to not take her at face value here—I can see that being something she won’t flinch on. If she believes that she’s protecting the soul of a loved one from some kind of giant monster, well, I’d probably endure prison too. So where do I go from here? I guess I should poke at the theory and see if there’s anywhere it falls apart.

“So… you’ve seen the Mistwatcher’s soul, and you’ve seen it eat the souls it collects. But do you have any reason to believe that ‘eating’ the souls isn’t just the method by which they get sent to the afterlife?”

Vita rolls the extra eye on her face, the others unfocussing as she plops back down to the ground.

“This is pointless,” she grumbles. “You don’t believe me at all.”

I raise an eyebrow at her.

“Is it not expected that I don’t drop twenty-seven years of belief after hearing a few sentences?” I ask. “Like no, of course I don’t believe you, but that doesn’t mean I’m not interested in what you have to say.”

“Fuck off,” Vita grumbles.

“You mean it?” I ask her. “Because you know I’ll leave if you want me to.”

She doesn’t respond, which I interpret as tacit permission to continue sitting here. She goes back to being expressionless and limp, but I’ve learned a better way to figure out if she’s paying attention to me is to watch her tentacles or her big cat-eye soul. She’s still twitching and moving around a bit on the spiritual front, so I figure she’s thinking about it.

“Yeah, I have reason to believe that getting chomped into tiny pieces doesn’t transfer you to the afterlife,” she eventually grumbles. “And not just on the grounds that that should be explicitly fucking obvious. Much like the Mistwatcher, I can also eat souls. Unless you’re saying that when I do so people are taken to some afterlife inside me that I don’t even know about, it’s not a method of achieving eternal life. Furthermore, when you break a soul enough outside of the context of devouring it, it loses coherency and that person can no longer be brought back.”

Okay, she can eat souls, that’s… certainly a fucking revelation. But I can mentally table that for a moment and focus on what she’s saying.

“…Are you sure that breaking the soul isn’t the very thing that releases them to the afterlife, then?” I wonder. “Like, I’m new to all this being-an-animancer stuff, I’ll grant you, but that seems—”

“Splices, Wights,” Vita snaps, cutting me off. “If breaking a soul in half released the person inside it rather than just breaking that person in half, you couldn’t make two splices out of one soul, which is a thing you know is possible because there are a bunch of them that you talked to earlier today.”

“Splices are a product of animancy,” I counter, “which is explicitly forbidden because it can do things like alter the natural order.”

“Sure is weird that natural undead are a thing then. Hmm, it’s almost like they’re created when the Mistwatcher carelessly smashes a bunch of souls because it doesn’t give a shit about them as anything other than food!”

“But—”

“Look, can we stop?” Vita grunts. “I’ve had this conversation like fifty fucking times and it always goes the same way and you’re not going to listen to me so it doesn’t matter. Okay? There is nothing you can do to convince me to let these people die, and if you think you’re clever and try to make me I’ll give you a reminder on why they have me locked up down here.”

Well. That’s a death threat. I’m going to… not mention that on the report, I think. It wouldn’t really do my position any good.

“Sorry,” I say, raising my hands in a placating gesture. “I promise, I’m just talking. I absolutely don’t expect to convince you over one conversation, or necessarily even at all. I’m just trying to get a better idea of who you are.”

“So that you can convince me,” Vita finishes derisively. “Just save yourself the time and effort, Inquisitor.”

I frown.

“You know, if you manage to convince me, I’d consider that a win too. I… I mean, I’m not gonna lie, I find that really hard to believe, and I get that you’re probably tired of arguing about it, especially since it’s the whole reason you’re locked up down here and you think it’s a bunch of bullshit. I know that must feel unfair. But… you can tell I’m genuine, right? I’m not some unflappable rock.”

Again, Vita doesn’t respond at first, but I can see she’s thinking. I give her as much time as she needs. This is my last stop for the day, so any extra time I spend here is just eating into free time I don’t really use for much anyway. Believe it or not, there aren’t a whole lot of fun activities to pursue inside the maximum-security correctional facility.

“…Okay,” Vita says. “How about this. Think for a moment about what it means if I’m right versus what it means if I’m wrong.”

“I’m not sure I follow,” I tell her.

She lets out an annoyed huff.

“I don’t know, I’m not good at talking to people. I mean like… if I’m wrong and you’re right, what happens? Presumably I keep all the souls inside me and then I die eventually and then they are returned to the Mistwatcher normally, or maybe I figure out a way to bring them all back to life without fucking them up and I do that and they die later to something else and return to the Mistwatcher normally. Right? Most situations are fine, even if you let me do my thing. The absolute worst-case scenario is if I try to bring them back to life and do some animancy bullshit and somehow mess it up and then they don’t come back right. But I have no intention of doing that, which is why I’m holding them inside me until I know what I’m doing. Okay?”

“Okay,” I concede. “I would argue you’re severely underselling the inherent issues with preventing souls from passing to the afterlife, but overall that’s a reasonable assessment of the risks.”

“Sure, fine,” she grunts. “Now think about what happens if I’m right. If that’s true, everybody that has been dying is reduced to oblivion. We could have an afterlife, but you are not sending anyone there. That’s what scares me, Inquisitor. There’s literally oblivion at stake, but it’s like you would rather risk hurting everyone in the world than be wrong.”

I listen to that, frowning in thought. Of course, the obvious answer is to point out that if we’re right but people stop believing it, it hurts everyone because failing to follow the teachings of the Mistwatcher just condemns people to suffer in the afterlife until they learn the lessons they, by all rights, already should have learned. But that’s not really equivalent to oblivion, and I sense this is the precise sort of back-and-forth that will just frustrate her. I nod and resolve to genuinely think about it, hoping that will start mending the bridges my partner and predecessor have apparently worked so hard to burn. I try to think of something to change the topic to in the meantime, but to my surprise Vita beats me to it.

“Souls aren’t necessary for life,” she says out of the blue. “Like I know trees and stuff don’t have them, but I’ve seen animals move around without a soul, too”

I blink, a bit surprised at hearing that come out of nowhere, but decide to roll with it.

“I know that, actually,” I tell her. “Or at least I assumed.”

“You did?” Vita asks, her tone bland but her attention captivated enough for her eyes to actually look my way.

“Yep,” I say. “When bugs get small enough, the Mistwatcher doesn’t put souls in them. I guess most people don’t really notice, but it’s pretty obvious to me. As soon as I realized I wondered why. Like, what’s the cutoff?”

“No idea,” Vita admits. “I just saw the Mistwatcher be late to put a soul in a baby monster, and it walked around for a while without one.”

“I figured it out because I see a bunch of bugs all over everybody’s face literally all the time,” I tell her. “They are fucking disgusting and they make looking in a mirror absolutely horrifying and I can’t get rid of them and everyone has them. At first I figured the little bastards didn’t have souls because even the Mistwatcher knew that they were the worst, but then I started seeing it on all sorts of tiny creatures. Either my soul sight isn’t strong enough to detect them, or they have nothing.”

“I have bugs on my face?” Vita asks, wrinkling her nose.

I watch with surprise as her soul actually moves through the inside of her body, all the other souls flowing around it as it passes down her leg into her knee. She turns it around and looks at her own face, scowling with disgust.

“…Oh fuck, I think I kind of see them,” she groans.

“Seriously?” I ask.

Those things are crazy tiny, normal people can’t even get close to seeing them. Most of them just don’t believe me.

“I mean, it’s tough. You’re right, they don’t have souls, but I can still kind of make them out as discrete entities… fuck! Why did you tell me about this? This is the worst.”

“You regularly shit yourself and don’t seem to care, but bugs on your face is a problem?” I joke.

“Hey, when I was a kid I knew a guy who had a bug lay eggs in his ear, and—”

We actually just chat for a while after that, which I consider my first major victory here at Site 4. I keep things copacetic for the next tenday, improving my relations with all the other inmates as much as I can as well. Honestly, as much as it terrified me at first, I kind of like this deployment. Sure, I’ll probably suffer in the afterlife due to daily blasphemy, and yeah, everything smells like mold, and the confined spaces make my ears ring, and, you know, there’s the slightly terrifying reality that motherfucking Ars Rainier is like, just down the hall from somewhere I spend most of the day, but still. Talking to people is much more my skill set than getting eaten by monsters. It’s rewarding. Things are honestly pretty good.

I make a habit of looking through old records about my prisoners, and something that catches my eye one day is a shipment notice that was declined shortly after Vita was admitted to the prison. Basically, it looks like someone claiming to know her—the report doesn’t say who—dropped off a package with the church requesting that it be delivered to wherever she happens to be. The package was immediately investigated, and while I see nothing in the report that indicates it’s a risk to the facility, shipment was declined anyway. The contents of the package?

A stuffed animal.

I immediately pen a request to get the package re-investigated and sent to Site 4 if no anomalies are found, but the day afterwards I find myself staring down my irritated Inquisitor Captain.

“You’ve been taking a lot of liberties with our Epsilon-One,” Captain Manus tells me, and it sounds like an accusation.

“If I have made any unwitting breach of protocol, please correct me, Captain,” I respond primly.

“No, you haven’t,” he answers, which immediately feels like a load off my shoulders because I was legitimately unsure if that was true. “But you have been spending the vast majority of your time with a single prisoner, one suspected of cognimancy. Given your recent requests, I’m afraid I have to put you in decontamination.”

Fuck a duck, that doesn’t sound good.

“Decontamination, sir?” I ask. “I’m afraid I don’t know what that is.”

He nods.

“If all goes well, you still won’t. May you be in the Watcher’s good graces, Inquisitor.”

Then, without warning, I’m lying on my bed in my underwear, staring at the ceiling. My room is how I left it, but the lingering smells of two people I don’t recognize are all over everything I own. Shakily, my whole body sore, I slip off the bed and rise to my feet, heartbeat hammering a mile a minute. What the fuck just happened? How did I get here? My eyes catch a note on my dresser from Captain Manus, instructing me to go to his office. I put my armor on, chugging down a glass of water because my head is throbbing like I played chicken with a wall.

Flustered and confused, I report to my superior’s office as instructed. Manus is inside, reading through paperwork that he doesn’t bother to look up from when I arrive.

“You passed and your shipping request is granted,” he grunts. “Go find Inquisitor Victoria, she’s been covering for you these past three days. Dismissed.”

I walk out of his office in a daze. Why is my life always like this?