"Where is he?"
The prisoner didn't answer.
Silence was all Esteban had gotten for three days, and he asked again anyway, in the same flat voice. No shouting. He said it the way a man repeats a sentence he has memorized.
"Where is he?"
Rain found its way through the warehouse roof and dripped onto the concrete beside the iron chair. The man in the chair was bound in clear restraints that shone like ice under the swinging lamp. Diamond. They couldn't be broken or cut. His wrists bled beneath them where he'd strained, and his gray shirt had dried stiff, been soaked again, and dried again.
On the back of his left hand, under the blood, was a small tattoo: a star with a seven inside it.
Three days had shrunk the place. Rotten ropes hung from the beams. Broken crates leaned against one wall. A bucket of stagnant water stood by the chair. In the corner sat the little stove Esteban had built himself out of stones from the yard, a few embers sulking in its belly. The only sounds were the rain, two men breathing, and the lamp's rusty creak.
Esteban stood in front of the prisoner with a length of iron in his hand. He'd just drawn it from the fire. It smoked, and it smelled of scorched metal.
He'd lost count. How many questions. How many times the man had cried out. How many times he had told himself he would never do this, and then done it.
On the first day he'd been polite. He brought water and bread, sat on a crate across from the man, and talked to him like one man talks to another. He promised to let him live if he would only point the way. The prisoner smiled and asked for another cup of water.
On the second day he kept him from sleeping. Whenever the man's eyes closed, a bucket of ice water woke him. Esteban asked, and asked, and asked, and got the same silence, and that calm look that made him want to scream.
On the third day he took the iron out of the fire.
He hadn't wanted to. He told himself that every time. But he'd wanted answers more than he'd wanted to stay a good man.
"Ten years," he said.
The prisoner lifted his head. His face was gray, his lower lip split. His eyes were still calm, and that was what raised the hair on Esteban's neck.
"Ten years I've been looking." Esteban took a step closer. "I slept in an empty house. I woke up to two names nobody answered. I walked through villages where half the doors were shut and asked, Have you seen them? Do you know anything? And they shook their heads and looked at their feet."
The prisoner said nothing.
"Do you know what that is, hunting the man who killed your family for ten years? I carry a drawing in my pocket. A six-year-old's drawing. Every night I take it out and count the crayon colors. Red, green, yellow. I keep picturing a little house with a red roof until I can't remember my wife's face, and I have to drag it back, one piece at a time."
His hand shook around the iron. He tightened his grip.
"You're one of them. You helped do this. I'm going to learn from you where the monster is, even if it takes cutting you to pieces. Even if I end up in pieces, too."
The prisoner's face didn't change.
"Last chance." Esteban's voice had gone hoarse. "Tell me where he is and I'll cut those restraints myself and let you walk. I swear it on my daughter."
The prisoner looked at him for a long moment. Then he closed his eyes, slowly, like a man choosing silence on purpose.
And Esteban understood that nothing in this world would make him talk.
He pressed the iron against the man's shoulder.
The scream was short and strangled. It bounced around the warehouse and died. The prisoner's body jerked against the chair. The air filled with the smell of burned flesh.
Esteban shut his eyes.
Not from pain. He couldn't stand to look at the man's face, because he knew he would see it every night from now on.
He dropped the iron into a crate and backed away two steps. Then he sat on an old wooden box with his elbows on his knees, and stared at the floor.
He'd never been like this. He was a woodcutter. He spent his days among trees, hauling timber to the village and coming home to a dark house. He'd never hurt anyone. But in a world that had lost half its people, everyone had learned things they never wanted to know.
He looked at his hands. Cracked at the fingers, thick-skinned from axe handles and rope. They knew heavy loads better than they knew harm. Now they were shaking, and the blood on them belonged to a man he couldn't even be sure deserved it.
Elena would stand in the doorway every evening, wiping her hands on her apron. You're late, she'd say. Lucia would come running barefoot with a new drawing and a smear of red wax on her cheek.
What would they say if they could see him now?
He had no answer, and that was worse than any answer.
"How much... longer?" the prisoner whispered.
Esteban looked up.
The man was breathing hard, cold sweat beading on his forehead. His eyes were steady.
"I heard you counting the colors," he said. "Red. Green. Yellow."
"Don't talk about her."
"Did she like green?"
"I said don't."
Esteban was on his feet before he knew it. He snatched the diamond dagger off the table and set its point under the prisoner's chin, forcing his face up.
"You say her name? You? You took her."
The man didn't answer. But something in his face had changed. It wasn't fear and it wasn't pain. It looked like pity.
Esteban could have stood anything but that.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
Nothing.
"Why are you looking at me like that?"
The blade pushed in until a thin line of blood ran down the clear edge. It would take one second to finish this. One second, and he'd never know.
"Talk. Where is he? Where's the monster who took them?"
For a long moment there was only rain, and two men panting.
Then something appeared in front of his eyes.
It wasn't light and it wasn't smoke. It was blue writing, thin as a thread, hanging in the air between his face and the prisoner's. As if someone had traced it with a wet finger.
[ Ascension: Wood Rank (+3) ]
He squeezed his eyes shut. When he opened them, it was still there.
Then it changed. The first line faded and a new one rose under it, in larger, colder letters.
[ Lore Boss ]
Underneath, line after line, in silence, as though the air itself were reading aloud:
[ The Seventh Star. Rafael. ]
[ He was not born strong. In his youth he served the Eraser: carried out every order, asked nothing, never raised his voice, never refused. ]
[ When others screamed or begged, he stayed silent. ]
[ That silence is what gave him his power. ]
Esteban didn't understand. He had never heard of anyone writing about a man in the air. He had no time to be afraid. All he could grasp was this: three days of silence hadn't been stubbornness. It was a habit, an old one, and the man had learned it years before Esteban ever heard his name.
That was why Rafael didn't scream the way other men did. And that was why a hot iron would never pry that mouth open.
He still didn't lower the dagger.
Then, for the first time in three days, Rafael spoke.
"You're wasting your time."
His voice was rough from screaming, and calm. A man stating a simple fact.
"What?"
"Not because I won't talk. Because what you want isn't here." He drew a breath that hurt. "You've spent three days torturing me over the wrong question."
Esteban gave a dry laugh. It sounded like a cough. "Three days, and you say it's the wrong question?"
"Yes."
"Then what's the right one?"
Rafael didn't answer right away. He closed his eyes as if gathering himself. When he opened them, they held something Esteban couldn't name. It was the look of a man who knew that what he was about to say would cut deeper than the iron.
"Don't play with me."
"I'm not."
"Then tell me where he is."
"I won't." Rafael shook his head, tired. "But I'll tell you something else. Something you'll wish you'd heard ten years ago."
Esteban's hand trembled.
"Say it."
Rafael looked straight into his eyes. There was something in that look Esteban had never seen on a killer's face. Sorrow.
"Your daughter..."
He stopped.
"What about her?"
"She isn't dead."
The rain went quiet.
Or it didn't. But Esteban couldn't hear it anymore.
"What?"
"Lucia." Rafael said the name softly, looking past the blade at his throat as if it weren't there. "She's still six."
The dagger fell from Esteban's hand.
The diamond hit the floor and rang through the warehouse like a small bell, then went still. Esteban didn't move. He couldn't feel his limbs. Something had cracked inside him, something he'd thought broke ten years ago, though he'd always kept a small piece of it.
He tried to speak. Nothing came out. He tried to pick up the dagger, and his fingers wouldn't close. His heart slammed. The room turned slowly around him: the lamp, the chair, the pale face, and the little tattoo he'd been staring at in his dreams for ten years.
He had heard every kind of lie. Lies sold for a silver coin. Lies told out of pity. Lies from frightened mouths. But he had never heard a sentence like this, from a man in this condition, said in such a tired, level voice.
It wasn't a lie. It didn't sound like one at all. And every time he tried to tell himself otherwise, the same thing came back. He had questioned hundreds of people. Searched dozens of houses. Followed every thread. And in ten years he had found nothing to prove they were dead. No grave. No body. Not even a headstone. He had believed it because everyone said so, and because believing in death was easier than waiting.
"You're lying."
"No."
"You're lying!" He grabbed the man's collar and shook him until the chair rattled. "She's dead! They're all dead! Everyone says he killed half the world!"
"Think." Rafael was struggling for air, but his voice hadn't changed. "How many bodies have you seen, Esteban? In all those years? How many graves? How many bones?"
Esteban froze.
He had never thought about it. Not once.
He saw the houses he had entered over the years. Tables with plates nobody had cleared. Beds with the sheets folded tight. Children's toys scattered across the floor, as if the owners had just stepped outside to play. No blood. No wreckage. No sign of a fight or a massacre. Only stillness, as though the whole world had held its breath in a single moment and forgotten to let it go.
How had he missed it? Ten years of walking past the evidence.
Empty villages. Shuttered houses. Made beds. Plates laid out for supper. And not one corpse.
"You..." His voice trailed off. "You..."
"Close your eyes," said Rafael, low. It was almost a plea. "And remember how this started. Not ten years ago. Four months ago."
"Four months?"
"Close them."
Before he did, Esteban saw the way Rafael was looking at him. There was no triumph in it, and no mockery. It was the look of a man carrying a weight for someone else that he couldn't put down, waiting for the other man to take the rest.
Esteban knew he should refuse. Hit him. Burn him. Do anything to shut that voice. He knew this might be the first step in a trap the monster himself had set. But he also knew he hadn't heard a sentence like that in ten years, and that whoever said it was either mad or honest, and that either one was easier to bear than going back to his empty house.
He didn't know why he obeyed. Maybe he had nothing left to resist with. Maybe everything inside him had come down at once. He closed his eyes slowly, his fists still tight on the man's collar.
He couldn't hear him anymore. He couldn't hear anything. Behind his eyelids he saw only a small house with a red roof, and a little girl at the window, waving, her hand stained green.
Above them the oil lamp shuddered. Its light swung three times.
Then it went out.
And the sound of the rain was gone.
Four months ago...