Three days after Sisyphus left the manor, I went down to see Edwin Vale. The house had already settled around me. Whatever movement remained belonged to servants finishing their work, distant doors closing, and the ordinary complaints of old wood adjusting beneath its own weight.
Vane was free again.
Vale was not.
When we returned from the hospital, Mara and two of the manor's men had carried him from the carriage before I could decide whether he was even conscious. Since then, he had remained somewhere beneath the house while his injuries were treated and the rest of us continued with our lives above him. I had not hurried to speak with him.
Part of that delay had been practical. Vale’s knee remained wrapped from the damage Sisyphus had done to it, and the bruising at his temple had faded into the yellowed edges of an injury that was finally beginning to heal. Questioning him while pain and concussion did most of his thinking for him would have gained me little. The rest of the delay belonged to me. I had spent enough time thinking about what I wanted from him to understand that information alone was not the problem.
Vale had information.
He also had years of explanations built around that information. Dr. Vane had given him a structure in which every cruelty could be called necessity, every act of obedience could be called professionalism, and every doubt could be answered by another premise supplied by the same man who had created the doubt in the first place. If I simply asked what he knew about Vane, Vale could lie. If I threatened him, he could endure it. If I bribed him, he could negotiate. The more interesting possibility was to make him understand himself. That was why I chose one of the quieter rooms beneath the manor.
It was not a dungeon, though the difference felt mostly architectural. The walls were plain. A single lamp rested upon a narrow table. There were no windows. The thick door sat far enough from the occupied portions of the house that servants would have little reason to pass it. Vale sat bound to a sturdy wooden chair beneath the light. His hands were secured behind him. His injured leg had been positioned carefully enough that the bindings did not press against the damaged knee. Someone had even given him water. The contradiction amused me.
We had kidnapped the man, tied him beneath a manor, treated his wounds, and apparently developed standards concerning his comfort. I stepped inside and closed the door behind me. The latch settled with a quiet click.
Vale raised his head and looked toward me.
Recognition came first. Then calculation. His eyes flicked once toward the hallway behind me before returning to my face. He seemed to be looking for someone else, perhaps Sisyphus or one of the manor’s servants. When he found no one, his shoulders tightened by a fraction. I suspected he was trying to determine whether I had come alone out of confidence or because I intended to do something I did not want witnessed.
"So," he murmured. "You've decided to ask questions."
"I've decided to have a conversation." I let my fingers leave the brass handle and turned fully toward him. "I think we can both gather that you have no regrets regarding your assistance of Doctor Vane, yes?"
Vale’s jaw tightened.
Not shame. The change was too clean for shame. I watched his attention dip briefly toward my hands. He was checking whether I carried anything that could be used against him. Fear existed, certainly, but it lived beneath something more stable. Conviction.
"No," Vale said. His voice remained calm. "I regret that what happened at the hospital became unnecessarily violent. I regret underestimating the man you brought with you. And I imagine, given my present circumstances, I ought to regret underestimating you."
A deliberate pause separated the final word from the others.
"But assisting Doctor Vane?" His expression did not move. "No. I don't."
I studied him. "I don't understand you, Vale. Was it greed?" The question was gentle enough to seem almost charitable. Vale’s reaction told me immediately that I had missed. A quiet breath escaped his nose. His gaze shifted away from me and returned with something dangerously close to offense. Greed had not exposed his motive. It had reduced it. Money mattered to him, but the suggestion that money explained him injured his pride.
"Money mattered," he admitted. "I won't insult you by pretending otherwise. Doctor Vane pays well, and competent assistants are rarely rewarded for developing consciences at inconvenient moments." His eyes settled on mine. "But greed? You think I spent years beside that man because I wanted a larger house?"
The answer sat behind the defensiveness. He believed the work mattered. Not merely Vane. Not merely the wages. The work itself.
"So you worked for him because you believed in his vision." I began walking around the chair at an easy pace. My boots clicked softly against the floor. "Do you feel even a sliver of compassion for the emotions of those who were tested upon?"
Vale followed me with his eyes until I moved behind him. His shoulders tightened.
He did not like losing sight of me. His lips pressed together before he answered. For a moment, his breathing changed. At this distance, the surface of Vale's mind was not silent. That did not mean his memories belonged to me. I could not reach into him and pull out a chosen afternoon, a face, or a confession as though opening a filing cabinet. Surface thoughts rose when emotion pushed them high enough. Impressions arrived before words. Contradictions between intention and expression became difficult to hide. A fragment brushed close enough for me to catch.
Screaming.
Not a complete scene. Not a memory I could examine at leisure. Only the remembered panic attached to the question I had asked him, followed by the instinctive discomfort of someone who knew exactly what kind of fear I meant. Vale had heard people scream. That much was close enough to know.
"Compassion is a dangerous word," he said at last. "It implies that feeling something obligates you to stop it."
"I felt sorry for some of them. Some more than others. There were procedures I argued against. Times I convinced Vane to stop before he otherwise would have. I kept people alive who would have died under someone less attentive."
He turned his head slightly, trying to keep me within the edge of his vision. The justification was old. I could hear that in its smoothness. He had repeated it enough times that it no longer required invention.
"But if you're asking whether their fear was enough to make me abandon the work, no. It wasn't."
"Your moral compass is corrupted by the lies and training you have put yourself through." I stopped. My finger rested briefly against my chin as I considered him. Then a possibility aligned inside my mind. Not certainty. A hypothesis. I turned quickly toward him.
"You're as much of a victim as I was, aren't you?"
Vale’s expression broke. His head snapped toward me with an indignation too immediate to be performed. For the first time since I entered the room, discipline failed him entirely. The word victim had struck something hidden. His fingers curled behind the chair. His breathing sharpened. Whatever had been done to him, he did not interpret himself through helplessness. He had built too much of his identity around having chosen his place beside Vane.
"Do not compare us," he said sharply. "You were a patient. I chose my position."
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Too fast. The defense had existed before the question. I watched the rest of his face catch up with his words. I chose. I understood. I stayed because the work mattered. He did not say those sentences aloud. He did not need to. Everything about the speed of his response carried their shape.
"Whatever Doctor Vane taught me, whatever influence you imagine he had, I was not helpless." His eyes narrowed. "Calling me a victim does not absolve me, Evelyn. And I have no interest in being absolved."
"I don't intend on absolving you." I let the words settle before continuing. "I intend on unraveling you."
Vale’s expression hardened. I felt no joy in saying it. That was almost worse.
"He trained you, just as he trained me. To be obedient. To do as he says. To be useful. Because when I was brought to be nothing, he believed I could pursue being something. That I would perceive some sort of freedom in a higher position." My eyes settled on him. "Which is what happened to you, isn't it, Edwin Vale?"
He went very still. Not the controlled stillness he had used earlier. This was the body stopping before the mind decided whether it should. His pupils narrowed. His lips parted, closed, then parted again.
Useful.
The word mattered. I could see it in the way his expression shifted around it. Not memories in any supernatural sense. Rather, the suggestion of sleepless nights and approval sought too eagerly. The peculiar warmth a person carries when praise is rare enough to become intoxicating. Being told he was different. Being told he was competent. Being permitted to stand beside the table rather than lie upon it. Vane had not offered Vale freedom. He had offered him proximity to power and taught him to mistake the distance between himself and the restraints for proof that he had escaped them.
"You know nothing about how I came to work for him." Vale's voice had lost its measured quality. "I earned my position." The words fractured even as he spoke them.
"He noticed me. He trusted me. I wasn't like them."
Again, not literal thoughts.
The architecture beneath the words.
"I was not dragged into that laboratory," he continued. "I was given an opportunity." The pause lasted too long. "And I made myself indispensable."
"Yes." I regarded him quietly. "You were special enough of a loyal dog to keep beside the doctor."
His face tightened at the word dog. I continued before anger could give him somewhere safe to retreat. "I don't condemn you for that, Edwin."
That disturbed Vale more. His mind had expected punishment. Condemnation would have allowed resistance. Pity would have allowed contempt. Instead, I offered what could pass for understanding. For the first time, uncertainty entered his expression without being immediately covered.
"Don't pity me," Vale said quietly. "If that is what this is becoming, spare me." His gaze dropped to the floorboards. "A dog doesn't question whether its master is right."
There it was. He needed that distinction.
"I did. More times than he knew," Vale insisted.
His posture changed as he said it. Not enough to be obvious to anyone who was not watching for it. The sentence was offered as proof of independence, but everything around it suggested compromise. Questions swallowed before they reached the tongue. Objections shaped carefully enough that they would not resemble disobedience. Boundaries shifted whenever Vane called the next step necessary.
"I simply reached the conclusion that he was right more often than he was wrong."
Even Vale seemed to hear how weak the sentence became once spoken aloud.
"Then you were a good dog," I said.
He flinched. Barely. His shoulders stiffened. His breathing caught. Anger surged, but humiliation moved beneath it. More interesting than either was recognition. Good. The word had mattered once. I could see its history in him without knowing the exact scenes. Praise delivered sparingly. A successful procedure. A difficult patient subdued. An instruction completed perfectly. Good work, Vale. The satisfaction attached to those moments curdled beneath the comparison.
"Stop calling me that." His voice came through clenched teeth. "You think because you've learned to watch people that you understand them?" He pulled once against the restraints before stopping himself.
"You escaped him and decided that makes you enlightened. It doesn't." His anger was no longer steady. "I was useful because I was competent. Not because I obeyed."
"Edwin?" I changed my voice. Not dramatically. Just enough. Something familiar. Pleasant. His eyes moved to mine. "Do you remember how you looked at me? How you risked your life to keep me from dying under the knife?" I allowed a breath of silence.
"Did you do that because you secretly cared for me?" The change in him was immediate. He stared. His pulse quickened visibly at his throat. The muscles around his mouth tightened. Warmth surfaced beneath resentment and shame before he could bury it. Judging by his reaction, he had checked Evelyn’s breathing, argued over dosages, and remained near her longer than professionalism required. When her condition worsened, he had been afraid.
Not for the records or the experiment, I suspected, but for her.
"Don't," he said. He looked away. "I was responsible for keeping you alive."
The answer came too quickly. Even Vale seemed to know it.
"You were..." Vale stopped. "You were different from the others." The phrase had once been flattering in his mind. Now it sounded contaminated by everything we had already discussed.
"I don't know what you expect me to call it, Evelyn. I watched you suffer. I knew what was being done to you, and I still went back every morning." His eyes opened again, though he did not quite meet mine. "But when I thought you were going to die, I was afraid."
Something inside me recoiled in disgust. My face did not follow those same feelings.
"Why did you chase me then?" The gentleness remained in my voice. "Why accept the money to reclaim me a second time? My fate would've been worse than it is now." The softness did what accusation had failed to do. His expression changed. Not into guilt. Into familiarity. For an instant I watched him return to the rooms where he had understood the world, to a version of Evelyn he had believed he could predict.
"Because I thought you were going to get yourself killed." His voice had gone quiet. "You had no idea what you were becoming. You barely understood what had been done to you. You were frightened, unpredictable, and surrounded by people I knew nothing about."
Vale’s gaze shifted away.
"Vane told me you would deteriorate without supervision. That whatever had changed in you would eventually become uncontrollable." A pause. "And I believed him."
That admission seemed to hurt him. I could tell. The money had mattered, but it had never been the center of the decision. Payment had merely given obedience a respectable name. He had convinced himself that returning Evelyn to Vane was rescue. Whatever waited beneath the doctor's knife, in his reasoning, was preferable to watching her die somewhere beyond his reach.
"I thought bringing you back was keeping you alive."
"He lied to you." My tone sharpened. "He was a man of obsession and you knew this." I held his gaze.
"Tell me, Edwin. Do I seem uncontrolled? Do I seem as though I will keel over at a moment's notice?"
Vale looked at me properly. The clinical habit returned, but it no longer felt like an inspection performed upon property. His eyes moved over my posture, my breathing, the steadiness of my hands, the health that I had spent months cultivating in a body that had once been starved, drugged, injured, and treated as disposable.
"No," he admitted. The word seemed painful. "You don't."
His brow furrowed.
"You're healthier." His eyes returned to mine. "Considerably."
The contradiction appeared to disturb Vale. If Vane had been wrong about that, then the decisions built upon it required examination. "But he had records. Observations. Cases where subjects became unstable after leaving controlled environments." His voice weakened as he heard himself defending the premise. Then came the hesitation. A small one. Enough. I caught it.
"Did you ever check?" I asked.
Vale did not answer.
I continued. "Were you there when those cases were recorded? Did you witness those who deteriorated? Or were you simply handed files and told to understand what was before you?" His silence answered first. His eyes dropped. His expression offered no sign of a specific patient coming to mind: no recognition attached to a face or bedside encounter, only the unease of someone confronted with records he could no longer defend. That much I could infer from his silence and the way his attention turned inward.
"No," he said at last. "Not for those cases." His breathing had become shallow. "They predated my involvement with the project."
He hesitated, searching for something else to add.
"Vane gave me the files when I began assisting him. He said they were necessary context." Vale looked at me as though explaining his diligence might somehow rescue the premise. "I reviewed the records. I verified the internal consistency of the notes, the treatment dates, the progression of symptoms..."
His voice faded.
"But not the patients," I said.
Vale swallowed. "I never met a single one of them."
For a moment, I simply watched him. A belief did not disappear because a contradiction had been found. People were rarely so convenient. They defended. Reframed. Moved responsibility. Built a second wall behind the first. But Vale had already used most of his walls.
"Do you understand what you have done?"
Vale’s mouth opened, but nothing came out.
His eyes dropped, not in submission, but because looking at me had become harder than looking at the floor. He had helped restrain people. Prepared instruments. Recorded reactions as data. Argued about how much suffering a body could survive and congratulated himself whenever he chose the lesser cruelty. Worse, he had done all of it while trusting the man who supplied the justification.
"Yes," Vale said eventually. His voice was rougher. "I think I do."
His hands had stopped testing the restraints. "I told myself that knowing the risks made me responsible. That questioning Vane occasionally made me independent. That keeping people alive made me better than him." A bitter breath escaped him. "But I never questioned the premise. I only argued over how his conclusions should be carried out." He raised his eyes. There was no request for forgiveness in them.
"I helped him hurt people because he taught me to believe that hurting them was necessary."
I let Vale’s admission remain between us. Then I struck.
"You killed Evelyn."