“Like somebody peeled you off their shoe.”

The cadence of his speech, the slang, scooped a chunk from Cyril’s heart he hadn’t realized he had left to lose. He took another drag on his cigarette to fill the hole. He’d killed his sense of taste, smoking too much, drinking too much, taking tar when other vices wouldn’t cut the tension or dull the pain. The cigarette tasted like nothing now; it only burned.

“Asiyah told me you were behind enemy lines,” said Aristide. “I knew you had been working for the LSI, but last I heard…”

“I was dead.” He’d thought he had been, too. And there had been times he wished it were true. A part of him, maybe, still did. “I came close.”

“So were you abducted?” asked Aristide. “Or did you run?”

“I haven’t had a talent for that, historically.” He let the words fall between them caustic as lye, because it was easier to be angry at Aristide than at himself.

And Ari did pull back as if it stung. Cyril could spot all the ways in which he reassembled himself, and wondered if he had honed his observational skills so much more sharply in the time since they had last seen one another, or if Ari was getting sloppy. Or if this was just long-dormant familiarity with the other man’s affectations, rising to the surface.

Of the three options he preferred the first. The other two he didn’t consider too closely, for different reasons. Now that he had the luxury to think beyond survival and subterfuge, he found his mind was a field of unexploded ordinance.

“So,” said Aristide. “It really was republican militants?”

Cyril nodded, slipped back into debriefing mode. “They came in the middle of the night, said they knew what I was doing for the south. Beat me and hauled me back to camp.” Here, he glossed over the gruesome pieces, which he had reported in full detail for Asiyah’s people. Given a choice—he would always make sure he had a choice, in the future—he would never repeat any of it to another living soul. “They kept me for a week. I didn’t tell them anything.” Tits, he’d need to work on that defensive tone; it gave away too much. “They would’ve killed me, but they were close to the border and a raiding party found them. Destroyed the place. Saved my life.”

“Why didn’t you go back across the border?”

“Did I say they rescued me?” He’d fallen out of debriefing clarity, he realized, into the safety of vagueness. “I woke up in a pile of ashes. They’d burned the place around me. Maybe they thought I was dead, or didn’t realize I was there. Maybe they didn’t give two dried shits. I don’t know.”