The most intense sensations came from the two men holding her arms—and the primary emotion she felt in them was... confusion. They proceeded in a state of bewilderment and misery so acute that for a few seconds Isana could not distinguish her own emotions from theirs. Years of living with her gift had given her an ability to distinguish the subtle weave and flow of emotions, to make reasonably educated guesses at the thoughts that accompanied them.

The men knew that something was badly wrong, but they couldn’t focus on what it might be. Every time they tried, waves of imposed sensation and emotion swept over the thought and washed it away. The only time anything solid held was when Isana heard an inhuman shriek drift up from somewhere ahead of them. Both men immediately concentrated with a ferocious intensity, their emotions perfectly synchronized, and Isana felt one of them rise slightly, the other sink, and guessed that they had just been ordered to bank into a long turn, changing their course in the air.

Isana shivered. They were most likely collared slaves, then, forcibly converted to the service of the vord through the use of slaver’s collars. Once she’d determined that, she was able to feel more from the two men—their hearts overflowed with sadness. Though their minds had been rendered incapable of reason, on some level they must have known what had been done to them. They knew that their skills and power had been turned against their own people by an enemy, even if they could not consciously assemble the disparate pieces of the concept. They knew that they used to be something more but could not remember what it was, and that denial, that inability to reason, caused them enormous emotional pain.

Isana felt herself begin to weep for them. Kalarus Brencis Minoris had collared these men. Only he could free them—and he had been dead for more than half a year. They could never be freed, never be restored, never be made whole.

She made them a silent promise that she would do everything in her power to ensure that neither would live as a slave. Even if she had to kill them with her own hands.