Naja let out a deep breath as her gaze drifted away. “There was a brief window of opportunity created by an unexpected calamity. While people were distracted, I saw my chance and was able to slip away. I ran and I kept running. I didn’t want Sulachan’s vision to come to pass. I didn’t want people to die to fulfill his plans. I didn’t want innocent people to be visited by such horror as I knew was coming. I hated that I’d had a part in it all. I was ashamed that I hadn’t been brave enough to have chosen torture and death instead of the things I did to help him.

“I thought that maybe this was my chance to do something to try to stop the world from falling into such darkness. After all, if not me, then who? What was my life to mean, if I did nothing and let this happen? What kind of person was I, knowing what was coming, if I stood by and didn’t try to stop it?

“I saw my chance and chose to act. Because I am gifted, I was able to fight my way through some of our forces standing between me and the free parts of the New World, and because I am a spiritist I understood how the dead and the half dead function, so I was able to avoid them along the way.”

Magda laid a hand on Naja’s arm. “Thank you for being brave enough to take up the cause of life.”

“Yes, we appreciate it, Naja,” Merritt said. “Your help will be invaluable. So what was the calamity you mentioned?”

“An unexpected complexity developed in the emperor’s plan. The half people he created took to eating humans.”

Merritt and Magda both leaned in together and together they both said, “What?”

“At first, there was no evidence of the behavior, but then without warning the half people began attacking and eating the living. I had warned the emperor of that possibility, but he wouldn’t be dissuaded. He wouldn’t listen to any warning that went against what he wanted.”

“Why would they start eating people?” Magda asked. “What would make them do such a thing?”

“I believe that the half people crave the soul they no longer have. That emptiness drives them with a form of insanity that compels them to eat living people in a futile effort to try to pull a soul into themselves. It doesn’t work that way, of course, but you can’t exactly talk sense into the half people. It rapidly became a kind of madness infecting all of them, an obsession, that overrode everything else.