Kaden turned the claim over in his mind, trying to imagine what it might be like to encounter pain without the fear of pain. Like experiencing starvation without hunger.

“So what’s the point?” he asked finally. “If you think Triste is Csestriim and Csestriim don’t respond to torture, why are you driving shards of glass under her fingernails?”

Matol grinned. “Well, we weren’t sure she was Csestriim, were we? And I didn’t say they don’t respond. I said they don’t respond right. The old archives point out that you can usually tell a Csestriim spy from the lack of terror.”

“But Triste’s terrified. You just said that. She begs and pleads.”

“Sometimes,” Matol acknowledged, then leaned in so close that Kaden could smell the fish on his breath as he hissed, “but she doesn’t beg right.”

“You still haven’t said what that means.”

The man paused, staring at some unseen point in the air as he marshaled his memories of pain and pleading. “There’s a certain . . . shape to terror. A kind of writhing of the body, a rhythm to the screams. Everyone responds differently to fear and pain, but beneath the difference there’s something human trying to shove its way out. If you know what to look for, you can recognize that thing, that human thing.”

Kaden shook his head. “How can you recognize it?”

Matol smiled, a wide vulpine smile. “Because I’ve been through it.” He raised his hands, and Kaden noticed for the first time that scars marred the ends of his fingers where the nails should have been.

“The pain,” Kaden said quietly.

The man nodded. “So someone has bothered to educate you about our ways.”

“It seems,” Kaden began slowly, “that what you do to yourselves is worse than what the Csestriim might do.”

Matol stared, teeth bright in the lamplight. “It seems that way, does it? It fucking seems that way?”

He looked away suddenly, studying the scars as though he’d never seen them before, as though they were something utterly alien and unknowable, then turned his glare back on Kaden.

“This, all of this, everything we know about pain—we learned it from the Csestriim, from their manuals, their books, from the hundreds of years of meticulous history in which they tortured and killed us. You think this is bad?” He shoved his scarred hands in Kaden’s face. “You think this is worse than what the Csestriim might do? This is the fucking mild shit. This would have been a relief for our ancestors.”