Nara frowned. She’d never thought of the Dhantu Occupation as a humanitarian operation. But, of course, occupying armies always brought a certain social order. And most occupying regimes were wealthier than their victims. Bribery followed naturally after conquest.

“After the Imperial sanctions were imposed, the torture began. The strange thing was, our captors weren’t interested in pain. Not when they first strapped us to the chairs.”

Chairs, Nara thought. Such a quotidian word. A chill rose inside her, and Nara turned to catch more of the heat from the blazing fire.

“The chairs were experimental medical equipment, fully pain-suppressant,” Laurent said. “I felt nothing when they removed my left hand.”

Nara closed her eyes, a realization dawning in her. Even without her quickening empathy, she would have heard in Laurent’s voice the searching cadence of an unrehearsed tale. He hadn’t told this story before. Perhaps there’d been a debriefing, with the dispassionate rendering of a military report. But this was his first human telling of what had happened on Dhantu.

No wonder the psychic scars felt so fresh.

“Only twenty centimeters removal at first,” he said. “The prosthetic nervous tissue shone like gold wires. I could even see the muscle extensions flex when I moved my fingers. The blood transports were transparent, so I could see the beating of my heart pulsing in them.”

“Laurent,” Nara said softly. It wasn’t a plea for him to stop; she’d just had to say something. She couldn’t leave this man’s voice alone in the huge silence of the polar waste.

“Then they moved it farther away. Forty centimeters. Flexing the fingers ached now, as if they were cramped. But that was nothing compared to…the disgust. To see my hand responding so naturally, as if it were till connected. I vowed not to move it, to shut it from my mind—to make it a dead thing. But I could feel it. Only the strong pain was suppressed. Not normal sensations. Not the itching.”

He looked deep into the fire. “The Dhanti were always great physicians,” he said without irony.

Something broke inside the fire, a pocket of water or air exploding with a muffled sound. Sparks shot out at Nara and Laurent, and were repulsed by the firescreen. Bright ingots of flame dropped in a bright line along the stone floor, revealing the position of the invisible barrier.

“Of course, we were fully restrained in the chairs. My fingers and toes were all I could move. Imagine trying not to move your only free muscles for days. The hand began to itch, to throb and grow in my mind. Finally, I couldn’t stand it. I would flex my fingers, and have to watch them respond at that remove.”