Nara reached out to touch him, taking his right hand, the one still made of flesh. Disgust struck out at her from Laurent’s touch, as deep as anything she’d ever felt: utter horror at himself, that his own body was nothing but a machine that could be taken apart, like an insect’s by cruel children.

There was nothing to do but hold him, a human presence in the face of inhuman memory. But still she had to ask.

“The Apparatus never told us why, Laurent,” she said. The resistance fighters’ reasoning for the Tortures of Dhantu had never been explained.

Laurent shrugged.

“They told us that there was a secret, something that would undo the Emperor. They claimed to have heard something from a living initiate of the Apparatus they’d long ago captured. But they’d killed the man trying to wring the details from him. They kept demanding this secret from me. It was preposterous. They were grasping at straws. It was torture without reason.”

Nara swallowed. There had to be a reason; the Secularist in her did not believe in pure evil.

“Perhaps it was a fantasy on their part. They must have wanted some weapon against the Emperor so badly.”

“They only wanted to show us…”

Zai looked at her directly, and as their eyes locked Nara saw what he had realized over the long months in that chair. His next words were unnecessary.

“They wanted to show us what the Occupation had made of them.”

Nara closed her eyes, and through Laurent’s touch she saw herself through his, as if in some magical mirror in which she was a stranger to herself. A beautiful alien.

“There was one lie in the Apparatus propaganda,” he said a few moments later.

Nara opened her eyes. “What?”

“I wasn’t rescued. The resistance abandoned the hideaway and transmitted my position to my ship. They left me to mark what they had done. Along with the dead bodies, they left me living, but beyond anyone’s ability to repair.”

His gaze went from her to the waterfall, reddened now by the arctic summer sun.

“Or at least so they thought. The Empire moved heaven and earth to fix me, to prove them wrong. Here I am, such as I am.”

She ran her fingers along the line of his jaw.

“You’re beautiful, Laurent.”

He shook his head. A smile played on his face, but his voice trembled as he spoke.

“I am in pieces, Nara.”

“Your body is, Laurent. Not unlike my mind.”

Zai touched her forehead with the fingers of his flesh-and-blood hand. He drew some shape she didn’t recognize, a mark of his dark religion, or perhaps simply a random and meaningless sign.