But if you were the interrogator, if you rushed the process you might kill the subject. Or drive him insane, or at least make it actually take longer. It was a bad idea to allow for less than a couple of days.

So 2JS didn’t think he had a couple of days The attendant behind me held my head up and my eyes open. 2JS took a pinch of dry chili strings in two fingers. I got in a last, and I hoped scornful, glance at him. He held his hand up and delicately blew the threads into my eyes. At first it just felt like I’d peeled and chopped a mound of onions in a couple of beats, there was all that tearing and burning and itchy-nose liquefying way back up in my sinuses and the needing to blink-although in this case I wasn’t able to-but as the powder worked its way up into my eyelids and down and around into my tear ducts it got to a whole different level, buzzing heat bubbling up into explosions of dry-ice bergs spiking through cracks in my skull.

“Jed?” 2JS asked.

Come on. Think of something really, really plausible. Something that’ll take a while to check out.

“She’s coming after you,” I said. “I gave her all these plans and she’s building onagers and crossbows and shit right now. She’s going to level this place.”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Blowgun squad indeed. Fuck that, you should have come up with an antiartillery squad.”

“You’re not convincing me,” he said.

“Fine,” I said. Don’t say anything more, I thought. That’s the worst thing you can do. Stick with the one story. Eventually he’ll start asking about it again. Catapults. I could hear sizzling and smell burning flesh and skin. They must have been holding Hun Xoc’s stump against a hearthstone to cauterize it. The hot tears streaking down my neck felt acidic, like they were loaded with salts of despair. 2JS asked Hun Xoc something but I couldn’t hear what it was through the popcorn cracklings in my ears. Hun Xoc answered that he didn’t know. His voice sounded pretty normal. It must have taken a big effort. This kind of test of will was a big deal in a blood’s life. If you screwed up and cracked it meant your uay was shit-weak, but if you were cool you were in like Flynn. It was something you almost looked forward to. Attaboy, I thought. Just try not to mention where I was going when they caught you. Please.

I guess right around there I passed out for the first time of the session-and like I said, way too early-because the attendants were holding my eyes open and one of the teasers was spitting drinking water into it to clear it enough for me to see what was going on. Servers were setting up two tripod stands on the lip of the platform in front of us, with big steaming dishes right out of a cookhouse. The attendant behind me released my right arm and I was instantly rubbing it into my eyes. Even a little relief really is blessed. It felt like I’d just won the lottery. Fuck, itching is really something. It needs a stronger word than itching. A server took the lid off the first dish. It was just a stack of waah, tortillas. He peeled off one and handed it to me. The other server took the lid off the second. It was Hun Xoc’s forearms, quick-baked over a big eternally hot river-stone and then infused with chocolate ale and sliced in almost a spiral cut down to the bone. Very Morton’s. The tattoos on the wrists had been touched up with food-paint and the hands were arranged to sign “I traitor.” I closed my eyes but my head-holding guard pried my eyelids up with his fingers and turned my head back down to the dish. The roaster peeled off a well-done strip from the end and they guided my hand to roll it into my tortilla and moved it up to my mouth. I wasn’t thrilled but at this point I was already like, anything to put off the next inevitable, so I just chomped into it. It wasn’t too good. Everything tastes like ostrich. They made sure I swallowed and moved over to Hun Xoc.

“Please taste yourself,” 2 Jeweled Skull said in Chol, laughing under his breath in a way I wouldn’t have. “We mixed 9 Wax shit with the sauce for you.”

Hun Xoc just clicked his tongue twice to refuse. They started force-feeding him. He was laughing a little himself. 2JS took a tortilla with a good slice of Hun Xoc in it and chomped into it with his old filed teeth. On my right they were blowing salt water on Armadillo Shit’s raw cheeks, and he was cracking, but just babbling gibberish. They didn’t even pretend that he might know anything. 2JS must have been getting impatient because he signed for the attendant behind me to hold my eyes way open, and he came over and held a sharpened-nailed finger up to my right eye. He didn’t ask anything, he just chewed.

“Like I said, I told Koh everything,” I whispered. That earthstar shit had better be working, I thought, and I almost thought he could hear me thinking, GO EARTHSTAR! GO EARTHSTAR! Don’t say it. Don’t even think it. Keep him focused. “I gave her the recipe for gunpowder. You’re fucked through the dick with a battle saw. She’s going to bomb this place back into the Stone Age. Oh, sorry, we’re still in the Stone Age around here, aren’t we-”

He poked his finger into my eye. There was a flash and the feeling of a balloon popping all through the right side of my head, and then I could feel him prying out the eyeball and ripping it off the optic nerve. It was painful, but not more so than some other things I’d put up with lately. It was really just that instinctive urge to protect an eye, the panic and the helplessness, that was tough to take.

He held my deflated eyeball up to my remaining left eye. Its pupil was dilating. A pink drop of vitreous humor stretched out and finally dropped off.

“This sucks,” I said.

2JS said something you could translate as “Your ball days are over. Would you like me to take the other ball as well and put out your sun?” But it was kind of an untranslatable pun, since he used the same word, k’iin, to mean “ball,” “eye,” “day,” and “sun.”

“So you’re giving up on the English?” I asked. He put his fingernail against the eyeball. “I don’t need that eye either,” I said. “Not if I’m going to be looking at you, anyway. You look like if Margaret Hamilton had been in Once Were Warriors.” I was still acting blustery but actually I was worried I was about to crack, getting to that point when the doctors of pain really do become a lot more frightening than death, just flailing on this macker of panic. The pain and the idea of blindness were heavy enough but 2 Jeweled Skull’s character was another whole level of pressure, I was fighting his insight into character and his near-mirror-perfect insight into me especially, fighting his old dominance over Chacal, fighting his Jedness, it was rough. Maybe I’ll just tell him what’s going on and we’ll all laugh it off later. No, wait. Squelch that. Cold out. But instead of using up the other eye he wiped his finger off while one of the teasers stuffed my empty eye socket with chili strings. At first it was just shrieking sound and flashes of lightning, my reptile brain thinking I’d been frozen and dropped and shattered, and then it peaked and settled into a long, slow shriek of the razor wire through the vessels, sharkskinning all 862 receptor neurons from the wrong side, the inside. For some reason I came out of it singing, “I don’t care, I don’t care,” like Judy Garland in In the Good Old Summertime. I could hear tears dripping out of my eye onto the mat, but was pretty sure everyone could tell they were only from laughing. Someone threw water over me to shut me up and get my attention.

“This is your last chance for me to just kill your friend,” 2JS said too impatiently. “Otherwise he’s going to be a twenty-year captive.”

“Well, I just have to let him go,” I said. Just don’t tell him, I thought. Don’t tell him about the earthstar compound, and don’t tell him what Lady Koh’s planning to do. Just those two things. Anything else is fine. Just hang on to those for a little longer and… and… well, and then there’s at least a chance, a slim chance…