Thresholder, ch 169, On Practical Applications of Knowledge

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Sorry for the late chapter, I'm traveling and just didn't get as much editing time on the plane as I thought I would. (I've also been working on editing up the third book of Thresholder, trying to see what, if any changes would improve it, which is always an interesting experience, being in the guts of a middle section while still writing something far later in the chronology.)

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Perry didn’t particularly like keeping a prisoner, but if he was going to have one, it was best that it was someone like Doctrix Grayspear. He didn’t like her, and felt no sympathy for her. So far as he was concerned, her unethical experiments had caught up with her, and that was a good thing — he would go back to destroy the device later, or at least pull it inside the shelf space, though he couldn’t imagine ever having much use for it.

Anaksi was in a separate part of the shelf, an impromptu living area, and once Grayspear had been pulled in, he went over to explain things to the Yuuksen woman.

“We’ll be quiet,” said Perry. “She can hear us. Don’t use my name.” He spoke Eshkee for the sake of security. “I was attacked, and Queenie got away, but that means that she’s in the city. We didn’t have much chance for conversation.” He had, in fact, tried to kill her, but he thought he’d have trouble explaining that he’d almost put a bullet in the head of their one lead on her people. “What we need now is some understanding of how to reverse what Queenie has done, and then some line on how to find her, what she’ll do next. We need to dive into Grayspear’s recollection, though I think I got the end and the beginning of it.”

“But they’re here, right?” asked Anaksi. “They’d be close to the city? Just outside it? She wouldn’t leave them, would she?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry. “It doesn’t seem like she has much control over them, unless she’s hiding her power level. I’m not sure why she would even bring them with her, what purpose that would serve. It’s something that I’m missing.”

“I want to talk to her,” said Anaksi. “I have the power too.”

“If you use the power, I can’t see it,” said Perry.

“You can ask your own questions,” said Anaksi. She looked him over, but he was fully in the armor, using the modulated voice, and it wasn’t like he’d have given anything away. “The Inspectors do it all the time, it’s a way they try to break a person, asking the same questions that have already been answered, visiting memories that have already been shown.”

“Fine,” said Perry. “DId you want to go first or second?”

“First,” said Anaksi.

“I’ll be over here if you need me,” said Perry. “You can take whatever tack you want.”

Anaksi nodded, then moved away from him, over to the other side of the shelf space. It was, by design, open concept, but Perry tried his best not to listen in too closely, trusting Marchand to flag anything that was vitally important. They were somewhat close to the dead K-man, who was now stuffed inside of a container, but Anaksi didn’t seem to mind the body. It still showed no signs of coagulation or decay.

Instead, he began combing through the fight data.

“I’m trying to make sense of her plans,” said Perry as he played back everything from the first shot. “Why did she wait to shoot me?”

“She didn’t have a good angle, sir,” said Marchand. “The bullet penetrated through a number of walls, slowing it considerably.”

“Seems like we can tank the hits if we have to, which is good,” said Perry, reading through damage readouts.

“I wouldn’t depend upon it, sir,” said Marchand. “The back of the skull is well-defended for obvious reasons, but not every inch of the armor can withstand a hit, and not at all angles. We are unlikely to be killed with a single bullet, that much is true, but there’s much we don’t know about the rounds she uses, nor the weapon, as demonstrated by her escape.”

Perry scrolled through to the nuns. Queenie had been wearing a completely different face, to say nothing of her outfit. Could she generate outfits? Were there limits to who she could become? The only ones that Perry had on record were women. Maybe that was something.

A big ass rifle that she could use to fly, a disguise power, a psychic scarf, acid blood, and maybe some kind of regeneration? It was a decent enough suite of powers, and just from a general count, Perry expected there to be more, if he was figuring one power a world and she’d probably been to at least six of them. Of course, you could accrue more than one power from a world, which meant that he could never be sure that her bag of tricks was empty.

Thankfully, the mask had worked to pierce her disguise — he watched that back again, the multi-colored hues she’d shown, the way the acid had spewed out from her and instantly started eating through the wood, cloth, and walls behind her. By the time he’d left the room, he could see on the rear-facing cameras that small holes had already been eaten into the walls with trails of smoke coming up from them. It wasn’t acid then, it was something much worse than acid, extremely fast-acting and against things that shouldn’t have been that reactive.

Perry rewinded the video again, to the moment when he’d burst in through the door. It had been dark in there, almost completely so. He watched as Queenie got up from the bed she was in. Her disguise was perfect, with nothing to betray it, and she was in a bed that was the same as the others. Had she planned this? To slip in with the other nuns, or whatever they were? Had she made sure this bed was available hours beforehand? Or did she have some kind of cover story, known to the nuns?

Plausibly, she’d been using that cathedral as her sniper nest for a while, maybe even before he’d shown up, back when she was a lab assistant. Her eyesight was extremely good, he knew, and her ability to land a shot from incredible distances was even better. Depending on her need to sleep, maybe she had posted up there more than once.

He rewound the video further, to when he was doing his questioning, and found that Marchand had separated them out into the vision as seen through Shoreboth’s power, and that of actual reality. If Queenie had been watching the whole time, why did she wait to take the shot? How had she seen him through several walls? Had Grayspear messaged her somehow? They didn’t seem to be in cahoots, based on the final conversation they had.

“Of course, it’s possible to fake a conversation,” said Perry as he watched it back, now with Marchand-supplied subtitles.

“How so, sir?” asked Marchand.

“If you know or suspect that an Inspector might be watching in the future, you segment out conversations as much as possible,” said Perry. “You make it so you can show one conversation that seems complete, and force them to watch through your life in realtime, without cuts, if they want to get at the truth. There’s no time compression, not that I’ve seen, it’s either a cut — which is really just forcing a new memory into view — or realtime. And if you want to fake something … I guess you can’t ‘fake’ it, but you can have a staged conversation according to a script or with improv.”

“Ah, I catch your meaning,” said Marchand. “That is clever, sir.”

“If we think we’re going to have to answer to the Inspectors, we’ll have to start doing it,” said Perry. “Set up conversations that are just for the benefit of someone in the future, to be shown to them as a form of manipulation. We’ll have to get good at acting in a hurry.”

“That seems a bit beyond our area of expertise, sir,” said Marchand. “It’s difficult to recall a time you favored subtle deception over naked aggression.”

“You’ve got me there,” said Perry. “But it’s something worth thinking about. There are pathways to manipulation here, given that they know for certain the things I show them are things that I actually experienced.”

“I’m afraid I’m skeptical, sir,” said Marchand.

“And why’s that?” asked Perry.

“When you met with them as yourself — or as the persona on the train, which they will eventually connect with the man who fought in the street — you made it clear that you were showing them things that were impossible,” said Marchand. “And you also showed some immunity to Shoreboth’s touch, to hear you tell it. This is reason for skepticism. Besides which, you are a problem from beyond their world, with unknown powers, and should they connect you in the power armor with whoever you’re presenting yourself to be, they’ll know that you speak Shoreboth’s language.”

“That … is a good point,” said Perry. “There are witnesses who saw me leaving Grayspear’s. Witnesses at the cathedral, all those nuns, or whatever they were. And with Grayspear very obviously kidnapped, if they go looking into who she’s been hanging around, there’s a good chance that someone saw me, which means that all these identities are getting collapsed. Which sucks for me.”

“Yes sir. Thankfully the power level of this world is much lower than some others,” said Marchand.

“I wish I had chameleon power,” said Perry. “Some way to disguise, like Queenie has.”

He went back to the video to check whether she wore the same clothes as she flew over the city, and saw that she did. Maybe she didn’t spawn new clothes as part of the disguise, which would help with finding her.

“Is she shooting bullets when she’s doing that?” asked Perry, looking at her movements from the recoil of the gun.

“I don’t believe so, sir,” said Marchand. “But attempting to capture an image of a bullet in mid-flight is difficult.”

Perry had more questions than answers. He felt like he’d done pretty well for himself in that encounter, given that he was ambushed. Given that Queenie had started that encounter, she had been bringing her A-game, he felt pretty confident about that. So once he tracked her down again, he would do his best to kill her, and he didn’t think it would be that hard.

He was taken away from his strategizing by the sound of a hard slap.

When he went over to where Grayspear and Anaksi were, Anaksi was in the process of storming away from the bound woman. Perry grabbed her by the arm, as gently as he could, and she stopped to look at him.

“She says there’s no cure,” she explained, and when she pulled away from him, Perry let her go.

Perry went over to Grayspear, who was laying on the ground, bound in ropes, tongue licking at the blood that was flowing from her nose. It must have stopped at some point, then been restarted with the slap.

“Who is the woman?” asked Grayspear.

“None of your business,” said Perry. “She’s understandably upset. Queenie altered her people with the psychic scarf, somehow. There’s no way to undo it?”

“Not that I know of,” said Grayspear. “But she hid things from me, many things, I’m sure.” She strained against the ropes. “Where are we?”

“We’re in a special place that there’s no escape from,” said Perry. “I could untie you and hand you a crowbar, and you’d be no more able to leave than you are right now.”

“You’re going to kill me,” said Grayspear.

“No, wasn’t planning on it,” said Perry. “But I smashed my way out of your front window when I got shot by Queenie, and I didn’t want us to be interrupted. Ideally, I would have had you back in your workshop tomorrow. Now, that’s not going to happen.”

“My nose is broken,” said Grayspear. “I need a medic, a doctor.”

“Hrm, no,” said Perry. “I don’t think so.”

He was hesitant to do it, but he reached out and touched her face, though she tried to move away from him. Mending a broken bone of his own was a difficult thing, and it needed to be the right kind of break, one where the pieces abutted each other, rather than going at funny angles or rotated away from each other.

Her nose wasn’t actually broken though, he could feel that, it was just some burst blood vessels or something like that, damage to the soft tissue that had led to copious bleeding into the nasal cavity, and after pushing more of his energy into it than he probably should have, he thought it was healed.

“She said that your power would rival her own,” said Grayspear, looking at the metal helm.

“Show me,” said Perry.

Grayspear hesitated, then they were in another vision, this one in Grayspear’s house. The two of them were in her living room, and Queenie was in an outfit that Perry hadn’t seen before, a worker’s uniform, very similar to one that he’d seen the Leased in, almost featureless. It was accented by the scarf around her neck. For her part, Grayspear was in a nightgown — it was dark out, and it seemed like she’d been sleeping.

“Oh, I’m special among my people, us world-hoppers,” said Queenie. She was, as ever, smiling. Whatever the context of their current conversation, which was apparently an unexpected late night visit, they were now talking casually. “They’re brutes, all of them, angry men and a few women, fun people, but without a drop of grace, except when they’re fighting.”

“You’ll have to tell me more someday,” said Grayspear. “How it all works. What your organizations are like.”

“Not much in the way of an organization,” said Queenie. “And if there were, I wouldn’t be a part of it.”

The vision fell away, and Perry started at Grayspear’s bloody face. “More. Continue that conversation until I tell you to stop.”

It came back, as though it had never stopped.

“What does that mean?” asked Grayspear. “Individual actors, united by purpose?”

“Something like that,” said Queenie.

“I’m asking for specifics,” said Grayspear.

“Oh, well, there’s an independent spirit among us,” said Queenie. “Somethin’ that gives me a bit of pride when I see the other chubbos. We make our own way. That’s what it is for me, what I’d like to bring to others, that’s the goal, if there is one, this idea that so many people are a mule under a yoke without even realizing it.”

“I suppose many people are,” said Grayspear. “I’m glad for my independence.”

Queenie laughed. “You?” She laughed again at Grayspear’s frown. “You work for the collegium, for the Commission, you’re as tied up as the rest of them, isn’t that plain as a pig’s face?”

“I’m considered free and independent among my people,” frowned Grayspear. “To be beholden to no one, that’s …”

“That’s what?” asked Queenie, leaning forward.

“Unrealistic,” said Grayspear, pursing her lips.

“Oh, is it?” asked Queenie. She leaned back on the couch and spread her arms wide, resting them on the back of the couch. “It’s the life I have. No attachments, and I mean none.”

Grayspear spoke from beside Perry. “This isn’t pertinent.”

“You have power,” said Grayspear. “You have freedom. I’ll grant this, yes. But are there really no attachments? No friends? No organizations, even if they’re transient, among your people?”

“Not a one,” said Queenie. “And it’s the way to live, I’ll tell you that. I get along with people well enough. I come across someone like you now and then, someone who interests me, or a man or woman or other kind of thing to warm my bed, other people are the spice of life after all, but you can just leave them, put them behind you.”

“It’s not so easy,” said Grayspear. “Though I do wonder what it’s like, to live a life like that, to drop everything at a moment’s notice and simply … leave. In Charlonion, there’s no other place to go, not if you’re in tune with cities.”

“The Dusklands call to me,” said Queenie. “They seem like my kind of place, eh? But with the rails spreadin’ out everywhere, maybe I’d like them less.”

“Queenie, I appreciate the visit, and the information, but it’s late,” said Grayspear. “I do need my sleep. I have an early morning class that I’d like to be sharp for.”

“I’ll get out of your hair,” said Queenie. “You sleep tight. Before I go, the bed warming thing, do you know suzzo about that?”

“I don’t know what you’re asking,” said Grayspear.

“A place to settle my nerves,” said Queenie. “Get out the energies.”

“There are all kinds of places,” said Grayspear. “Any saloon you go into, any place there are men, all you’d have to do is be alone and have a smile on your face.”

“Interestin’,” said Queenie. “Wouldn’t have thought so.”

“One last thing,” said Grayspear. “How did you know where I live?”

“That’s for me to know,” said Queenie with a laugh. “Maybe next time I’ll answer some questions before I go.”

She got up from the couch and went over to the window, throwing it open and slipping out in a single fluid motion, disappearing from view with the scarf following after her.

Grayspear watched the window for a moment, then walked over to it, closing it firmly and locking it in place, then double-checking the lock, before finally going off to bed. The vision followed her, and it wasn’t until she was back in bed, in the dark room, staring up at the ceiling, that Perry asked for it to be stopped.

“You were afraid of her,” said Perry.

“Of course,” said Grayspear.

“And she didn’t tell you she was going to fight anyone, not really, only hinted at it, if that,” said Perry. “She didn’t tell you there were other thresholders out for her blood.”

“Right until the end,” said Grayspear. “When she left, it was with a warning, but I’ve already shown you that. And I still don’t know, unless you’re willing to tell me. Why are you at war with each other?”

“I don’t know,” said Perry, which wasn’t a real answer. They were at war because they were thresholders, and if Queenie was telling the truth, her experience had put her on a war footing right from the start, just like his own experience had dictated. “What was she planning?”

Grayspear opened and closed her mouth. “I don’t know exactly,” she said.

“But you have a guess,” said Perry. “Tell me, then show me the evidence. Make your case.”

“I need some time to think,” said Grayspear. “You seem to know a lot, you know about the trials?”

“Ten men, then another two,” said Perry.

“The batch of ten wasn’t the first,” said Grayspear. “There were more, individuals, not anyone we ever told the Commission about. And after the murders, it felt better to pretend that everything that happened before wasn’t a part of it. We did tests, you see, trying to amplify the power. And they worked, and she was thrilled.”

“And you were thrilled too,” said Perry.

Grayspear shook her head. “Thrilled for different reasons. Do you understand the human mind? Do you not want to? To know what makes a person, to mold the very clay of knowledge, emotion, will? It is the most vital, most fundamental thing, in this world or any other.”

He could see in her eyes that she believed this, and he knew from talking to her as her assistant that she wasn’t lying about it.

“All you could do was break people,” said Perry.

“Yes, exactly,” said Grayspear. “But sometimes people are already broken, and only need to be broken moreso to help them, to let them achieve something. There are madmen in the asylums who have been put to work by Leasing! There are people that fate or circumstance made invalid who we can make whole, or close to!”

“But Queenie didn’t care about that,” said Perry. “She didn’t care about the understanding, or deeper applications of this science.”

“No,” said Grayspear. “Because she thought that what we were doing was perfection by itself. And this is my suspicion of what she wanted, in the end: to increase the power, to spread it far and wide. The machine, as it exists now, is slow, I can show you that, and it takes a subject sitting stock still for hours. She wanted it faster, wider — here.”

Another vision was pushed forward by Grayspear, and Perry allowed it. It was the same workshop, late in their time together by how disorganized the place was. The machine was assembled, and Queenie had changed outfits again, putting on work trousers, a heavy leather apron, and a white blouse. Grayspear was in a dark dress that was marked with streaks of white, evidence of her work at the chalkboard behind her. Above them, rain drummed against the ceiling.

“You’re dissatisfied?” asked Grayspear. “Whyever for? It’s a fraction of this psychic thread, powered by a pair of fingers, and it works.”

“You can’t change a single thing one person at a time,” said Queenie. She was frowning.

“This is only preliminary,” said Grayspear. “There’s so much more to go.”

“You want to monkey around in there,” said Queenie. “You want to reverse it.”

“Of course I want to be able to reverse it,” said Grayspear. “That would be proof that we actually understand it! I want to be able to make a connection that wasn’t even there in the first place. Can’t you imagine how interesting that would be, to make someone as deeply devoted to an egg as to their wife? What it would tell us about people, about this thread?”

“No,” said Queenie. “It’s good now. Cuttin’ the binds, that’s great, we just can’t be doin’ it one at a time, an hour a piece. We need more juice through here.” She looked around thoughtfully. “I was wanderin’, as I do, and saw a place where people spend themselves on those wires, day and night, hundreds of them workin’ for the light of those richer than them. We could steal that, couldn’t we? Draw from them? More power would work, yeah?”

“It would still only be in drips and drabs,” said Grayspear.

“The harmonizer then,” said Queenie.

Grayspear laughed. “And where would we get one of those? They’re guarded, all of them, and if you managed to steal one, or kill the guards, or however you’re thinking of doing it — they’d come after you. The whole of Charlonion would descend on you. Not to mention that a harmonizer is not the same thing as the energy drawn from a person.”

“You said they were the same,” said Queenie, frowning.

“They’re similar,” said Grayspear. “There is, in a person, a fundamental reality, their influence on the Flux. There is, in the orb at the heart of a harmonizer, a greater fundamental reality. At least, this is my supposition. I could argue with colleagues on it for days.”

“So you could take a harmo and power the lights?” asked Queenie.

“I don’t know,” said Grayspear. “Yes, on a small scale. On a larger scale … it’s unclear to me, not my area of expertise.”

“Well find out, then get back to me,” said Queenie. “I’ve got things to do.”

“Don’t go stealing a harmonizer,” said Grayspear.

“I won’t, will I?” asked Queenie. “It’s like you said, takin’ one here in the city is suo.” This meant ‘suicide’. “But I might poke around for a bit, see where they are, how they’re made, whether they’re careless with them.”

“I’m associated with you,” said Grayspear. “Anything you do, I could get brought in for.” She closed her eyes for a moment. “We are on the edge of a revolution, of boundless knowledge, enough to make both of us rich if we care to be. But we need more time, more study. We have all the time in the world, why can’t we use it? Why risk our position here?”

“You wouldn’t understand, chubbo,” said Queenie. She strode from the room with purpose, trailing her scarf behind her, which seemed to wave goodbye for her.

The vision ended, and Perry looked down at Grayspear.

“You can see we had different visions,” said Grayspear. “You can see that she didn’t tell me about you, not until the end, and even then, not enough, not the right things. I’ll do anything for you. She’s nothing to me.”

Perry watched her watching him. He held all the cards. It didn’t take her long to continue.

“I don’t know where she went, but this is what she wanted, a way to turn people into these other beings, to strip their care and affection for their family,” said Grayspear. “To make every relationship a transaction, a calculation.”

“Did she ever use it on herself?” asked Perry.

“No, never,” said Grayspear.

“Did you ever use it on yourself?” asked Perry.

“No,” replied Grayspear. He was watching her closely, and it seemed to him that this was the truth, though a canned answer, repeated often in her head, might fool him. He could only wish for some kind of truth-detecting power like Fenilor’s.

“She saw me come to your place last night, and shot me,” said Perry. “What’s her next move?”

“I don’t even know where she was,” said Grayspear.

“Guess,” said Perry.

Grayspear’s lips went thin. “I think she was trying to find some power, or … possibly to steal a harmonizer from somewhere, or to find where they’re created.”

“Where are they created?” asked Perry.

“I don’t know,” said Grayspear. “Please, trust me when I say that, I — here.”

She pushed forward another vision, this one of five academics sitting in a wood paneled room, arranged in front of a fireplace with chairs that must have been ancient, smokes and drinks in hand. They were a motley crew, but all cut from the same cloth, intellectuals who were trying their best to look like intellectuals.

Perry paid close attention, but his expectations were extremely low.

“It must be somewhere within the city,” said a woman who was older than Grayspear, another doctrix by the look of her. She had a cigarette holder whose head was in the shape of a turtle, and gray streaked through her hair. “The city has a primacy, a reality, it’s the highest concentration of people, and people have the same effect on the Flux.”

“No, if they came from the city, we’d have discovered them much earlier,” said an older, rotund man whose cigar was perched perilously on the arm of his chair as he leaned forward to make himself a bite from a charcuterie board sitting on a table between them. “They’re from out in the Flux, far out in the Flux, product of some blood ritual, no doubt, or the wily minds of the Yuuks.”

“It’s enough to say we don’t know,” said Grayspear, and Perry gained some small measure of respect for her.

“There must be someone at the collegium who knows,” mused an unhealthily thin man whose clothes seemed to swallow him, and who sat in a puffy chair that was intent on finishing what the clothes had started. “The Commission didn’t come up with the stability effect on its own, I refuse to believe that.”

“It’s deep history now,” said Grayspear. “It would have happened ages ago. The Commission loves their secrets.”

“They love to spill their secrets,” said the other woman, who had a high, tinkling laugh. “And the collegium isn’t much better.”

“But this is important,” said Grayspear. “If it was common knowledge how to make one of these things, if it was cheap and easy, a person could start their own city away from Commission control. The Commission has the rails, the harmonizers, the lawmen, they have everything they need, complete centrality. It’s a monolith, they’d let nothing threaten that.”

“And there are a few cases of them striking out,” said the thin man. “Independent villages burned to the ground.”

“It wouldn’t do to bad mouth our benefactors,” said a man who hadn’t spoken yet, his face cloaked in shadows. His back was to the fire, and an illumination came only from his cigar. In any other situation, Perry would have found him ominous, but here, he thought this was just the way people were.

“It goes on like this,” said Grayspear from in front of Perry. She dropped the vision.

“That wasn’t proof, and you know it,” said Perry.

“It’s all I have,” said Grayspear.

“Alright, here’s some information for you: Queenie already has a harmonizer,” said Perry. “What’s her next step?”

“More of them,” said Grayspear. “She can arrange them in series. They add to each other. I think she could figure out how to do that, from what I showed her when she was working with me. But I don’t know where she would get them, nor — wait, she has one?”

“Yes,” said Perry. “And you think she’ll need more?”

“If she has one, then her next step is taking the machine,” said Grayspear. “Did you collect it? Destroy it?”

“It’s still in your workshop,” said Perry.

“Then go there, now!” cried Grayspear. “She’ll take it if you give her even half a chance, and from there … she’ll have the power to change hundreds, thousands, snapping them into a different shape.”

“She’ll make an army for herself,” said Perry.

“She’ll make something both less and more,” said Grayspear. “She’ll make people who are untethered, and she’ll know how to tether them so they’ll do what she says.” She looked at Perry. “Go, now, if you care at all about this city, these people.”

Perry hesitated. He didn’t particularly like being given orders, but it did make sense. What Queenie would do with the device was a bit unclear, but the workshop was the next place to go, assuming that it wasn’t swarming with lawmen — he’d blown his way out of Grayspear’s house earlier that night, and it would make sense for them to make for the collegium, if they had enough intel gathered.

“I’m leaving you with the Yuuk,” said Perry. “Try to find a way to reverse this. Wrack your brain. Show her anything you have. Do whatever she asks. I’ll be back once the machine is secured.”

He moved away, not to the entryway, but to Anaksi, who was staring at an open notebook, pencil in hand, but not writing anything.

“I’m going to secure the device,” he said in Eshkee. “You’re in charge here.”

“I believe her, when she says what was done cannot be undone,” said Anaksi.

“I don’t,” said Perry. “I think she doesn’t know how to undo it, but that’s not the same thing. We’re not giving up hope here, not yet, not on the madwoman’s say-so. Alright?”

“Alright,” nodded Anaksi.

“Don’t kill her,” said Perry.

“I won’t,” said Anaksi, slightly defensively, as though the thought hadn’t occurred to her, in spite of them having had a conversation about it earlier.

“I’m going to go steal the machine, which I should have done before going to her house, except I didn’t know that Queenie was in town, or that we’d be kidnapping her,” said Perry. “I’ll be back when I have a good place for us to hide, it shouldn’t take long.”

Anaksi nodded. “I won’t kill her, not until I have my people back.”

Perry left. The prospect of killing someone who was his prisoner made him feel worse than keeping a prisoner in the first place. It felt more defensible, somehow, to kill someone who was just going about their day, though he couldn’t say where that intuition was coming from.

He was going to kill Queenie either way, no punches pulled, and if she happened to be sitting down for a very cordial tea, he would blast his way through without regret or remorse. He just didn’t feel the same about Grayspear, didn’t think she warranted a complete lack of decorum in some way.

Those were the thoughts rolling through his head as he got to the workshop.

The window had been smashed open, showing ragged glass teeth to the outside world. Inside, the machine was already gone.