Obscure

Chapter 4

Kirill

Kirill had been in all manner of interrogation rooms over the course of his career. High-tech temples of steel and chrome, with hidden cameras that would let any observers count his nose hairs. Filthy holes in the ground, smelling of blood and sewage, with an inch of standing water on the floor. And everything in between.

Sometimes, he worked out of less traditional locations. His subjects wouldn't have called those encounters interrogations, even though that was what they were. Kirill was an expert at starting a bar fight and screaming just the right insults along with his right hook to send the subject's memories flowing in the proper direction. Or delivering the perfect cutting remark after a one-night stand, and drinking in the memories as he made his smooth exit.

But he had never actually been in one of the interrogation rooms inside headquarters before. Not since the night he had turned himself in.

He had thought the rooms would have changed in thirty years. They hadn't. The room was clean and spare and sterile, with the same dusty non-smell he remembered. The light above glowed industrial-warehouse white. The table in the center of the room was the sharp-edged cousin of the kind where you might find the hors d'oeuvres at a wedding buffet. Unlike its buffet cousins, this one aspired to be more. Played in a punk band on the weekends, maybe. The harsh light reflected off the metal surface with such force, Kirill wished he had worn sunglasses.

Elias Kitzner sat on the far side of the table, his hands cuffed in front of him. He had a healthy amount of fear—Kirill could tell from the slow but steady trickle of memories radiating off him. A montage of all the fears he had faced in his life. A car hurtling toward him in the wrong lane at seventy miles an hour. A dentist appointment as a child, the dentist looming over him as bright light stabbed into his eyes.

Kirill paid just enough attention to the memories to know they couldn't give him what he wanted. Then he let them fade into the background like a radio playing commercials. If he hadn't learned to tune out the irrelevant memories by now, he would never be able to leave his apartment. There was no shortage of negative emotion in the world.

Although he tried to keep it to a minimum in his own life. It was one reason he went along with what his girlfriends wanted. He didn't need to be privy to the memories they would rather keep hidden, and that was the only way he knew how to stay out of their heads.

Besides, he knew how to give people what they wanted. He liked giving people what they wanted. If he didn't know what his girlfriend was looking to hear across the restaurant table on a first date, or how to flawlessly echo her wishes back to her, he didn't know what he would say. Sit in silence for an hour until she awkwardly got up and left, maybe. A waste of a date.

He settled into the chair across from Elias. The metal was slightly cool, and poked him in all the wrong places. But as interrogation rooms went, it was on the more comfortable end. At least there was no smell of sewage.

Elias looked up. A curtain drew over his eyes. He visibly smoothed the fear from face as he took a deep breath. The trickle of memories slowed to a drip, but didn't abate entirely. If Kirill focused on the place in the background where the unwanted images went, he could still see that dentist's toothy smile.

Kirill had braced himself for Elias to use his power against him, whatever that power was. Despite decades of research, PERI still had no effective power-suppression drugs. Neither did anyone else, as far as they knew. But he didn't feel anything out of the ordinary. Elias hadn't used his power yet.

Either that, or Elias's power was too subtle to feel, and Kirill was already in trouble.

Kirill frowned. He wasn't used to interrogating people like him. He was used to having the advantage.