She resisted a whole five seconds, eyes going bloodshot, before the “yes” came through gritted teeth. The moment she said it, the stage with the guillotine reappeared. “Hold on!” said Barnett, “Before this bitch dies, there’s something I want to know. The Inquisitor mission is finished, so use another question for this.”

The showrunners apparently didn’t object, given that she had yet to vanish and appear on the stage. I raised my eyebrows. “And why should I?”

“I will become your ally,” he said. That threw me. “If you don’t believe me, don’t ask her any more questions. But as stupid as you seem to think I am, I know really antagonizing you is a bad idea. I’d heard rumors about the Pyromaniac’s doings in the first round, and when I saw how fast you were killing the spiders today, I knew that I’d never survive if I tried to kill you later.”

I shrugged. “All right,” I said, “it’s not like I have any other use for the remaining questions. What do you want me to ask?”

He told me.

“Invoke Interrogate,” I said, again looking into the Saboteur’s eyes. She was no longer held—not by Throskarts, anyway. But she clearly couldn’t run away. “Were you planning to kill your three collaborators?”

This novel is published on a different platform. Support the original author by finding the official source.

“Yes,” she said, no longer trying to resist the Interrogation’s effects. “I was greedy. I identified them as tough competition, and I wanted to eliminate not just you, but them too. Another mistake, I suppose,” she said with an ironic laugh, “and I figured if I killed Barnett first, since a lot of people saw him mess with you in the rush and during the executions, if my first plan failed I could at least get you to waste one question by making people think you were the Saboteur, not the Inquisitor.”

“Thus making me waste an Interrogation on the demonstration of that ability,” I said, “not a bad idea.”

“Thank you...Lheticus.” I nodded back at Barnett when he spoke.

As she was led to the guillotine, I realized there was one more thing I wanted to say to her. “I’m not going to say you deserve this, even though you were conniving, greedy, and above all, sloppy. To say that someone deserves death is, to me, the ultimate conceit. But one thing I’ve come to realize about life is that what someone gets is almost never what they really deserve, and even when it is, it’s nothing but a lucky coincidence. What Throskarts or humans or whoever deserve doesn’t matter. It hasn’t since the dawn of time.

There’s only the law of the game, here. We played, I won, you lost. That’s the only reason you’re dying here today. I wanted to try to help you understand that, in your last moment.”

“I think...I do understand,” said the Saboteur whose name I never learned and never would, her face finally showing emotion. “I’ll see you in hell.”

In spite of the words she was saying, there was no vitriol in them, or any hate in her eyes. And her tone wasn’t angry, just sad.