Slip, Oliver, and Dallas had been tracking their own suspects when all three got a message, and abruptly made their way to the woods at roughly the same time. By the time Shrike and Jason caught up, four men were tied up next to three assault rifles, two pistols, and a fat stack of ammo and cash dug up from a trunk buried in the ground.

Rachel, Touch, Anea, and Shrike meet with the mayor, and the chief of militia, at the police station. Shrike dismisses Dallas with a nod.

“See ya back at camp.” The white-haired man collects his weapons at the front desk and leaves.

They take a tour around four interview rooms, letting Anea get a good read of all the men inside. Rachel looks at the last highway robber through the one-way mirror. This one had his head shaved bald, had a thick beard, thick arms, and thick potbelly.

“Well?” the mayor asks.

“What do you want me to say?” Anea retorts, “Whether they’re guilty or not? They are all frightened, terrified, stressed. Anyone would be under the circumstances. Is there any doubt that these are our guys?”

“No. We are gathering evidence and arranging a trial now. I was curious to see what insight your mind reading could bring.”

“Have you gotten a confession yet?”

“No.” The chief speaks up. “We’re letting them stew a bit.”

“Well, call me back for the interrogation. Then I’ll show you what I can do.” The little girl strides out of the observation room.

The mayor, chief, and Rachel all look at one another.

“We can’t let a little girl interrogate our suspects.” The chief smiles.

“Give her a mic.” Rachel says, “Let her advise whoever talks to them, can’t hurt.”

“I mean, we can’t let a little girl-”

“Done.” The mayor cuts in. “What’s the plan for the rest of the festival? We still got almost a month to kill.”

“Well, in the reports, there were no more than three rifles and three robbers. So the roads should be safe now. Nothing left to do but settle in, keep our guard up, and wait for the festival to end. Does the festival really go on for a whole month?”

“It’s barely started, ma’am-”

“Call me Rachel, please.”

“Yes, well, Rachel, this first week is nothing. Things will really pick up in the last two weeks. Halloween is our biggest party of the year, then just like that, everyone is gone the next day.”

“And our payment?”

“Should be in the hands of Shrike and your masked man as we speak.”

“There is one more thing I’d still like to take care of before the end of the month.” Touch says as they get back to the mayor’s house.

“And that would be?”

“Taking the guns and the money may have stopped these guys, but it won’t do anything to combat the general rise in highway robbery. Shrike and I have been talking, and if we can get the mayor to employ, legitimize, and re-brand the Pinchers, they could act as informants and guides and a police force for the roads. Everyone wins. The Pinchers make money off their intimate knowledge, roads are safer, and it keeps the corporations at bay.”

“Alright, talk to the mayor about it.”

“It has to come from you.”

“Why?”

“You’re the one he’s been talking with. To him, I’m just your right hand. You’ve built up a rapport with him, so you and Shrike need to approach him together and work out a deal.”

“I can’t. I don’t see things the way you do. I don’t know how to advocate for something like this.”

“I’ll walk you through it.”

After Rachel’s initial class on negotiation was over, everyone sits on the floor around the mayor’s large coffee table for dinner. They had been camping so long it feels more natural to sit on the floor than to eat in the dining hall, so they usually didn’t unless the mayor was home for dinner, which was rare.

Anea suddenly smiles and looks at Touch. “Alright, let’s hear it.”

“Your fathers are fine. They didn’t go to jail.”

Anea freezes. A smile spreads across her face as she breaks down in tears, shaking, laughing, and sobbing into her hands. Then into Dill when he waddles over. Rachel slides over and squeezes the little girl’s shoulder.

The next day, Anea watches through the one-way mirror as the sheriff, John, interviews the first three thugs, Rachel sitting quietly behind her.

“State your name, for the record.” He indicates to his corporate issue work phone on the desk.

“Jo.”

“Well, Jo, would you like a lawyer? We can get one here from corporate in the next few days.”

Anea can see the man’s fear at the word ‘corporate’ as a cold yellow lighting streak across the cloud of his psyche. The man, Jo, barely twitches and looks away as John says it.

“Or,” John continues. “We can keep things in-house. Which will it be?”

Jo needs no further encouragement. “I’ll tell you what you need. It was all Tully. The guns are his. He holds on to everything, the guns, the money, and he gives us all a cut. He follows us around and tells us where to meet him when he’s ready.”

“How does he know who to target?”

“I don’t know. Sometimes we tip him off. Most of the time it comes out of nowhere. I guess he has his own people, uses the money to keep stocked on ammo and tips.”

“Tell me about Allen Header.”

“That wasn’t me! That was Vargas.”

Anea speaks into the mic. “He’s telling the truth.”

This narrative has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. If you see it on Amazon, please report it.

“I know,” John says, “But tell me about it.”

Anea watches as the man’s aura grows clouded and cold. He doesn’t want to talk about it. Too much shame and guilt.

Or rather, Anea scoffs, not enough. Otherwise he would have left, or turned them in on his own. He’s just ashamed to be caught, to have to say it and take responsibility.

“It was a regular job. We get tipped off, suit up, and wait by the road for a lone cart passing through. We hold ‘em up, as usual. When Vargas tells him to put his hands up, the guy drops his little hand cart and just bolts.

Then… Then Vargas just starts shooting! The man drops dead, simple as that. I was happy to let him run. We had the cart anyway. We would have missed out on the most valuable things: cash, jewelry, small things that people usually keep on them. But there would have been other jobs.

Vargas said that if they let one run, they would all start running’. Everyone, even Tully, agreed, so I kept quiet.”

Anea bends over and presses her head against the glass. The guy was technically telling the truth, but the mental gymnastics he has to do to trick himself out of a guilty conscience was sickening. Watching his psyche slither and writhe and cloud over wasn’t pleasant.

It’s like that man’s aura was reaching out, trying to convince her to feel as he did, to buy into his bullshit, persuading her to distance herself and put the blame on others, just like him.

Rachel’s firm, gentle aura washes over Anea as she crosses the room and puts her hand on her shoulder.

“You good?”

Anea nods and grabs hold of the mic, suddenly standing up straight.

“He’s telling the truth.” She states.

The other two guys all say essentially the same thing. Anea has to step out and get far away when Vargas starts talking about the murder. He didn’t need mental gymnastics. He felt completely justified. There was again that feeling of transferring responsibly to some higher power, as if he someone had taught him, drilled into him that it was okay to gun down an unarmed man for running away.

Then they move on to Tully. The bald man with the beard and the pot belly limps slightly as he’s escorted by the guard and his cuffs are chained to the table.

“I think we can do away with those.” The sheriff says. The guard nods and undoes the cuffs, taking them with him as he steps out of the interview room.

The sheriff sighs after they finish the introductory questions. They’ve been interviewing for hours now. John said he wanted to push through this last one before taking a late lunch, so he could do all the paperwork in one evening.

“So tell me,” he continues, “all your guys gave you up,” Tully’s jaw hardens and his eyes gloss over as his psyche burns through a quick flash of red. “why should I go lenient on you, the man who put all this together? What can you give me?”

“Why bother? You got what you need. What’s left to tell?” Anea sees a dark black and blue cloud reach across his psyche. Isolation, loneliness. Some old deep nerve hit by this betrayal, this condemnation. She grabs the mic again.

“Keep him talking. He might spill something we can use.”

John’s aura clouds over with a slither of deception and a sharp orange jet of annoyance as he leans closer to Tully. “Your side of the story. Make me understand why. Then I’ll see what I can do.”

“What exactly am I supposed to do? Can’t exactly do honest work with my knee and shoulder.”

“You get those in the war?”

“Bad genes for the knee, and a loading accident for the shoulder. I was military, before the government went under, and corporate won’t recognize my status as a veteran. So no handicap money. But everyone is willing to leech as much money as they can from you, to short you and cheat you whenever they get the chance. So why wouldn’t I start taking what I need?”

Anea shivers. The man is so hateful. She can feel his lifetime of small slights adding up until he breaks. Monstrous loss and disillusion. She could by no means feel sorry for him. She knew these feelings well; she sees them all the time in other people. Her four friends especially.

There was something off about this… it defined him. He sees himself, identifies himself, by all that he’s lost. And he uses that loss to justify his every action, every selfish gain, at the expense of others. This man was simply hollow inside.

“Where’d you get the guns?”

“I worked in supply. I had friends in the armory. We made sure a few went missing when the government sold out. We had families to protect.”

“And that’s why you do this? For your family?”

“No. They left when I couldn’t work up any money. Took the last of what I had.” Anea could see the lie, the exaggeration, coloring his words. He wanted sympathy. Recognition. He still wants mercy, thinks he deserves it.

“Tell me about your operation.”

“I’m not the only one that the government and corporations tossed aside. Some of us keep in touch. I had the guns, others work shit jobs for richer people. So they let us know, we take what we need, and split the profit.”

“He’s hiding something.” Anea says into the mic. She can almost feel the sheriff’s annoyance jab out at her.

“And what about people like Allen Header?”

“I never wanted that to happen. I never told them to do that. The guns are just for show, and to defend themselves if someone else draws on them.”

Anea could almost vomit. She couldn’t stomach this kind of lie. The kind that was only technically the truth, so you could still warp your mind around it and sell it with a straight face. It wasn’t backed by any emotional truth. He didn’t care if they killed people. The guns were meant to coerce people by any means necessary. Whenever they could plausibly justify it. If someone like Header got killed, it was their fault for disobeying. That was the mentality these people had.

Anea takes a breath and focused on Rachel’s deep, soothing purple aura.

They weren’t done yet.

“He’s holding something back. Keep questioning him.”

There is a pause. Anea looks into the sheriff’s psyche.

“What the hell are you doing?” she demands.

“I think we’re done here.” The sheriff says

---

Rachel listens at the closed door to the mayor’s office.

“The girl was useless.” The sheriff’s muffled voice sounds through the door. “She kept wanting to dig into the guy’s sob story. It wasn’t turning over anything useful.”

“Might I remind you,” the mayor cuts in. Quieter, but voice as hard as a knife. “that the only reason you have these guys to interrogate is because of that ‘useless girl’? She found them far faster than you ever could.”

“She’s a charlatan. Her people did all the work, but they want to sell her as some kind of psychic… It doesn’t matter, I got what I need. We get him to start name dropping his buddies, then we can start clearing them out, get the other towns to pitch in.”

“Fuck that guy.” Rachel says when she makes her way downstairs. “He’s an idiot. Let’s go. I’ll talk with the mayor later.”

Anea hops off the bench and the two make their way out of the building.

“So what was off about this Tully guy?” Rachel asks after a while.

“I don’t know. That’s why I needed him to keep talking.”

“Well, what could it be? We got the guns, we got the bad guys…”

“When he was talking about his other guys, the informants, I could see he was actively withholding something. Maybe he has a few people he doesn’t plan on turning in.”

“Right. Maybe some friends of his that got involved. I guess we don’t really need them if they’re just informants.”

Anea looks down, scrunching her eyebrows together. “…Right, I guess so.”

The next morning, Rachel walks with the mayor to his office. She’s made a point not to talk business with the man in his own home, unless he asks first.

“We need to talk about the sheriff.” She says.

“I know. I didn’t like what he said about Anea. I know she’s the real deal. But it’s his case, so it’s his call.”

“You can’t talk to him about it? Make him work with Anea?”

“I can, of course, but I won’t go throwing my weight around without a damn good reason. I’ll talk to him again, but I won’t force him to put her back on the case. I’m sorry.”

“It’s fine. It’s not your fault he’s an ass. There is something else we need to discuss once Shrike comes in.”