“I’m not gonna explain it to you. Facial expressions combined with unnecessary tenseness to his glottis, among other things.”

“Oh…kay.” Marks squinted at the man. “You sure?”

“Yes, Marks, I’m sure.” Forcing herself to shake off her irritation at the man’s arrogant disrespect to lie to her, she said, “So what’s your name? I’m Crash. That’s Lieutenant Marks. Don’t know these other guys.”

The man hesitated, looking wary. “What you say to him?”

“I told him that you said there were six, and he was surprised because there were more than that.” She tapped her fingers against her cheekbone again, that nagging itch in the back of her mind, like a compulsion that focused all her attention onto that one detail, the way his eyes twitched slightly when he spoke his blatant mistruths, the way his timbre shifted. “What else you lying about?”

The man’s face paled. “Is he dead?”

“He’ll be fine,” Crash said. “But your friend hasn’t told us his name, and that’s probably going to piss the Commandant off. Lying in general pisses him off. He thinks liars are wiggling bags of shark dicks that need to be stomped on with a machete. Maybe you could help…?”

“Khayu,” the man said quickly. “I am Sabbaht. Khayu is my brother. Tell him not to fight. He will follow my orders.”

“Was he the last one out there?” Crash asked. “Just seven?”

Sabbaht nodded.

Crash glanced at Marks. “Tell the Commandant I think he’s got a problem. There’s another one of the savages out there we haven’t caught yet. And smile like you’re relieved. He’s watching us too closely.”

“That’s not good,” Marks said, smiling.

“No,” Crash said, smiling back. She turned back to Sabbaht, who was again watching them warily. “So what was your purpose here? Why did the Pharaoh send you? Climbing those cliffs…must’ve been difficult. What was her goal?”

For the first time, the man’s eyes darkened to near-black. “She was bored.”

That sounded true enough that it allowed some of the tension of the previous lie to settle back down in Crash’s gut and she relaxed a little. “So…she ordered a team of soldiers to climb over the Edge and kill a bunch of peasants because she was bored? She had no other goals? Surely she wanted some sort of diplomacy or exploration or technological exchange…”

“You’re going too fast—” Marks began. Crash slapped the table, hard, to shut him up. Laser-focused on the captive, she said, “What was the mission, Sabbaht?”

“Send a message,” Sabbaht said, lifting his head proudly. “To give her enemies a taste of Burkan’s wrath.”

“Wrath. Yeah, that sounds right,” Marks said, scribbling notes.

“He’s lying again,” Crash said, still completely focused on the man. That old agitation was back, and it was starting to eat at her core, like an itch digging into her mind, burrowing there, agitating her at a core level. “Fuck I hate liars.”

Marks stopped scribbling and looked up, blinking at Crash, then at Sabbaht. “Lying how?”

“Don’t know,” Crash said. She took a sip of soda as she processed. “So…” she said carefully, “She wasn’t looking to establish trade communications, nothing like that. She told you to come over here and slaughter people in the name of her volcano god.”

Sabbaht tensed ever-so-slightly, but only for a minute. Then he nodded. “As a sign of her greatness and power.”

“You’re lying,” Crash said, in Alliance Common. She smiled. “Again.” She hated it when people lied to her. It was the antithesis of the purpose of language, and she wanted to punch people in the face every time they did it.

She must have been giving the man a funny look, because he gave her a tentative smile back and she narrowed her eyes at him.

Marks’ comm buzzed and Crash reluctantly tore her eyes from the man and glanced over at her assistant. Marks had his hand to his ear, listening and nodding, then his eyes widened and flickered to Crash.

“What?” Crash asked, after he was done.

“So, uh, the Commandant says to just play it cool. Let him think we’re buying it.”

“Yeah, tell him bullshit on that.”

“He wants to talk to you right now. He’s outside.”

“Uh huh.” Crash was falling into the swing of things, now, all but fully immersed in the accent and word variations off the Ancient West American root language, and the last thing she wanted to do was drop out of it to go talk to a gun-slinging brute when she knew this guy was lying to her, the smug fuck. She turned back to the prisoner and considered him, tapping her face. “What other things did the Pharaoh want you to do after she had you scale two cliffs just to go murder some random people?” she asked sweetly.

“Uh… He sounds really serious about this, Miss Crash. He says he’s not gonna let you fuck this one up too.”

“Whatever. He has spaceships because of me.” She continued to smile at the liar, who was glancing back and forth between her and Marks, a little crinkle of strain on his brow. I could crush you with my mind, she thought, glaring at him. There was nothing more disrespectful than using the powers of speech to lie to someone. It was akin to smearing shit in their ears and mouth and she hated it, and this douche had done it twice now. Once, she could overlook, because most everybody lied, but twice in ten minutes? That was a pattern.

Lieutenant Marks cleared his throat uncomfortably and glanced at the glass. “He says he knows you’ve got that tic about lying and this is really important and you need to go out and talk to him right now, before you lose us the advantage.” He was looking at the glass as he spoke, clearly getting his orders directly from the man on the other side.

“Don’t look at him, look at me,” Crash retorted. “I already told him I do this on my terms or I don’t do it at all. I retired six years ago. I’m not even getting paid for this.” To Sabbaht, she said, “So she just told you to climb twelve thousand feet—six thousand each way—so you could massacre some farmers. No other reason.”

Marks reluctantly tore his eyes from the mirror and Crash could hear the vague buzz of the man’s comm going off in his ear, probably with the Commandant’s threats. He gave her a nervous look. “Commandant Belkin’s giving a direct order not to tell him we know he’s lying. He says he can fry your fish tank with his index finger from across the continent and still have energy left to nuke a burrito.”

“Yeah, well, the goldfish were starting to irritate me.” Crash opened her mouth to tell the lying bastard he was a piece of shit perjurer that needed to take his insincere bullshit and shove it up his own double-dealing asshole where the rest of his duplicitous crap came from.

The door slammed open and Commandant Belkin stormed inside. He grabbed her by the back of the shirt, yanked her bodily out of the chair, and dragged her backwards as she stumbled and batted at his iron-hard arm.

“Hey, ow!”

“Let’s go,” Commandant Belkin growled at her, spinning Crash around and shoving her out the door.

“Ow, ow!” Crash cried, stumbling into the other room with him.

Belkin slammed the door behind them and glared at her. For long moments, he just scowled at her in silence, so long she started to fidget. “I know you,” Belkin finally growled. “And I also know we need this guy to think we believe every word he’s saying. If you catch him lying, just notate it and move on. We’ll piece together his story later.”

Unauthorized content usage: if you discover this narrative on Amazon, report the violation.

“I’m piecing it together now,” Crash growled, straightening out her shirt.

“The key is don’t let him know that,” Belkin said.

“You wanna interview him?!” Crash cried. She made a broad gesture at the door. “Be my guest! Marks could probably get a few sentences out of him if you gave him eight hours and a dictionary.”

Travis made a face. “Just let him think we’re not catching him in his lies. I know that’s like, the hardest thing for you to do, but for the love of Christ Almighty and all his hairy little minions, Crash, just let the guy think we’re stupid, okay?”

“But I’m not stupid,” Crash said, frowning at him.

Belkin grabbed his head in big, callused hands and dragged his fingers down his face, watching her over the grotesque inside-out eyelids. “Please don’t do this. Not today.”

“Do what?” she asked innocently, already planning on how she was going to get the asshole to confess to being a murderous psychopath who should have been on a diplomatic mission.

“This.” He gestured at her. “You. Don’t do you. Not right now. Just ask the questions I gave you. Mark it down if he’s lying and move on. Don’t go off like…you do.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

Belkin groaned. “Look. I know you’re an autistic shit, but this is really important. Nobody cares if he was lying to you. He’s a prisoner of war. They do that. Just move on.”

“It wasn’t just once,” she said. “You act like it was just once. It was twice.”

“Twice, great. You know what? There’s a kid in the barracks I know has got a stash of weed. I’ll go get it, and you’ll take a big toke, down a few margaritas, whatever it fucking takes to reset that fucking brain of yours, then go back and talk normal, everyday shit. Nobody fucking cares he was lying. He’s a captive. That’s technically one of his jobs.”

“Lying is a gross abuse of the intricate and ever-changing glory of language,” Crash blurted. “It should be punished as such.”

Belkin gave her another long, hard look. “Reset. Your. Brain.”

“You’re doing an excellent job of that already, thank you,” Crash muttered. “I was really getting into the groove in there and you fucked it. Now I have to re-center myself in a more plosive, guttural form of Ancient Canadian with a Californian influence and scattered Egyptian word trees.”

Belkin gave her a really long look. “Nobody gives a shit he was lying. Don’t go off about it like some mind-scrambled, butt-picking monkey. I mean it, Crash.”

“Fine,” Crash muttered.

“Fine.” But still he squinted at her. “Don’t.”

“I won’t!”

“Okay.” Very cautiously, he opened the door to let her back into the interrogation room, then quickly closed it again, eyes narrowed. “Don’t.”

“I told you I won’t!” she cried, attempting to shove past him.

It was like trying to shove past a Clydesdale. He glared down at her until she fidgeted and looked away.

“Don’t,” he said again, a mountain of rock-hard flesh between her and the door.

“All right, I won’t,” Crash muttered.

Very reluctantly, he opened the door again. “Go figure out how many cities they’ve got and where. What troop numbers are, what kind of transport they’ve got, tech level, shit like that.”

“Uh huh.” Crash continued to watch the liar over the Commandant’s arm.

Belkin glanced at her, then followed her gaze over his shoulder to the liar inside. He narrowed his eyes. “Crash…” he warned.

“Okay!” she cried. “Let me in there before I forget my Ancient American root dialects, okay?”

Very reluctantly, Commandant Belkin stepped aside, glaring at her as she walked past him and back into the interview room, thumping the door behind her. Crash sat down, ignoring the stares the others in the room were giving her, as if getting dragged out by her collar by the Commandant was a normal thing.

As soon as her eyes found the prisoner again, however, Crash felt that old agitation slamming back through her in a pin-prickling wave of irritation. She hated liars, especially when she had to pretend she didn’t know they were lying to her. It was a twitch she had, one she had to try really hard not to scratch.

But she liked Travis when he wasn’t being a brute, and she really didn’t want to piss him off.

“So, let me see…” She glanced at Marks’ notes, trying to refocus. It was hard. All she could see were his beady brown liar eyes as they simmered with smug confidence that he hadn’t been caught. “You…said you were sent here to kill people.”

“Yes. Many people. Pharaoh send a great message.”

Crash felt a muscle twitch in her neck. She picked up her tablet, tried to concentrate on what it said, couldn’t get it out of her head that the guy was being a smug, lying prick that actually thought he was smarter than her, then fiddled with the straw in the coffee, flicked a couple pieces of hamburger off the table.

Travis needs me, she thought, focusing on the piece of burger. Keep your cool. She gently put one of the burger crumbs down and folded her fingers on the table and said, “So…what’s it like over on your side of the canyon? You got a big volcano over there you sacrifice stuff to?”

“The Pharaoh appeases Burkan with the blood of heretics,” he agreed.

Crash flicked her eyes up to watch him, tapping the table much too loudly with her nails. “This Burkan sounds like a murderous bastard.”

“He could kill the world if he ever wakes,” Sabbaht said.

“So you feed him the incoherent bodies of your firstborn children after you’ve anointed them with holy oils and gotten them drunk on some holy hallucinogenic alcohol?”

“I’m not quite following…” Marks said quietly. His stylus had stopped.

“Shhh!” she held up a hand, laser focused on Sabbaht, daring him to lie to her again.

“We feed him,” the captive agreed. “Many sacrifices each year.”

“How?”

“Into the fires of rock,” the man said.

“So you live next to a volcano,” she said. “How big?”

“Very big. The greatest. It’s why we came here. Pharaoh needed better sacrifices to appease Burkan’s great power. Told us to collect them and bring them back to her.”

Crash’s eyes narrowed, unable to handle the screaming, bone-shard roar in the back of her brain any longer. “You think I’m a fucking idiot.”

The captive blinked, even as she heard someone groan loudly in the next room.

“You weren’t here to kill people, you narcissistic mental cancer,” she went on, jabbing a finger at him. “You were here on a diplomatic mission. And you’re the leader, that means either one, you fucked up and lost control of your men and they went on a rampage, or two, you decided to go kill people rather than follow your Pharaoh’s orders, so that makes you either a fucking incompetent dumbass or a murdering psychopath. Which is it, Sabbaht?”

Crash heard someone moan and bang their head on the glass. She ignored it, skewering the deceitful sack of dog jizz with her glare.

The man’s eyes widened. “Whatever Khayu told you, he lies to save himself.”

“Fuck Khayu,” she snapped, slapping the table hard enough to make the man jump. “Khayu didn’t lie to me. You did.” Crash couldn’t have stopped the tide of rage bubbling up from within if she’d had a plug the size of Niagra Falls. “I gave you the respect of letting you open your mouth in my presence and you turned around and shoved your ass crack in all of it starfishy goodness right at my brain and then shat all over it like a squealing piglet as someone was cranking on your testes. Who do you think I am? Your washed-out college professor for some lame humanities associates degree nobody gives a shit about? Some hillbilly low-seventies bucktoothed hermaphrodite you conned into going on a first date because it didn’t have the IQ to recognize you were a jiggling bag of shit?!”

The man was staring at her, probably because she was no longer talking in a language he could understand. Marks had his hand to his ear again, and was looking at her nervously.

“Or maybe,” Crash sneered, getting to her feet. “You’re just a fucking murderous creep on a power trip who doesn’t respect anyone, much less the only person in the world with the ability to help you.” The prisoner confusedly looked at Marks for help and Crash switched back to Ancient American and slapped her hand on the table again, startling him back into looking at her face. “You’re just an unabashed piece of whale dick who probably never knew that uncouth twat of a mother who shat you between her legs in between getting throat-fucked and gang-banged by syphilitic druglords. Who pissed you into her, anyway? Your brother? Makes fucking sense for a mendacious, bowlegged cunt-crust of a liar.”

The chained man’s mouth fell open into an O.

Marks was standing, now, a big hand on her shoulder.

“No, that’s okay, Lieutenant, I’m going, I can’t stand being around this morally defunct cockweevil any longer. His mental deterioration is probably contagious. Like syphilis.” She grabbed the coffee on the desk and, without a word, splashed it into the prisoner’s face. Leaning forward, she spat, “Fuck you. I know what you did. I can get in your mind you retarded ape of a crackhead’s buttbaby.” She pointed two fingers at her face, then flipped them back to him, narrowing her eyes over them in warning. “I’m there, man. Right there.”

Marks gently guided her out of the room.

Travis was standing on the other side, his brown eyes flat and hard.

Crash shook off Marks’ grip on her shoulder and sniffed, then wiped her nose. Behind her, Marks gently pulled the door shut.

For a long time, no one said anything. Crash started to fidget. She idly wiped some of the splashed coffee off of her arm with someone’s shirt.

“So,” Travis said.

Crash sniffed again. “I think I forgot to sleep last night.”

Travis glanced at Marks, who nodded. The Commandant took a deep breath and let it out slowly, still scowling at her. He raised an arm, pointing to the door. “Your room’s that way.”

Clearing her throat, Crash turned back to collect her gear.

“Marks will get your stuff,” the Commandant barked. “Go sleep it off.”

Crash jumped, then cleared her throat nervously. “I, uh. We got some important info out of him. He said there’s another one of them out there—”

Travis raised his arm to point at the exit again, cocking his head at her dangerously.

“Oh.” Clearing her throat again, she went to the door, then hesitated and looked back. “I’m guessing by the high level of linguistic mixing of old dialects and the general variation to the evolutionary trees that we’re probably dealing with a culture that’s at least thirteen, maybe fourteen million people…”

Travis never lowered his arm nor softened his face, just scowled and waited for her to leave.

Crash coughed. “Kay then.” She pushed the door open and went to find her room.