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knelt quickly and struck Seymour again. A loose slap with the pads of her fingers upward beneath his testicles. A harder blow would galvanize him, coax a scream from him. A looseslap has an entirely different effect. Immediate and comprehensive nausea.
    He rolled over onto hands and knees and vomited.
    She stepped back and let him.
    Vomiting was good. It reduced a man of this kind to shame and the helplessness that came with shame.
    She walked behind Seymour and used the tip of her sneaker to kick him in the perineum, exactly between scrotum and anus. The blow was deliveredat a slight angle so that the correct nerve clusters would be stunned.
    They were, and immediately his bowels let loose. The rich stink of feces filled the room. The man groaned. Another wave of pain and shame.
    Those were two of Boy’s favorite tools.
    Combined, they were far more effective than agony and fear. Pain—controlled, specific, and moderate—was one key, one dial she turned on people.If the pain was too big, then system-wide shock set in. The body released the wrong chemicals; it sparked a different psychological reaction. It was why classic torturers put bamboo shoots under the fingernails rather than cut the fingers off.
    The professor began to cry.
    Boy nodded, satisfied.
    The man on the floor was big. Two hundred and fifteen soft pounds. She weighed ninety-eight. She wasas slender and hard as the knives she loved so dearly.
    Boy knelt beside the man and bent close. She kissed his cheek. She ran a tongue around the curve of his ear. He cringed and tried to close into himself. Boy leaned so close that her breath was hot in his ear.
    “It doesn’t have to get worse than this,” she said.
    Professor Seymour almost stopped breathing. He lay there, rigid, hanging on whatevershe would say next.
    “You want to talk to me,” she continued. “You want to whisper to me. I know you do. I can feel it. You want to share things with me.”
    She reached a hand and gently stroked his crotch, letting each separate fingertip find and caress his flaccid length. His penis twitched.
    And what a wonderfully mixed signal that would send to this man’s brain. Boy knew that. Even laying there,beaten, his underwear filled with his own shit, he had just reacted to a woman’s touch.
    Exactly as other men had done before this one.
    Exactly as Doctor Pharos had said they would when he taught her his methods.
    As she continued to touch him, the shame of defeat, the worse shame of having soiled himself, the pain in his nose and sinuses all triggered the first flow of tears. Injuries to thenose always made the eyes water. To the overwhelmed it is impossible to tell the difference between the body’s automatic reaction to facial injuries and tears that are shed as a response to personal weakness. It is because of this unavoidable reaction that so many brave people doubt their courage and believe in a previously unknown cowardice. It’s a way in which the mind breaks itself.
    Seymourbegan to cry.
    To sob.
    And it was then that Boy knew he would tell her anything.
    She stroked him. And she felt him, against will and circumstance, grow hard. If she had started with sexual touch first and proceeded to pain, he would not be able to get hard. One had to know the patterns of things.
    Boy knew those patterns so well.
    “Please,” begged the professor. And in that moment he probablydid not know what he was begging her for.
    She smiled.
    Yes, this one would tell her anything.
    Everything.

 
    Chapter Eight
    The Resort
    208 Nautical Miles West of Chile
    October 13, 1:11 A.M.
    “Let’s do this and go home,” I told my team. “Gather all intel. Anything on paper goes with us. Maybe they have some Kings stuff. Maybe we’ll get lucky.”
    “Maybe blue pigs will fly out of my ass,” muttered Bunny. I ignored him.
    “Double-check that we have IDs on everyone. Disable all weapons. Collect all cellphones, trash any hard lines or radios. Basically, vandalize the crap out