RONAN I shook my head and caught myself wishing Victor would finally put his fist into the man’s face. The thought came fast and sharp. For a second, I pictured myself grabbing the man by the head and slamming his face into the table until the noise stopped. People like him were never complicated. They were easy to program. That also made them easy to break, easy to pull answers from if you knew where to press. My eyes drifted down to his hands. They were cuffed tight to a metal ring welded into the chair, right in front of his groin. His ankles were chained to the chair legs. He could not shift. Could not stand. A soldier in full body armor stood behind him, close enough that the man would feel his presence every time he tried to move.The setup was clean and efficient. It would be simple to start enhanced questioning right now. I had never been trained for it myself. Cyber units did not need that skill. But I had friends who did. Back at the Fort, I had listened to enough stories. I had watched enough demonstrations. I had already noticed the bucket near the wall. Water would not be hard to find. A few gallons would be enough to change the tone of this room. If it came to it, the brigade doctor could mix something stronger. A chemical push. Something that would turn the man’s thoughts inside out within hours, make him claw at himself and beg for relief that would not come. "Your girlfriend keeps checking me out. You wanna suck my dick you fucking faggot!" he snapped. His one good eye locked on me. It was sharp and mean. "You wanna see what a real American looks like down there?"For a brief moment, I wondered if someone had told him about me. Then I understood it did not matter. Men like this did not need facts. They reached for the same insults every time. They were trained into it early. Homophobia came packaged with the rest of the hate. It had been a long time since someone had thrown that word at me, but I was not surprised. I was about to speak when Victor’s hands hit the table hard enough to rattle the metal. "Listen to me," Victor said. "You genetic fuck up. If you don’t tell me everything you know, I’ll make sure something gets shoved up your ass. And when I’m done, you’ll wish it had been a dick." The man laughed. It was wet and ugly. "Aww, did I hurt your feelings?" he said. "Is he your little piece of brown ass?" I rolled my eyes. The pattern was clear. Homophobic first. Racist second.It always came in that order. His mind was anchored deep in conditioning he had never questioned. I stepped in before Victor could answer again. Victor was field intelligence, but this was not his strength. He had already let the man pull on his emotions, and that gave the man leverage. I pulled up the files I had lifted from his phone. The device had been running a single routing app. Every call and message passed through it. The data encrypted instantly. Then the trace wiped itself clean. Photos were erased too. All except one. The background image. The one that showed every time the screen lit up. It showed a little girl sitting on the steps of a porch. Her hair was parted into pigtails that fell along both sides of her face. She was holding a chalkboard sign. The words were simple."Happy Father’s Day." That was the crack I needed. Sentiment. Attachment. Something real. For a split second, my view of the man shifted. He stopped being only an enemy. He became a person. Not a good one, but a shaped one. A product of hands that molded him before he ever had a chance to think. He was another victim of the people who built this war and fed it. It was not his fault that he was raised inside a system designed to make him pliable. He cared about something. Someone. He was not empty. That did not erase his choices. He had access to information. Enough to challenge the lies he clung to. He chose not to look. That mattered. But it also meant his path here was not strange or rare. The human mind held tight to patterns. Patterns meant safety. Predictability meant survival. Anything that broke the pattern felt like a threat. Different things became enemies by default. His family and his community had carved that pattern into him early. The odds of him ever accepting the truth that endangered it were low. He had been lost long before this room. Changing that pattern would take years. Constant exposure. Pressure applied slowly and carefully. I did not have years. I did not even have days. The other option was simpler. Make him believe that staying loyal to his current path would end in unbearable loss. Pain that mattered. Pain that reached past his own body. I did not doubt his talk about sacrifice. Men like him loved that word. But sacrifice was always for something. I had done the same when I joined the agency. I told myself it was about protection. About family. That part had been true once. Now I was still here for a different reason. Revenge. The agency. The army. They were tools. Nothing more. So the question narrowed fast. Was the girl still alive? Was he with these traitors because he believed they could keep her safe? Or was he here because he believed they could help him punish the world for taking her from him? The answer would decide how this ended.