Voice is sitting in a dark room, in a hooded cloak, listening to quiet instrumental music. The room is the one with the box in it, but the box is open and empty. There is no one else in the house.

Angela just stands there for a moment, waiting to be noticed. She isn't sure how to begin.

"I have some questions for you," says Angela. "I will go away sooner if you choose to answer them."

He pulls his hood down over his face and shudders. "Leave me alone."

"I need to know why you did what you did, because in my world, there is a child who is a version of you, and I cannot for the life of me see the danger in him, but if it is there I need to know where. When I know that I will leave you alone."

"I don't have any answers for you," he says. "Go away. Go away. Go away."

"I can be very patient, if I have to," Angela says. "I will go away sooner if you tell me what I need to know."

"I don't know what you mean," he says, still shivering.

"I might be a little familiar to you, if you looked at me. You had an alternate version of me, kept in your box, for twenty-five years," Angela says. "She is a lot like me. There is someone who is similarly like you, where I am from. And someone similarly like the prisoner who was taken from you recently."

Angela sighs and backs up. "There are many worlds. Some of them have magic and some don't, some of them have creatures other than ordinary mortal humans on them who can nonetheless think and speak and some don't, some differ in other ways. My world is called Samaria. There's another called Atlantis. There's another without a name, that you're from. A girl on Atlantis died, and appeared here, and you took her home with you and kept her for twenty-five years and let her go. Later, you captured someone from the same world as you, and that's the prisoner that the new management took away from you. Between worlds people are often similar - cut from the same mold and then sanded down a little differently. The girl who died on Atlantis and I are alternates of each other in that way. And my husband and your last captive are alternates of each other in that way. And my brother-in-law and you are alternates of each other in this way, but I don't understand, because he's a harmless child and I cannot imagine him growing up to kidnap and torture people who'd done him no harm, and I want to know why this could happen."

Angela waits for him to go on.

"But I can't - I can't let anyone look at me, I can't stand it, don't look at me don't look at me go away," he says desperately, cowering in his chair with his hood still pulled down over his face.

"I haven't seen your face," Angela says. "I have no reason to wish to. I'll know what you look like when Nathaniel grows up, anyway. Why can't you let anyone look at you?"

"I can't," he says. "I can't I can't I can't."

"Have you forgotten why? Or did you never know?"

"I just—don't like it," he says miserably. "It's frightening."

"Has it always been?"

"I don't remember," he mutters. "Go away."

Angela considers, then expends a pentagon to offer Voice the same perfect recall that the Bells enjoy. Temporarily.

Angela has some sympathy for him. Not very much, but some. "The memories will not last forever," Angela says. "But I need to know, because an innocent little boy is somehow in danger of turning into you, and he is under my protection, and I won't have it."

He cannot hear her. Because of the screaming.

She sighs and adds another pentagon to muffle everything, the way Shell Bell's Downside memories are muffled.

The screaming continues unabated.

She undoes the perfect recall altogether and drops her head into her hands.

The screaming trails off after a few more seconds, but he doesn't uncurl, or speak.

"I apologize," she says quietly.

He shivers. Which at least suggests he heard and understood her.

"If you have a better idea for how I could understand what happened," Angela says, "I am listening."

"I'm not going to."

He doesn't seem to have an answer to that.

"I didn't know it would trouble you. I have the same modification myself. I ought to have inquired." She sighs. "And I know Shell asked you to stop, asked you to let her go, asked you not to hurt her - and asked you not to hurt her again - and I know you didn't listen to her and it wasn't an innocent mistake. I need to know why, I can't just declare your template inherently evil, not when Nathaniel is ten and harmless and my brother-in-law and I have any hope of steering him into a decent adulthood."

"I don't like it when people do things to me," Voice whines. "I don't like it when they look at me or touch me or notice me at all. But I hate being alone all the time."

"You could have kidnapped Shell and kept her in your basement and not tortured her," says Angela in a low voice. "I would still want to know why you did that, but it would not have been so pointlessly cruel."

Angela waits.

"I had a sentence to carry out, and I - I didn't," he says. "And they punished me for it. They said - if I neglected my duties again - it would be worse. So. I didn't neglect them."

"Shell wasn't sentenced to you."

"I had to keep in practice," he said. "I was afraid - everyone else would practice sometimes - I didn't get sentences that often - I didn't want to lose my touch."

"Why did you become a torturer to begin with?"

"So I could make sure no one looked at me," he whimpers.

"You could have stayed home," Angela says.

"I do," he says. "I am. Since the - changes."

"We are very proud of the changes," says Angela.

"I'm nearly done. Do you know how long you have been afraid of being seen?" Angela asks.

"No," he says slowly. "I don't remember. A... a long time. I can't remember ever... not."

"Even when you were a child, when you were alive?"

"I don't remember being alive."

"And I suppose you don't want me to fix that."

"nononononononono," he mutters, rocking back and forth.

"nooooooooooooo," he moans.

Angela drops her forehead into one of her hands and adjusts her wings. "Perhaps I should go talk to whoever initially judged you and ask them."

"Please don't," he says, "please, I don't want them to remember me, I don't want them to think about me—"

"I don't want my brother-in-law to grow up to do terrible things to keep himself comfortable," says Angela. "I don't want to keep him under suspicion that he personally has done nothing to earn just because I don't know. If you have a better idea, I'm listening."

He shivers, and says nothing.

Angela waits.

"why don't you ask him questions," Voice says finally. "he's probably less afraid of you."

"He is ten years old. I don't want to explain to him in detail exactly what I'm afraid of."

Voice has no answer to that.

"He knows something happened, because he met Shell Bell, and she flinched every time he spoke, and all he wanted to know about it, when I explained without the details, was whether he was going to be punished for what you did to her."

"Of course," says Voice, and then he flinches.

"He isn't. Going to be punished for anything you did, I mean."

"Neither are you, for that matter. I'm here for the reasons I stated, not to make you uncomfortable. We don't do punishment for its own sake. That's why you and all the other torturers were dismissed."

After a pause, he uncurls a little, although he still keeps his face muffled in his hood and turned away from her.

"Your last prisoner was almost certainly your brother," Angela says after a silence. "Since you're from the same world, and since on my world your alt and his alt are brothers."

"I don't know," he murmurs, shaking his hooded head. "I don't know."

"And you don't want me to make you able to look for yourself, and you don't want Jane to look, and you don't want me to talk to the judge who already knows because it's possible they've forgotten, and you probably don't want me to go to the world you lived in and have a look at its past as concerns you either."

He shakes his head again.

"And there is a reason we arranged for Jane to need permission to judgesight, so I am not going to do any of those things anyway," sighs Angela, "in spite of the fact that you certainly didn't much care what Shell wanted, or what Queenie wanted, or what any of the other people you kept captive wanted." She shakes her head. "And lie detection only detects lies, not mistakes, so I can't just ask you to answer the question various ways until we find the right one."

He shivers.

"Maybe you need a daemon," muses Angela.

"...A what?"

"There's a world one of us is from where people have external souls. Usually shaped like animals. They're part of the people they belong to, I can't imagine anyone being afraid of their own, but they have separate bodies. If you had one she'd be company of sorts."

"...that... might be... nice," murmurs Voice.

"I will, if you'll agree to one of the options that tells me what I want to know."

"...go to my world," he murmurs eventually. "Go to my world and look there. And, and don't, and please don't come back."

[Yes.]

[Does she mind?]

After a moment: [No.]

"She - it will probably be a she, but not necessarily - won't be able to go very far away from you without it hurting, unless you stretch the distance enough to snap," says Angela. "You won't want to let anyone else touch her - other daemons are fine but you're not likely to encounter any here. I'm not sure exactly what it would be like but I'm assured that apart from the most intimate of circumstances it's to be avoided. I can give you the ability to tuck her away inside yourself whenever you like, if you want. Say when and I'll ask Jane to send you to Alethia and back to get her."

"...O-okay," he says hesitantly, and he finally straightens up in his chair.

"Does that mean you're ready?"

He nods.

Jane picks him up. Jane puts him down.

He arrives plus one smallish brownish bird, who squeaks and hides in the folds of his cloak immediately.

"Thank you," he says, shivering.

"Do you want to be able to tuck her away?"

And away she goes.

Invisible in Voice's world, Angela teleports to "one hundred miles Londonward of the South Pole" - Amariah suggested it as an unobtrusive place to hang out on Earths, suitable for people who do not get cold - and finds that she doesn't not get cold to quite the same extent as Amariah and requires a bit of hexing to be comfortable. Once that is taken care of, she peers into her copy of Stella's past-watching power, and looks.

She skips ahead. She doesn't want to look at more than she has to - not even with his permission, not when he hates the idea - and she can always go back. Where was he when he was - twenty?

In college, studying diligently late at night.

She skips ahead in shorter increments, a year at a time.

Twenty-one and he's studying again. Twenty-two and he's on a date with a girl about his age, laughing at her jokes, agreeing with all her opinions, hanging on her every word.

Angela skips ahead in smaller increments still after the girl, because - that might be important. One of Voice's distinguishing characteristics as a torturer is that he never touched his captives. Shell had enough of a sample to know this to be unusual. And yet here is a girl. What is he doing an hour later - two?

The date ends. He goes home and curls up in his bed and has the shakes for a while, then goes to sleep.

And the next day? Does the girl reappear?

He has a long phone conversation with her, and they go on another date the following week.

Angela supervises, skipping ahead by half-hours, patient.

This seems, if perhaps not formative, at least an examplar of the problem. Pastwatching is specific enough that Angela can just look in on the other dates with this person.

They follow roughly the same pattern: minimal physical contact, slight awkwardness, and intense stress reactions afterward. From him, anyway. The girl is not similarly affected.

She skips forward to the next encounter a month later.

Angela listens in.

They run into each other once a few months later. It is awkward. Then, nothing.

Angela skips forward another year.

He is on the phone with his mother, exchanging meaningless pleasantries in subdued tones.

Angela carries on with this skipping criterion.

Oh, that's not good, that's not good at all.

When does he next touch someone...?

There is not so very much more of it. He is found out; he tries to evade capture; he fails; he is killed in the process.

He is in their bed, snuggling a blanket!

He should be snuggling his wife instead.

He kisses her forehead. "What happened, my angel?"

"A great many things, a long time ago. I - I think Nathaniel will be fine. Voice was never taken from his parents, and there was a long, slow descent into - problems, after that." Pause. "I gave Voice a daemon, to keep him company, in exchange for his consent that I look at his past on his world."

"I think Nathaniel will be fine," she repeats. "But I want to make sure we are seeing him regularly. To be sure that nothing is going quietly wrong."

"All right," he says, curling up close and kissing her forehead again.

That seems to be all there is to say, unless Micaiah wants details. But further cuddling is in order. Angela settles her top wing over them and closes her eyes and sighs.

Further cuddling is definitely in order.