Katalepsis VI: "And Less Pleasant Places" (part 4)

It wasn't totally out of nowhere that Heather escalated to that. Raine had already punched Gillespie in the face when she expressed doubts as to their seriousness. Threats of enhanced interrogation and/or murder had already been spoken. But even so, even Raine (and Evelyn, from behind her Praem commlink) are left blinking.

The worst thing about this is that it wasn't even a calculated move on Heather's part. Not a deliberate plan to torture Gillespie for information, or even a pragmatic method of killing her without noise and hiding the body. Just sheer, reflexive contempt.

Katalepsis 6.6

Slamming my mind back through the equation, clenching up hard on the roiling in my guts as I pieced it together with the map, I wasn't certain I even wanted to bring her back.

Had I thrown away our only lead to Lozzie, in order to satisfy my righteous anger?

I was turning into something I didn't like very much.

"Unnn," I grunted, grit my teeth, endured a spike of pain battering through my forehead.

I dragged the high priestess back from Outside, back to our reality.

Then I vomited into the bin again, whining, my head throbbing.

She regrets it, as the passage above explains. But she's not exactly super torn up about it going forward. And...I'll be very interested to see if her inner monologues keep moralizing about Raine after this, because, like I said, this kind of casual malice is beyond anything we've ever heard about Raine doing.

...

It also brings to mind Alexander's final speech (fittingly, given right before Heather killed him). When he asked her if the Brotherhood of the New Sun was really worse than the politicians and the plutocrats whose existence she's used to tolerating. Well, Catherine Gillespie didn't say anything that a good 20% of the voting public wouldn't agree with (40% in the suburbs), and we saw Heather's reaction. On one hand, hey, she's consistent. On the other hand, well...definitely a perilous path to tread.

The fact that Gillespie is such a loathsome character in general softens the blow, but I don't think the story is trying to trick the reader OR ITSELF about what shaky moral ground Heather now stands on.

Most dangerously of all, barely a chapter later, Heather is already trying to rewrite things in her head when she talks about it with Raine.

Katalepsis 6.7

The words spilled from me before I could stop them. My voice didn't shake or shiver, only sounded hollow. "I shouldn't have done that."

"Heather? Done what?"

"I crossed a line tonight. One I didn't even know was there."

"Heather? Hey, hey." She sat next to me on the bed, arm around my shoulders. "I'm not gonna pretend I don't know what you're talking about, but the last thing you should do is beat yourself up about it." I met her eyes, silently sceptical, and she replied with a smirk. "Come on, I know you inside out by now. You feel bad about what we did to that Gillespie woman."

"I tortured her. Me. I did that."

Raine let out a big sigh and her smirk dialled down. "I was about to do the exact same thing. Who knows, maybe a trip Outside was less traumatic in the long run than me whacking her in the stomach a dozen times."

I shook my head. "I sent her Outside. I tortured her with an experience I've been through. Self-defence, that was one thing, but … how could I?"

"Hey," Raine said. "She deserved it."

"I know she did," I whined. "I know. She deserves worse. She should be locked up, for life. But I tortured a person."

She really wants moral validation from Raine, but she's lying in order to get it. Raine has no way of knowing this, because it was only inside of Heather's own head, but *at the time she did it* Heather wasn't trying to torture Gillespie for information. She had no plans to bring her back to Earth, in the moment of sending her away from it. "Torture her for information" was a save. A post-hoc repurposing of something she'd done for much less pragmatic reasons.

So yes. Heather is lying to Raine about what happened, so that Raine will help convince her that it actually is what happened. She knows that Raine is okay with torturing enemies for information, so that's as much as she'll confess to. And it gets even worse a couple of lines later:

"You were justified. You had good bloody reason. We had to find out what she knew, and she'll never see any other punishment for what she did with the cult. If it was up to me, she'd have gotten off a lot less lightly."

"It wasn't lightly, Raine. I broke that woman." I felt an awful choke in the back of my throat. "How can you not see this? You're a philosophy student, you've studied ethics. Is torture ever acceptable? Is it? I did it without thinking, in the heat of the moment, and it was an awful thing to do."

I buried my face in her shoulder and tried to shut out the world.

"So you made a mistake," she said, in a tone of voice that would have made more sense if I'd left the oven on or spilled coffee on a carpet.

"Ugh," I groaned.

"How can you not see this? You're a philosophy student, you've studied ethics."

This. These two sentences. These are the slimiest, most manipulative words that Heather has ever spoken, at least onscreen. She's putting on a show. Casting herself as the naive innocent being forced to contend with a world too harsh for her, and Raine as the battle-hardened elder who tragically needs to explain the hard truths and remove her innocence. Now Heather can keep pretending that she's the soft, merciful one, and Raine is the dangerous violent one who she can feel ashamed of herself for admiring.

If Heather had been honest and told Raine that she'd actually intended to kill Gillespie out of sheer disgust and hatred, sacrificing their entire investigation for some personal catharsis, do you think Raine would have reacted the same way? Heather doesn't think so either. Which is why she didn't do it.

Heather is going to do this again. It's not a question of "will," or even really of "when." It's "how often."

Dangerous, dangerous path. And, I swear to god, if Heather mentally refers to Raine as a "sociopath" ONE MORE FUCKING TIME after this...

...

Anyway, Gillespie did survive, luckily. So they're able to get information. Torture isn't normally an effective way of getting that, but in this case they're asking for immediately verifiable things like "what phone number do you call to contact New Sun?" rather than military intel or the like, and in such cases torture is - depressingly - quite a bit more efficacious. She also tells them about some places in Sharrowford where she knows (or suspects) that Alexander was doing weird things, one of which being the creepy abandoned building next to Kim's that Tenny refused to get close to.

Kim seems to have honestly had no idea they were doing anything right across the street from her. I guess they didn't want any of their agents being seen traveling directly from a Brotherhood site of interest to their personal residence too often, and "across the street" would be way too obvious.

The phone number Gillespie gave them ends up being Amy Stack's, unsurprisingly. Amy is surprisingly forthcoming with information, and what she recounts is both comforting and disconcerting.

First, Edward Lilliburne either hasn't been able or hasn't been willing to relocate his nephew's old minions out of Sharrowford, and they've effectively gone rogue. Any supernatural or criminal goings-on in Sharrowford since Alexander's death are out of Edward's hands, and any former Brotherhood members acting independently can be dealt with as the gang sees fit. That more or less fits with what Kim has said about her life since Alexander got pulped, including the more adversarial relationship with Amy.

Second, Edward is at least fairly certain that the entity resembling Lozzie that's been appearing and being creepy at people she knows isn't actually his niece. Amy claims to have had a close encounter with it herself, and she too is pretty sure that this is a construct carefully designed to mimic her. Edward is pretty annoyed that someone or something would be sending a simulacrum of his niece to harass him, and would prefer that someone got rid of the damned thing. So, the gang can feel free to hunt Fake-Lozzie down without fear of consequences from the Brotherhood's main branch.

There's also a little hint in here that I appreciated:

"Where'd it visit you?" Evelyn asked. "In Sharrowford? Over in Manchester? Where are you, exactly?"

"Nice try." Stack's tone said it wasn't a nice try at all. Evelyn snorted.

"How do I find her?" I asked. "How did you find she'd gone to Kimberly's flat?"

"Mister Lilburne is unwilling to share his techniques."

"You-"

"But," Stack said, soft and affectless as all her speech – but something new lurked behind her words. "Pretty sure it's the same method he used to to detect your extra-dimensional messenger. Back in the autumn, I believe?"

"Maisie's messenger?" I breathed. "You have a way of picking up things entering our reality from Outside, don't you?"

"I don't know. I'm no magician."

He knew it had visited Amy's apartment building the same way he knew about Maisie's nightgaunt flying through the Sharrowford skies. It tripped the same detector systems of his. When we see the Fake-Lozzie in action at the end of this arc, some of its uncanny movements and qualities are likewise very familiar. And, we know the Eye must have access to night-gaunts, if Maisie was able to jack one in the first place.

The story never spells it out *explicitly,* but it's pretty heavily implied by the end that the Lozzie-doppleganger is just a reskinned nightgaunt. Clever.

...

By the way, speaking of messengers, Amy Stack really is the bad guy you don't want to like but just can't help yourself.

"Mr Lilburne may decide to share certain facts with you," Stack said. "Otherwise I wouldn't suggest I ask him. And he's too much of a coward to talk to any of you himself. I'll call you back on this number, likely within fifteen minutes. Do we have a deal?"

I thought it was just Alexander who she talked to/about like that, because it's impossible not to, but no. Amy is just fundamentally Like That. She does not give a shit about ANY of her bosses, no matter how scary they are, and somehow they let her get away with it. Gotta respect that.

...

On an impulse, they also ask Stack about the spooky abandoned high-rise that Gillespie mentioned. She tells them that she doesn't know any of the details, but it was a private project of Alexander's, which means that it's probably both stupid and dangerous. If the gang wants to check it out, sure, it's their necks on the line. Any cultists still guarding the site are no longer affiliated with New Sun.

So, that phone conversation ended up being surprisingly productive, all things considered. Unfortunately, Heather *still* isn't convinced that the construct isn't the real Lozzie under the Eye's control. Or that the Eye hasn't captured her elsewhere and to use her as a template for creating this projection or whatever.

They tell Catherine Gillespie to flee Sharrowford and never return. She's reluctant, but ultimately compliant. And...after Gillespie admits that the Brotherhood had been paying her for her services, Raine also demands bank access. All of the gang have been very PC-ish this arc, but I swear to god, Raine literally just acts like someone's DnD character who somehow escaped into real life lmao. The chapter ends with the gang GBP 33,000 richer. Less than the million Alexander died owing Heather, but it's a start. Heather suggests they donate half of it to some actual homeless charities before divvying the rest up, and the others agree. Except Evelyn, who is already rich and poo-poos the whole exercise

Just you wait, it's going to turn out that those charities are all fronts for other evil wizards doing their own experiments. Just you wait.


The last leg of this arc is an action-packed one. I think I'll call this a short post, and save wordcount for the final chunk of this review.