"You've soiled yourself," an unfamiliar voice announced. "Hey! I said you soiled yourself. Inconsequential, I suppose. The nurses undressed and bathed you." The words were punctuated with a stinging slap across Sydney's face that effectively roused him. "Can you hear me?"

Sydney could, and could not. The psychiatrist straddled two worlds: his present captor's rather humble dwelling and Krieg's hideous laboratory in Dachau, the barracks and degradation, barbed wire fencing, isolation, incalculable abuses.

No. That hell ended, I recall; indeed, it ended and the world agreed that it wouldn't be forgotten, and, certainly, never repeated.

The world is a goddamn liar.

And God must truly be dead for allowing it to happen again.

The dreadful internment camps were one of Sydney's earliest memories, some of the most painful memories. He loathed the thought of dying now, not because he feared the end, but because his final memories would be of the broken promise, of history repeating itself, the resurgence of internment camps, children screaming for help, crying for their parents, illness, terror, death.

The world's inhabitants were as evil as he'd believed they were when we was a child in Krieg's lab.

Nothing had changed.

I've changed nothing.

Sydney believed he was going to depart the earth in the coming hours, leave it in the same irreparably shattered condition it had been when he was a boy.

"I've sent the nurses home for the evening," Sydney's captor continued brusquely, quite confident in his delusions.

Sydney refused to nurture any delusions. He did, however, with some effort, lift his face, and open his eyes.

He'd, evidently, survived a barbaric variant of electroconvulsive therapy with his mind intact; his horror, however, was redoubled at the prospect of being nude in his disordered captor's presence.

The undiminished fetor negated declarations of bathing, nurses, cleanliness. An already oppressive stench was exacerbated by Sydney's bodily evacuations. Decomposition and blood mingled with vomit, feces, scorched hair and flesh, the tang of perspiration.

Improbably, hunger relentlessly gnawed at Sydney just beneath the terror; his body shuddered uncontrollably. The notion of being hungry, particularly while the continued assault on his olfactory system was waged, angered Sydney. Sustenance and warmth seemed like nonessential factors in the face of captivity, abject squalor, the immense potential for further abuses. Escape was Sydney's primary objective.

I must think only of escape.

Rumination was a double-edged sword.

Oh, dear God, how did Jarod ever forgive me?

Like Jarod, Sydney would refuse any meal offered him, was quite unwilling to eat given the appalling circumstances.

Sydney recalled that Jarod was force-fed, that his spirit was broken; he eventually yielded, cooperated with abductors. And that was the true, ultimate cruelty, the most loathsome indignity.

The abduction itself was criminal, horrible; coercing the victim to comply⁠—and eventually collaborate⁠—with his captors was remarkably heinous.

This is my destiny.

Fate is avenging what Jarod could not. Would not.

Because Jarod loves me.

Sydney started when his abductor shrieked wildly and argued with a blood-splattered wall.

"No! You won't cure anything if you're always afraid to fail. It's called ground breaking for a reason. Your unprofessionalism will not be tolerated. I've killed no one. The patient was fatally ill, had been a chain-smoker for four decades; he killed himself. Because," he continued smugly after several moments of intense anticipation, "I don't want to do anything even remotely invasive unless it's absolutely warranted. Surgery, thus far, has not been indicated, nor will I retrieve the fleams until it's medically necessary; they are still being sterilized. I am, first and foremost, a naturopath. You others," he shouted, "you're butchers, always eager to carve."

Sydney's attempts to inquire proved futile. His lips refused to cooperate, word retrieval was laborious; the aphasia—a term that Sydney struggled to recall—was, he hoped, only temporary.

"Phlebotomy therapy has been widely used with no ill effects as has hirudotherapy. Hirudo medicinalis."

Sydney stared blankly at the man, and recoiled and attempted to withdraw when the fellow crouched, extended a hand, and removed saliva from his chin with a fraying handkerchief. "Can you feel them?"

Them?

Sydney's abductor referred to leeches, marvelous bursts of olive thickly delineated with bands of ebony, many ringed with droplets of blood. The parasites were greedily latched on to the psychiatrist; their engorged bodies were an indication that they'd been feeding for some time.

They were scattered about Sydney's body, all strangely out of place, entirely medically unnecessary, and reminiscent of William Raines' more unorthodox doctrines, and, quite possibly, Jacob's as well.

"It doesn't hurt at all, does it? Hmm? You don't even feel them; the leeches release anesthetic compounds when they latch on."

Contrarily, Sydney detected immediately an appreciable contrast between exposed skin and skin concealed by leeches. The small lustrous bodies contracted, undulated, suctioned, and would not be ignored. Sydney believed the pain, when several leeches reattached themselves, was comparable to a thorn's prick.

He was grateful for the binds that prevented him from instinctively plucking off the creatures violently; they would have, in turn, regurgitated their stomach contents into the incisions they'd made on Sydney's body, doubtlessly ensuring transmission of infection.

"Their saliva contains antihistamine vasodilators, too," the fellow continued didactically, "as well as a potent anticoagulant and platelet aggregation inhibitors that enable them to imbibe deeply, and more hastily detoxify your blood. And that clear fluid there is water that the leeches have removed from the blood; I suppose you know already. It's all rather fascinating, isn't it, Doctor Jacob? Or at least you said it was when you allowed these awe-inspiring creatures to feast on me. I was five. This was before my medical training, of course, and, being an imaginative and pessimistic child I believed I'd be eaten alive. And you laughed at me, at my fear."

Sydney's brow crumpled; anger dissolved.

Dear God, Jacob, how could you have been so cruel?

Sydney's questions raised more questions.

How could I have been cruel to Jarod?

"Odd," Sydney's captor added with a sly smile, "You're not laughing now."