Wherever they dragged her to, it could not have been far. The pungent aroma of hotdogs boiling woke her from dreams of smoke-drenched turrets ripping rounds into the three El Otros.

  The eyes of the woman lingered in her mind even as Fiona gained full consciousness.

  Murderer, those eyes seemed to accuse before fading away, yielding to the reality of the room she was now hostage.

  Her gaze was still hazy, but it appeared the Inquisitors set up an impromptu interrogation chamber in an abandoned basement kitchen directly beneath the diner.

  The wall in front of her was lined with empty prep stations made clean with long-faded antiseptics.

  "She's awake already," a man belted out, standing somewhere off to her periphery. "Prep the cocktail."

  Off to her right, glass and brassy instruments slammed down on a wooden table. The noise maker asked as he spread items out:

  "Quantity, Pavano? She is kind of a big girl."

  Only silence followed for a moment before motion intruded upon her blurred vision. Standing at a distance by the prep stations, Senior Inquisitor Izquira Pavano turned to face them. The two others whom she heard speaking were waiting for an answer from him.

  He chortled amusedly as his eyes gazed over her body like a surveyor scrutinizing a land claim.

  Fiona tensed up; she was nude. And strapped, standing upright by her arms and chest, to a polished wooden stand of some sort.

  Pavano glanced at both men, throwing them an easy, confiding smile. His words echoed across the chamber.

  "It wasn't that long ago Ms. Caza was a strikingly thin beauty. We've suspected for a while she gained that weight to appeal to Clara Luna's fetishistic penchant for a voluptuous figure."

  He folded his arms and gave a pitying smirk as he looked her in the eyes.

  "You are still a decent-looking specimen given the firmness of your physique, but you better take care of that before atrophic stretching scars your flesh. That is if you survive what we have in store."

  He showed no emotion as she involuntarily quivered in response. Pavano turned to the man to her left.

  "For the cocktail, two-thirds oxytocin and one-third midazolam. That should suffice to prep her for what's next."

  He turned back around, facing away from her. His hands held together behind his back, completely still, over a black oval device whose purpose she feared to even fathom.

  Pavano sat down on a stool by a prep station and laid out a spread of documents he retrieved from a satchel on the floor. He ignored the proceedings around her.

  A pair of hands placed fingertip-sized devices on her temples, the side of her neck, and down the length of her vertebrae.

  Wireless biofeedback sensors, she assumed.

  Meanwhile, the other man rigged together a hologram display a few meters in front of her with a pair of wrenches. That was when she noticed his neck tattoo, a grinning Santa Muerte skull in the crest of a pair of Desert Eagles with the words Poder Eterno (Eternal Power) beneath, all framed in curling Yungas vines, and realized the two men were not ùltimos Diàs Inquisitors.

  The man at her side chuckled. He strapped an upper arm blood pressure cuff on her that began constricting immediately.

  "Something got you nervous all of a sudden," he said. "You're probably thinking, 'What in the Seven Hells are those Cartel boys doing with the Inquisitor?' right?"

  "Pretty much," she confirmed.

  "El Acasador, that's what. A common enemy makes for strange allies, mi chica. But, we are the least of your worries." His stark black eyes darted to Pavano, who ignored their banter. "If it were up to me, I'd take you back to Pachamama's Dive in our little hideaway to salsa our tailbones off, but it sure as shit ain't up to me."

  She chuckled silently to herself. Her former skinny, city-girl body would not have elicited the time of day from the gangsters, but now that she was full-figured and a bit more, they tended to see her as a physical challenge.

  She gave the strangely soulful-eyed Cartel flunky a once-over. He wore a tattoo on the back of his neck: Tiwanaku's Gate of the Sun with a skeletal figure in a medieval robe between the pillars and a stylized rainbow serpent above the gate.

  "They call you El Monje, correct?"

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  He chortled out loud.

  "How could you possibly know that?" He asked.

  Even with all that was occurring, Fiona smiled.

  Teodoro's intuition was rubbing off on her.

  When El Monje (The Monk) finished his task, he dismissed himself with a nod and disappeared out of Fiona's sight.

  Twin Guns Muerte flipped a switch, and a heat signature holograph of her body displayed two meters in front of her. He too disappeared behind her.

  Senior Inquisitor Izquira Pavano's boots smacked the floor as he briskly approached.

  When he stopped, standing beside the holographic display, he asked her a question bereft of formality.

  "Se?ora Caza. At some point you became sympatico to the El Otro cause. I want to know when that happened and why."

  She buried that secret deep in the recesses of her true self with self-induced hypnogogic training, and she wasn't going to give it up.

  As part of the methodology, she diverted her thoughts into an empathy pattern. Focus on self was what interrogators exploited.

  Teodoro came to her mind.

  "I need to know what you have done to my friend." She asked.

  "Alright," Pavano nodded from his shoulders, a smirk forming. He addressed the man to her left, "Ichi..."

  Fiona tensed up and feared the gangster so deft with tech was going to demonstrate his murder and torture skills.

  "... dial in Se?ora Caza's brain activity."

  The hologram image changed to a high-definition depiction of her brain with systemic connections outlined in neon green.

  He shook the black oval device in front of her. Two prongs now jutted out of it, shaped like a V.

  "When your entire frontal lobe is covered in the green, Se?ora, that is when this matter becomes a trifle more interesting. You know that, right?"

  She knew it was futile to scream. Soundproofing a room of this size could be done with an aerosol spray.

  But she also knew that on this matter, she was right. If stressed, the memory cluster would shatter, and it would take a twenty thousand calorie infusion of a purified carbohydrate, while a five-tone mantra played as she slept six hours, to rebuild it.

  She had stress-tested the treatment vigorously, and it worked without fail. Currently, Fiona wasn't even in possession of the memory cluster. She would not relearn it until she felt it was safe to do so.

  The gangster Ichi (she preferred Two Guns Muerte) laughed out loud with a snort.

  "What do you find so amusing?" Pavano asked, annoyed.

  "Her biofeedback readings. She is not at all concerned with the threat you are making. Cabróna is like she has ice in her veins, man."

  The Inquisitor's face pinched up, disgusted as the answer occurred to him.

  "Counter torture conditioning?" He said with his voice raised an octave. He fell silent for a moment before Pavano sighed in exasperation. "But, of course they did. El Otros, the whole damned Manifest enterprise is a glass onion of secrets."

  No outside influence was behind her treatment. Just a desire to be true to herself. Whatever that secret memory happened to be, it was intrinsic to her being, and she would take it to the grave.

  Fiona smirked back at the Senior Inquisitor for the little victory she gained.

  His eyes narrowed on her lips, and finally showing emotion, he threw her a hateful gaze and spoke in a low timbre.

  "I have secrets of my own, Fiona Caza. Do you know where Deputy Director Rubin Estes happens to be at the moment? While telling you to sit tight, he made contact with his American friends. He is on his way to Asunción right this minute, leaving you high and dry."

  A chill ran down her spine as she instantly realized the Inquisitor wasn't lying. She overheard Rubin speaking in English but had not made the connection to the American crew.

  She thought of Beauregard—the handsome devil. Before she and Rubin became romantically involved on a serious level, they took many business excursions to Asunción. She met Beauregard, the American outlaw.

  They danced, dined, and fucked on several soirées that season. Unfortunately, he started dating another American, and she became serious with Rubin.

  A sharp cackle ripped from Ichi and took her out of her thoughts.

  "You got her, Pavano," he yelled. "There is a nest of vulnerabilities displaying now. She has deep emotional connections in Asunción."

  The Inquisitor raised his chin and once more displayed the device.

  "Are there any secrets you would like to share with us before we fetch them from your brain?"

  Fiona blurted out before she could even reconsider her words, "Elise Luna Claro manufactures and distributes LSD!"

  Senior Inquisitor Izquira Pavano stopped dead in his tracks. He weighed the information for a long moment before speaking.

  "That's a very serious allegation."

  He turned to Ichi and asked, "True?"

  "She believes it to be," Ichi answered.

  "You know very well that is considered by the Salvage a capital crime."

  Fiona regained her breath. "Yes. I wouldn't have said anything even about Luna Claro, but you have me in a vice grip. And that cocktail is starting to have an effect on me."

  Pavano nodded. "I see. It's a good thing you told me. I may need an outside source for my own inoculation booster soon, and Green-Eyed Elise is a very good friend of mine."

  His eyes stared starkly as he muttered those words. He then tore his gaze away from her and turned around, walking back towards the prep stations.

  Oh shit! That was a bad move on her part.

  Pavano returned with a folder in his hand; he pulled up a table in front of her and laid out the contents. A photo of Tasìa del Alma-Gris, another of her walk-around guy, Matzi, and a third of her personal guard, Simone Barre Estèvez.

  He spoke:

  "Soon I will own you completely, but I need you to know your task before you are not able to function for several hours, given you are set to meet them tomorrow, correct?"

  Not capable of resisting him further, Fiona nodded. "At her base of operations. An abandoned highschool."

  "Your objective of capturing del Alma-Gris remains the same. It is a major tactical blunder on the part of Dimitris to seek this one. We won't stand in their way.

  "Estrella I need alive for negotiations with my counterparts in Spain. A very dangerous person of interest. But this is the real prize that brings my Bolivian friends along for the ride. You know him as Matzi, but his real name is Eduardo Sanchez Domingo. Retired major in Argentina's Buzos Tácticos, their specialist diving division.

  "You also know him as El Acasador, the flying mantis."

  He looked up from his files and gave her a moment to take it all in. Once satisfied, Pavano nodded to El Monje.

  The cartel flunky held on to her shoulders, firmly but not cruelly so.

  "Be brave, Se?ora Caza. It will be over soon," he whispered.

  Pavano pressed his palm into the black oval device, and the end receptors glowed warmly. A green vapor arose between them. He stuck the receptors into her nostrils.

  She jolted with a biting, acidic surge smashing into her face. Followed by pure electricity pulling at her. Her nostrils sizzled as the pain intensified until it became white noise.

  It would not be until several minutes before Fiona was certain she was still alive.