There's a moment of sympathy-empathy even-that flashes through his ice-blue eyes. Fractured fragments of memory of a time before the Salt Mines, before the Vultures and worked to strip away all that made Malachiasz Czechowicz the lad he had been and replace him with a weapon. His name had become a mantra chanted in those lightless halls, something he still did when he felt his grasp of self slipping.

"What is your name?" He knew her name to be Natalia, but that was not the purpose of this exercise.