It never occurred to the interrogators that they were torturing a little boy. The only son of the most wanted terrorist on the planet, he wasn't a boy at all. It was an opportunity for promotion. His crime was that he was born outside the system, to a father whose legacy of violence and bloodshed permeated the lives of ordinary people. The people of Thalassinus turned to their governments for guidance and support, longing for an end to the bombing, for freedom from the constant threat of death. No one knew when the boy's father would strike next. To the boy, none of this makes sense. He had heard words like "terrorist" and "murderer," but what he knew about these things didn't line up with what he knew about his father. He remembered the man who worked with sickly strangers: he rarely slept, he rarely ate, he stopped only to stand by the window and light a cigarette, blowing the smoke into the cool, endless winter air. It was true that his father was often gone, leaving him in the care of men and women with strange and twisted faces, but his absence wasn't due to blowing up retirement homes. The people who mumbled apologies to lab rats didn't. things like that. They didn't build an army of fire drones to terrorize the Terasu Emperor's annual picnic, and they didn't release lethal bacteria into schools. He had never seen his father angry at anyone. Before her death, his mother had occasionally scolded the man, but he had always accepted the criticism. The boy remembered spilling something in his father's laboratory, paralyzed by the sheer terror of knowing he had done something wrong. He stood there like a shaking statue, bleeding from the jagged shards of glass embedded in his skin, furious with himself. It wasn't long before... halfway down the paper ......he found, like, deep furrows left by the progression of glacial ice. A star like ours doesn't die like most people expect. A. There is no gradual weakening: a constant decrease in light, an increasing absence of heat. It does not vanish into the depths of space, calmly retreating into the womb. Instead, as the last of its resources are consumed, it burns bigger and brighter, swelling like a festering gash, incinerating planets nurtured since their birth. It is the last, desperate act of a sick mother. So you see, if it's close enough to a dying star, a red giant, a planet will heat up before it cools down. This is how I know something is wrong. Everything we have been told is a lie. Kuroda knelt beside him, sliding a hand through the bars to brush a sow's back, “The Emperor is a bit of a brat when it comes to people like that. Find other uses for them.”