Tipsy gave everything Ted needed to find the deserters and make their lives into a prolonged torture session.
He would start with soft stuff. Dung-flinging the windows, carefully planting snippets of paranoia-inducing conversation on their paths, scary-looking people walking past them with an unusually high frequency…the idea was to make the victims think, little by little, that they were cursed, going insane, or both.
If that was not enough to make them return to the cult, then the straight up violent part would start.
It was a fact that Ted was an expert in the field of violence.
He told about this plan to Eknie, and she reacted with unrestrained glee, just as Ted had predicted. He smiled, watching her jump up and down in her chair while raving about all possible ways to drive a weak-willed individual into a full-blown psychosis.
She was an exemplary woman, a supreme human being, and at moments like this one, Ted was glad that he had saved her life all those times. Granted, it had been his own actions that she had been saved from, but the direction of the merciful acts was not the point.
The point was that Ted was a wise man, a supreme human being himself.
He joined her laughter and drew a map, and while he circled the area that the deserters frequented, Eknie added letters and an arrow pointing towards the entire block.
"H." Ted read it out loud, twisting his head so that he could decipher her temporarily horrible handwriting.
"E…"
it always got like this when she was truly excited about anything. It was so hard to read that Ted nearly choked on the chuckle rising from the back of his throat.
"L."
Their heads were almost touching, with both of them in such uncomfortable positions that Ted considered simply falling on top of her and letting her deal with the consequences of her actions.
"L. That's nice. That's what they'll have if they do not come back. We have six hundred and…"
"Seven hundred and one," Eknie corrected him. "We are bursting, Ted, the sleeping arrangements will give you nightmares for weeks."
"Then I will just not sleep," Ted protested.
A peculiar thought got a hold of him. He was so close that he could smell how clean her red hair was.
If he would possess her, tempt her, tease her, if he would pretend to be willing to give some parts of his heart to her, he would have such control over her that it was impossible to own a human being in a greater way. If he wanted something more than anything else in this world, it had to be power.
If Eknie was power, well, then it logically followed that Ted wanted Eknie.
He looked at her strikingly bright eyes, the slightest tint of translucent lipstick or whatever they called it staining her lips, her perfect cheekbones, and he saw no rational way out of the situation.
He kissed her quickly.
Eknie looked like she was about to faint.
"Don't have a stroke," Ted said casually, even though he had to admit that he felt like he had accomplished something. "I do what I want to do. If you act up, I might execute you on the spot. You're very pretty, but pretty can be displaced."
Then he went to greet Mad, even though he knew that scientists seldom liked to be disturbed.
"How's your research going?" Ted asked.
He had a few more hours until the operation to bring back the lost ones would take off. He wanted to do something useful, even if it was just fishing for morsels of information that could be understood without a significant background in physics, chemistry or similar fields.
"It just won't open up to me," Mad groaned. "I think we got another sample of water."
"WATER?!"
"Yes, only this time…it's carbonated and mixed with dye."
"Holy mother." Ted lost all of his remaining good mood. This was bad. Perhaps the secret fuel was still out there, but in any case, he would have wanted to sleep, not run around the continent looking for clues.
"I have a friend who can help us," Madorn said.
He was pinching the bridge of his nose, though. Ted hated it when people did that. It reeked of desperation.
"And…?"
"He's got access to a safe that holds a vial of the fuel. But he just doesn't have the code to the safe. It will be a dangerous mission for him and I…uh…I might have to do quite a few favors for him."
"We can just kill -"
"NO."
The refusal was so sudden and shocking that Ted got tongue-tied for a moment.
"No. We won't kill him, even if we could realistically do it. Do you realize how wide and long this trail of blood behind us is? How massive it will be if we kill anyone and everyone just because it's easier in the short term? No. We deal with this my way, Ted, as a friend and a man of reason I must tell you this. Say…what's that red stuff on your lips?"
Ted turned away to face the only mirror in the room.
"I might have kissed Eknie," he said. He was a good-looking man and he did not intend to feel ashamed of being a great success when it came to women.
"Glad you didn't kill her," Madorn said, with such a fake serious expression that the men lasted for three seconds until roaring with laughter together.
"You think I should have?" Ted teased the scientist. "But it would have left such a mess on the table, though. You weren't there to see the angle. I prefer my murders to be comfortable. For me, not the one being killed."
"There are bloodless ways of killing people, you know," Mad shot back. "Choking, my man. You heard of it?"
This caused Ted to collapse with laughter.
He thought about how hard it had been to find his place, his people, but now he had both.