Valkyrie reached for Cadaverous’s thoughts with her mind. She could hear them, faint though they were, like a muffled conversation held behind a closed door. She had to get closer. She had to open the door.
Valkyrie lunged at him and he laughed, let her come, let her clamp her right hand on to his head, and suddenly the door burst wide open and his thoughts became loud and clear and overwhelming.
But she expected this and so narrowed her search, cutting through to his memories, just like Abyssinia had done. Valkyrie copied her technique precisely, following those memories down a flickering tunnel of sights and sounds and emotions, burrowing past his adult life, past the people he’d killed and the people he’d met and the people he’d known, back and back, deeper and deeper, to a childhood that was sharp at the edges and cold in the centre.