Dillon shifted in his seat, and looked down at the heavy cuffs on his hands. There was a moistness to his eyes. Was it remorse? the profiler speculated. Then, from Dillon: “Something has to be alive before you can kill it.”
“An interesting philosophy.”
Dillon tugged half-heartedly on his bonds, then looked at the profiler. “Yeah . . . I’ve done some unspeakable things in the past. But believe me, the punishment has fit the crime. There’s nothing you can do to me that hasn’t already been done.”
The profiler tapped his pen on the table, the clicks echoing in the cold interrogation room. “Let’s talk about your three dead friends,” he said. Now that he had regained control of the conversation, he was going to keep a tight rein on it.
“Deanna was the first to die,” Dillon said. “Her body lies trapped in the place between worlds.”
“A place between worlds,” repeated the man. Making a mental note of this delusional construct. “Is this a place you created?”
Dillon grinned. “You seem to think I’m all-powerful.”
The profiler found the grin far more unsettling than he expected. “Didn’t you claim to be a god?”
“I never made the claim—others called us gods. We just got tired of correcting them.”
“Alright, then. What are you?”
“The six shards of the Scorpion Star.”
“The Scorpion Star? You’re saying this has something to do with the supernova?”
Dillon didn’t move, didn’t break eye contact. His eyebrows did not rise in the reflexive twitch of a lie. “Our souls are the six fragments of the soul of that star, which went nova at the moment each of us were conceived.”
“How lucky for you.” The profiler had to hand it to him; the kid’s delusion was distinctively grandiose.