Sarah didn't blink. The flame's reflection danced in her violet irises like trapped fireflies, but her gaze remained locked on Renna's face—not the weapon, not the threat, but the woman herself. A silent challenge. The lieutenant's smile faltered when she noticed the child's lips moving soundlessly, forming words too small to hear. She leaned closer, the torch's heat making Sarah's peach-fuzz arm hairs curl and blacken. The scent of burning keratin pricked the air—acrid, intimate. "Praying, little bird?" Renna whispered, her breath mint-cool against Sarah's feverish cheek.

The first touch was almost gentle—a lover's kiss of heat that made Sarah's skin prickle with false warmth. Then came the *real* heat, a molten line searing across her forearm's tender underside where the veins mapped blue rivers beneath translucent skin. Sarah's nostrils flared as her flesh blistered in slow motion, the pain radiating outward in concentric waves—first white-hot, then deepening to a crimson throb that pulsed in time with her heartbeat. The skin puckered, bubbling like wax left too close to a candle, the edges charring black where Renna held the flame too long. A high, keening sound escaped Sarah's clenched teeth, but her eyes stayed dry, wide-open. *Lily's laughter,* she chanted inwardly, *Lily spinning in snowfall, Lily's gap-toothed grin.*

Renna watched the child's flesh metamorphose with clinical fascination—the way Sarah's porcelain pallor first flushed rose-pink, then mottled into angry scarlet as capillary beds burst beneath the surface. The smell hit then: pork crackling in a pan, the sickly-sweet undercurrent of burning hair follicles. She adjusted the torch's angle, etching a meticulous line from wrist to elbow, delighting in the way Sarah's muscles twitched involuntarily, tendons standing out like harp strings. The blisters formed almost instantly, pearl-like pustules of plasma that swelled and burst under sustained heat, leaving raw meat glistening beneath. Sarah's forearm was no longer an arm but a grotesque canvas—patches of unharmed white skin beside weeping crimson, the borders between burned and unburned stark as a battlefield's front lines.

Yet the girl didn't scream. Didn't thrash. Her violet eyes remained fixed on Renna's face with unnerving focus, her small chest rising and falling in deliberate, measured breaths. Only the faint tremor in her lower lip betrayed the agony—that and the way her toes curled against the metal table, the nails digging into its surface hard enough to leave pale crescent moons. Renna felt an unfamiliar prickle along her spine, like spider legs tracing vertebrae. She'd seen grown men sob for their mothers at half this pain, their resolve crumbling faster than charred paper. But this child—this *infant*—held her silence like a knight gripping a sword. The lieutenant's gloved fingers tightened around the torch, her pulse thrumming with something dangerously close to admiration before she crushed it beneath professional disdain. *All flesh burns,* she reminded herself. *Even steel warps under enough heat.*

With deliberate slowness, Renna withdrew the flame, clicking off the valve with a soft *hiss* that sounded obscenely loud in the sudden quiet. The abrupt absence of heat left Sarah's forearm throbbing in the cold air, the blisters glistening like grotesque jewels under the fluorescent lights. Renna traced a gloved fingertip along the unburned skin just above the wound, watching Sarah's pupils dilate at the featherlight touch—anticipating pain where none came. Then she leaned in until her lips brushed the shell of Sarah's ear, her peppermint breath a cruel contrast to the scorched flesh smell clinging to them both. "This was a kindness," she murmured, her voice syrup-sweet. The child's earlobe was soft as rose petals beneath her lips. "Next time?" Renna's gloved hand drifted lower, skimming Sarah's ribs to pause just above the swell of her prepubescent breast. "I'll start here." Her thumb grazed the budding nipple, feeling it pebble instantly under the leather. "Then here—" The hand slid lower, over the quivering plane of Sarah's belly, stopping just shy of the soft pink folds between her thighs. Sarah's breath hitched, her entire body tensing like a bowstring. "Unless," Renna whispered, her tongue flicking out to taste the salt on the child's temple, "you'd prefer to spare yourself?"

Sarah exhaled through her nose—one long, steady stream—and turned her head just enough to meet Renna's poison-green gaze. Her lips, chapped and bitten raw, peeled back from small white teeth in a smile that held no warmth, no fear, only the razor-edged certainty of a child who'd already chosen her hill to die on. "I'd prefer," she said, her voice hoarse but clear, "if you stopped smelling like my grandma's toilet water." Renna recoiled as if struck, her porcelain skin flushing mottled red from collarbones to hairline. Sarah watched the tremor of fury ripple through the lieutenant's body—the way her glove creaked around the torch handle, the vein pulsing at her temple—and felt something hot and fierce uncoil in her chest. This was power too: not just enduring pain, but wielding words like scalpels. Renna's polished boot tapped an erratic staccato against the tile as she straightened, her posture rigid with barely leashed violence. Sarah lifted her chin, her burnt forearm screaming, her thighs slick with sweat, and smiled wider. The game had changed. Now they both knew it.

The blowtorch hissed back to life with a sound like a thousand snakes uncoiling. Renna's gloved thumb jammed the valve open wider—too wide—the flame roaring from delicate blue to a searing white cone that licked hungrily at the sterile air. Her breathing came too fast, her chest rising and falling in sharp jerks that made her high collar dig into her throat. Sarah watched, mesmerized, as a single drop of sweat slid down the lieutenant's temple, tracing the sharp line of her jaw before vanishing beneath the black wool of her uniform. The flame wavered in Renna's trembling grip, casting jagged shadows across her face, turning her poison-green eyes into something molten and inhuman. "You insolent little *cunt*," she spat, the words dripping venom. Sarah had just enough time to register the spittle flecking Renna's lips before the world dissolved into agony.

The first touch was a whisper—a ghost of heat grazing the soft pink bud of her left nipple, so light it might've been mistaken for a lover's breath. Sarah gasped, her back arching instinctively, the cold metal table biting into her shoulder blades as she strained away from the flame. Then Renna pressed closer, the torch's tip kissing her flesh with the intimacy of a branding iron. The pain was instantaneous, all-consuming—a white-hot spear driving straight through her chest into her spine. Sarah's teeth sank into her lower lip with enough force to taste copper, her jaw locking tight around the scream clawing up her throat. She wouldn't give Renna the satisfaction. Not again. Not ever.

Her nipple darkened first—pretty rose-pink flushing to angry scarlet as capillaries burst beneath the surface. The areola puckered, tightening like a tiny starfish recoiling from heat, the delicate skin bubbling where the flame lingered longest. Sarah's vision tunneled, her pulse roaring in her ears as the torment crescendoed—her nipple wasn't just burning now, it was *swelling*, the flesh ballooning obscenely under the sustained heat. The blister emerged like some grotesque parody of arousal, the nipple distending to twice, then thrice its original size, a translucent sac of plasma stretching the skin taut until it shimmered under the fluorescent lights. Renna exhaled sharply through her nose, her gloved fingers adjusting the torch angle with surgeon's precision, ensuring the flame licked evenly around the swollen peak. The smell hit them both simultaneously—sweet and nauseating, like pork fat rendering in a pan.

Then it burst.

Renna watched, rapt, as Sarah's distended nipple split down the middle with a wet *pop*, like overripe fruit yielding to thumb pressure. A thin jet of clear fluid arced through the air—spattering Renna's polished cheekbone with viscous warmth—before the blister's tension gave way entirely, the ruptured flesh peeling back in ragged petals. Steam curled from the exposed subcutaneous fat, carrying with it the nauseatingly intimate scent of scorched milk ducts. Sarah's back arched violently, her spine lifting clear off the metal table as her entire body convulsed—a marionette yanked by unseen strings. Her mouth flew open in a silent O, the scream building in her throat like a storm surge, her vocal cords vibrating with the force of it. At the last possible second, her teeth snapped shut on her lower lip, biting down until fresh blood welled crimson against her pale gums. The sound died unborn, strangled into a wet, shuddering gasp that misted the cold air between them.

The torch's flame dipped lower, blue-white tongues lapping eagerly at the raw crater where Sarah's nipple had been. The outer edges of the wound blackened instantly, the epidermis curling like burning parchment to reveal dermal layers that flushed from angry red to corpse-white before darkening to the color of overcooked liver. Yellow globules of subcutaneous fat bubbled to the surface—tiny, frenzied beads that popped and hissed as they liquefied, forming rivulets of boiling tallow that trickled down the curve of Sarah's prepubescent breast. Each droplet carried agony with it, searing new pathways along previously unmarred skin, the pain branching like lightning across her ribcage. Sarah's remaining nipple stiffened to a pebble-hard nub, her body's autonomic betrayal to the assault, the unpinked flesh glistening with terrified sweat.

Sarah blinked. The pain—still monstrous, still clawing at the edges of her consciousness—had dulled. Where once it had been a white-hot branding iron pressed directly to her soul, now it was merely... terrible. Manageable. She loosened her jaw, her bitten lip throbbing as she released it from between her teeth, tasting iron and salt. Her breath hitched—not from agony, but confusion. The exposed flesh still burned, still wept fluids that sizzled on the torch's kiss, but the screaming nerve endings that had made her vision go white at the edges? Those were gone. Charred to silent numbness like a forest after wildfire.

Renna's gloved hand paused mid-motion, the torch's flame flickering as she tilted her head. Her poison-green eyes narrowed—first at Sarah's face, then at the ruined crater of the child's left breast. The blister sac hung in tattered ribbons, the underlying fat layer glistening like raw chicken left too long in the sun. A slow, dawning realization tightened the lieutenant's mouth into something between a smirk and a snarl. *Of course.* The most sensitive nerves had been vaporized in that first, excruciating pop—what remained were deeper, duller pathways. Still pain, yes, but not the exquisite, soul-rending kind that broke even hardened insurgents. Renna's thumb twitched on the torch valve, reducing the flame to a sullen blue flicker. Her gaze flicked to Sarah's right nipple—pert and untouched, its pink areola puckered tight with fear.