The two Coalition operatives had been given a warm room, food, and eight hours of sleep before I spoke to them again.
This was deliberate.
Interrogation — real interrogation, the kind that produces reliable intelligence rather than desperate fabrication — is not about pressure and discomfort. Anyone can be broken with enough of either, but broken people say whatever they believe will make the breaking stop, which makes the information they produce functionally useless. What actually works is far simpler and considerably more counterintuitive: you treat people like people, you give them time to think, and you let the silence and their own minds do most of the work.
I had learned this in my second year of exile, from an old wolf named Soren who had spent forty years as a territorial intel
