He shakes his head and laughs wickedly. “The Institute is not a school, it is a culling ground where the Golds go to hack at one another till the strongest in mind and body is found. You. Will. Die.”

Mickey’s cube lies at the opposite end of the table. I walk over to it without saying a word. I don’t know how it works, but I know the puzzles of the earth.

“My boy, what are you doing?” Mickey sighs in pity. “That is not a toy.”

“Have you ever been in a mine?” I ask him. “Ever used your fingers to dig through a faultline at a twelve-degree angle while doing the math to accommodate eighty percent rotation power and fifty-five percent thrust so you don’t set off a gas-pocket reaction while sitting in your own piss and sweat and worrying about pitvipers that want to burrow into your gut to lay their eggs?”

“This is …”

His voice fades as he sees how the clawDrill taught my fingers to move, how the grace with which my uncle taught me to dance is converted into my hands. I hum as I work. It takes a moment, maybe a minute or three. But I learn the puzzle and then solve it easily according to frequency. There seems another level to it, mathematical riddles. I don’t know the math, but I know the pattern. I solve it and four more puzzles, then it changes once more in my hands, becoming a circle. Mickey’s eyes widen. I toss the device back to him. He stares at my hands while working his own twelve fingers.

“Impossible,” he murmurs.

“Evolution,” Harmony replies.

Dancer smiles. “We will need to discuss price.”

12

THE CARVING

My life becomes agony.

My Sigils are attached to the metacarpus in each hand. Mickey removes the old Red Sigils and cultivates new skin and bone over the wounds. Then he sets to installing a stolen subdermal datachip into my frontal lobe. I am told the trauma killed me and they had to restart my heart. I’ve died twice then. They say I was in a coma for two weeks, but to me it was nothing but a dream. I was in the vale with Eo. She kissed me on the forehead and then I woke and felt the stitches and the pain.

I lie in bed as Mickey tests me. He has me move marbles from one container into other containers coded by colors. I do this for what seems a lifetime.

“We are forming synapses, my darling.”

He tests me with word puzzles and tries to make me read, but I don’t know how to read. “You will have to learn that for the Institute,” he giggles.

My dreams are cruel things to wake from. In them, Eo comforts me, but when I wake, she is nothing but a fleeting memory. I am hollow as I lie in Mickey’s makeshift medical cell. An ion germ killer buzzes next to my bed. Everything is white, yet I can hear the thumping of music from his club. His girls change my diapers and empty my piss bags. A girl who never speaks bathes me three times a day. Her arms are willowy, her face soft and sad as when I first saw her sitting with Mickey at his liquid table. The wings that curl outward from her back are bound with a crimson ribbon. She never meets my eyes.

Mickey continues to make me develop synapse connections as he repairs the scar tissue from my neural surgery. He’s all laughs and smiles and lingering touches on my forehead as he calls me his darling. I feel like one of his girls, one of the angels he sculpted for his own pleasure.

“But we must not be satisfied only with the brain,” he says. “There is much work to be done on this Ruster body of yours if we want to make you into an iron Gold.”

“And that is?”

“The golden ancestors, they call them the iron Golds. They were hard men. They stood lean and fierce upon their battlecruisers as they laid waste to the armies and republic fleets of Earth. What creatures they were.” His eyes go distant. “It took generations of eugenics and biological tampering to make them. Forced Darwinism.”

He’s quiet for a moment, and it seems an anger builds in him.

“They say Carvers will never duplicate the beauty of the Golden Man. The Board of Quality Control taunts us. Personally, I do not want to make you a man. Men are so very frail. Men break. Men die. No, I’ve always wished to make a god.” He smiles mischievously as he does some sketches on a digital pad. He spins it around and shows me the killer I will become. “So why not carve you to be the god of war?”

Mickey replaces the skin of my back and the skin of my hands where Eo applied bandages to my burns. This, he says, is not to be my real skin. It is only a homogeneous baselayer.

“Your skeleton is weak because Mars gravity is zero point three of Earth’s, my delicate little bird. Also, you have a diet deficient in calcium. Gold Standard bone density is five times stronger than naturally occurring bone density on Earth. So we will have to make your skeleton six times stronger; you must be of iron if you want to last the Institute. This will be fun! For me. Not you.”

Mickey carves me again. The agony is beyond language or comprehension.

“Someone has to dot God’s i’s.”

The next day, he reinforces the bones of my arms. Then he does my ribs, my spine, my shoulders, my feet, my pelvis, and my face. He also alters the tensile qualities of my tendons and muscle tissue. Mercifully, he does not let me wake from this last surgery for several weeks. When I do wake, I see his girls around me applying new cultures of flesh and kneading my muscles with their thumbs.

Slowly, my skin begins to heal. I am a patchwork fleshquilt. They begin feeding me synthesized protein, creatine, and growth hormone to promote muscle growth and tendon regeneration. My body trembles in the nights and itches as I sweat through new, smaller pores. I cannot use pain medication strong enough to numb the agony, because the altered nerves must learn to function with the new tissue and my altered brain.

Mickey sits beside me on my worst nights telling me stories. It’s only then that I like him, only then that I think he is not some monster cooked up by this perverted Society.

“My profession is to create, little bird,” he says one night as we sit together in the darkness. Light from the machines bathes his face in queer shadows. “When I was young, I lived in a place they call the Grove. It was what you might think of as a circus culture. We had spectacles every night. Celebrations of color and sound and dance.”

“Sounds terrible,” I mutter sarcastically. “Just like the mines.”

He smiles softly and his eyes find that distant place. “I suppose it may seem a plush life to you. Yet there was a madness to the Grove. They made us take pills. Pills that could make us fly between the planets on wings of dust to visit the faerie kings of Jupiter and the deep mermaids of Europa. My mind always separate from body. No peace to it. No end to the madness.” He clapped his hands then. “And now I Carve the things I saw in my fever dreams, just as they always wished. I dreamed of you, I think. In they end, I suppose they’ll wish I hadn’t dreamed at all.”

“Was it a good dream?” I ask.

“What?”

“The one with me.”

“No. No, it was a nightmare. One of a man from hell, lover of fire.” He’s silent for a spell.

“Why is it so horrible?” I ask him. “Life. All this. Why do they need to make us do this? Why do they treat us like we’re their slaves?”

“Power.”

“Power isn’t real. It’s just a word.”

Mickey ponders silently. Then he shrugs his thin shoulders. “Mankind was always enslaved, they’ll say. Freedom enslaves us to lust, to greed. Take freedom away, and they give me a life of dreaming. They gave you a life of sacrifice, family, community. And society is stable. There is no famine. No genocide. No great wars. And when the Golds fight, they obey rules. They are … noble about it when the great houses bicker.”