Words | “Good morning, Ethan,” said my jailer, with a cheer matched only by my hatred. I looked up from my bed. I didn't bother to correct her. My name is Zenith. Ethan had been gone for years, an old skin that never fit me. But contradicting Sister Sarah leads only to punishment – the last time I’d snapped at her and asserted my real name, she assigned me to “meditation retreat” for a week. Seven days of solitary confinement in the dark. I’d rather claw out my one remaining eye. “I have good news for you,” she said. “Your hand is ready!” I shuddered. I have been dreading this day. She led me out of my cell, and locked the door behind her with a click. There were two Wardens with her – Brother Elijah, who I recognized from previous excursions out of my cell, and another one, a hulking man that I don’t recognize. He glared at me as he steadied an arm under my armpit, and Elijah took the other. “Brothers Silas, Elijah, please, with me to the operating theater.” It’s an ordeal, moving around. The Edenists took my bionic leg, so I can’t walk without crutches. But they also stole my robotic hand, so I can’t use crutches on my own. Most humiliating of all, my eye – so not only can I no longer see the ultraviolet patterns on flowers, I don’t even have stereoscopic vision. I wasn’t sure why they didn’t just put me in a wheelchair; maybe, despite what they said, the deprivation was part of the point. Unnatural, they call us. Perverse. As if there’s something natural about intentionally maiming a person, removing parts of them and dragging their shambling half-corpse down a hallway to – Actually, I wasn’t ready to think about what happened at the end of the hallway yet. Sarah walked ahead of us imperiously, owning the space, projecting a confidence that belied her short stature. Even though I could only see the back of her neatly coiffed auburn hair and blue dress, it felt like she was staring at me. I averted my eyes, instead looking at the Scripture passages and kitschy art that adorned the otherwise hospital-like walls of the compound. Sarah led us through a pair of double doors to a room that I knew all too well. An eerie blue glow suffused it, almost ultraviolet enough to hurt the eyes. Rows and rows of tanks were mounted to opposite walls, filled with actinic blue suspension gel. Each one held an organ. Some of them were recognizable horrors, eyeballs and fingers and lungs, even a little bit of brain. Most of them were internal organs, undifferentiated little blobs of flesh, the bloody red of them shaved down to indistinct blacks and browns by the cyan of the gel. I had to remind myself that most of these were going to people who needed them, who actually wanted them. Most of these weren’t atrocities, but acts of deep mercy. But three tanks in this room – one hand, one eye, and a big one for my leg – were for me. “Here it is,” Sarah said, gesturing at a tank near the bottom of the stack. A pristine left hand floated in it. A mirror of my right floating in the middle of the tank, tethered by gummy strands of tissue to the growth matrix surrounding the tank. A twin – or perhaps younger sister – of the one that I had lost in an accident three years ago. A spasm wracked through the hand suddenly, curling it nearly into a fist. Sarah laughed, a fake, brittle sort of sound. “Ah, they do tend to do that sometimes. To keep the muscle toned.” I retched a little, barely keeping my breakfast down, and pulled away. “Come now, there’s no time to wait. We’ll get you off to surgery.” She peeled off, presumably to consult with the surgeons, leaving me with Silas and Elijah. Elijah considered me as he always did – basically a sack of potatoes that he sometimes had to haul from place to place. But Silas was still glaring at me. “Hey, new guy,” I said. I never wanted to mouth off to Sarah, but the orderlies were another matter. “First time seeing a real-life cyborg, huh? Booga booga.” Something unreadable crossed his face and he looked away. “Let’s get you to surgery.” — They didn’t even have to strap my body down for the procedure. What was I going to do, hop away? It was never more than lying down on my back that I missed my leg. It was obvious when I was standing how much the lack of balance threw me off, but the constant tension from the asymmetry when I was laying down was horrible. The operating table was uncomfortable, and the room was drafty. The surgeon was a man I’d never seen before, wearing surgical scrubs and a hairnet, with a neatly trimmed moustache. He came in without greeting me and grabbed hold of the stump of my left arm. He turned it this way and that, tut-tutting at something objectionable, then swung a board with straps up from under the table and strapped my forearm to it. “If only you’d come to us right away,” he said. His voice was reedy, higher than I expected. “That hack job you did with the machines made this procedure much more difficult, there will be a longer wait time than usual.” “I didn’t come to you,” I said. “You kidnapped me.” “Don’t be dramatic,” he said. “You’ll see how much better your life will be here, with real humans, with real body parts. And once they see how successful we’ve been with you, we’ll have a much easier time bringing in all those pitiable drifters in the desert.” “Please,” I said. “Don’t do this. I don’t want this. I just want to go home.” He smiled gently. “Poor thing. You are home.” And he strapped the anaesthetic mask to my face. — There was nobody around when I awoke. I was in a different room, one that had windows, although there was no light from outside. My arm was still strapped to the table, swaddled in gauze. And at the end of it was a pink, fleshy hand. The fingers were wrinkled as though I had just gotten out of a shower. It had none of the callus of the hand I still had on the other side, and the skin of the palms was strangely smooth and shiny. The hand twitched, sending pain coursing down my arm. I turned my head to the side and retched, hard. Nothing came up but a bit of stomach acid. I could feel the cold air through the fingers, but it felt wrong. Tingly, staticky, much worse than when I was adapting to the neural feedback of my metal hand years ago. It felt like I was feeling everything through tinfoil gloves. I looked away. I couldn’t stand the sight of it, couldn’t tolerate the feeling. My tendons and joints were on fire from where they had spliced them together. I thought of undoing the straps on the board and at least freeing my arm, but I didn’t want to do any more damage than they had already done. If I had to live with this thing, I wasn’t going to make it any worse on myself. The door creaked open. I turned to see who it was, but backlit by the bright hallway all I could see was a hulking silhouette. He carefully locked the door behind him, and approached me. It was Brother Silas, the new guy, the one who was so disgusted by me he couldn’t keep it off his face. His hood was down, now, revealing a mop of curly black hair. He put a hand on my shoulder, pushing me into the bed. Before I could shout out, he clapped a hand across my mouth. I struggled, but his hold was firm. He leaned down and whispered into my ear. “Silicon City sent me.” I stopped moving. He retracted the hand across my mouth, and the hand on my shoulder became more of a reassuring brace than a shove. “W – what?” I said quietly. “Vixen knew me from jobs she had done before,” he said, in a low rasp. “She hired me to infiltrate the Edenists and get you out. Everyone misses you, Zenith. We’re getting you out of here.” Tears came to my eyes, unbidden. “Now?” He shook his head. “Still need to lay some preparations. A week, probably. I’ll try to get you out before they graft anything more to you.” “Thank you,” I said. “Thank you. We can’t let them take anyone else.” “I know. We won’t.” He grabbed my right hand with his. “Stay strong, ok?” His hand was rough, calloused, but warm. “Okay,” I said. The thing at the end of my other arm spasmed in response.