The lackeys were all too eager to portion up hunks of a halfling.

Highness pulled another dagger from her belt and showed them how it's done. They took turns, a visceral hunger in their eyes until more metal than what adorned their belts had pooled under him, sticky and hot.

Whenever Tres' signature heat began rolling off him like a star burning its way through the atmosphere, Highness would drive another needle into his arm, filling him with what felt like liquid ice. His head rolled and black fuzzed up the edges of his vision as his body battled the foreign agents flooding his insides, and yet he hung onto the precipice of consciousness, looking out over that niggling oblivion.

Being mortal with all the advantages of immortality (save eternal life) had its disadvantages.

What felt like pure torture, Highness assured him were calculated experiments. They wanted to know the limits of his powers, what metals he could melt (the answer thus far: all of them, though copper made him the most constipated), what he might use his magic for in his "natural environment," ("Oh, you know, domestic stuffs, like keeping the cookfire, crafting candles, baking rounds of sourdough": that earned him another blade), and how they might harness it.

He once asked how she dared to be so liberal with metal, wasn't there a limited supply? There wasn't; folks all over the world were clamoring to see her vision realized. Lending her their metals and blacksmiths was a small price to pay.

Nikko entered somewhere between the fifth and seventh bloodletting and even then, Tres afforded him a bloody smile. "Doc, I gotta say, I think I've figured out why you've stayed stumped all these moons; there's not a lick of real science to be had in this place."

Jaw tight, Nikko eyed the thin wisp of steam emanating from the gaping slit in Tres' side. "Highness, I think it time for another needle."

"Not yet."

Nikko looked ready to grind his own teeth into a fine powder.

It was all Tres could do to not look at Nikko, for fear the man would see the mischief in his eye. "You really shouldn't let the kids play with the cutlery."

"Snide bastard," a guard grumbled.

That got Highness' attention. She ripped a lightning stick from the guard's belt, cranked the lever and electrified Tres. "Show me your mask."

His lidded eyes roved over her plunging neckline and he drawled: "Show me yours and I'll show you mine."

Zap.

No, that he wouldn't give them. They'd get only the humanistic visage, grin and glare that made them fear him most.

Highness took from her own belt a short dagger, this one with an elaborate hilt in the shape of a serpent with red jeweled eyes and a mouth open wide to accept the blade. She proffered it to a woman with puffy, red-rimmed eyes who stood at the back of the group. When her eyes met Tres', she stood a little straighter, a little meaner.

"For Adam," Highness said, still holding out the dagger, hilt first.

Tres scrutinized her as she approached and grabbed the dagger without breaking eye contact, her splash of freckles and the washed-out sea-green of her eyes—wait, he remembered those eyes, wide as saucers as the flesh around them liquified like a riverbed pummeled by a storm.

Sister, then, he guessed.

The woman stood over him, brow tight, mouth set as she rubbed a thumb roughly along the length of the serpent. Her cheek twitched. He wondered why she hesitated. Not out of empathy, surely. Then, he saw the twitch of her hand, the shake she was trying to steady by gripping the dagger. Fear. She shook with it.

"It's OK," he said, lips stretching into a slow-burn grin. "Don't be afraid."

Now she trembled with anger and spat that word that, for them, trumped all others: Monster.

"I know you are, but what am I?"

Face warping into a toothy grimace, she brought the blade above her head. Tres could hear it whistle right before it plunged into his chest, nicking his sternum, could hear a collective catch of breath as the leather bindings at his wrists that he had spent the last three blades slowly severing with a simple spell, the gasps as he grabbed the woman by the shoulders, pulling her in, and the scream when he chomped down on her nose. She pummeled her fists against his chest, but he was stronger. The others looked on in horror, as if witnessing a natural disaster. Tres gnawed and tore at the cartilage until it came off in his mouth and the woman tumbled backward, suddenly free.

Like sister, like brother.

"Got your nose," Tres said around the appendage clenched between his teeth.

He spit it out into her lap, cackling as every guard leapt atop him and wrestled him back down onto the table as the woman wailed, touching gingerly around the spurting wound, and Elsie stood ideally by, the loss etched onto her face. The tail of Nikko's coat disappeared around the corner and the door slid shut behind him. He returned about a dozen zaps later (not a soul would come within a foot of Tres after he had been strapped back in), not with a needle but the methuselah who moved so quickly to the table that anyone who had blinked might have thought he had apparated right there. A few of the starbirds cringed away, startled.

"Miss me?" Tres grinned, tasting blood.

The methuselah reached out and pushed a pressure point on the underside of Tres' jawline, knocking him out.

He woke with a start. That chill he associated with the needle they kept thrusting into him sat like a prickly stone in his gut, and his chest was tight, as if all those starbirds were still piled atop him.

He found himself in a new room, bound to another table. This one had curved walls and a transparent lid. It was tilted at an angle toward a transparent wall that he only knew was there because in it were reflected the gadgets, doodads and alien metals that furnished the room.

In the midst of the mess was his least favorite doc.

"Oh, do tell how you plan to seduce me," he drawled, keeping the pain from his pummeling behind his teeth.

Nikko didn't so much as look his way, and instead continued pressing away at a board with perfectly square lumps. Above it, he peered out a window emanating a sallow light. With each press, letters sprung up into the window that Tres was starting to think wasn't a window at all (in the reflection of the wall, there was nothing behind it but a black square), but more of that fabled technology from the Gone World.

"I admit, I'm a bit disappointed; you're not nearly as fun to look at as your queen bee."

Each word stumbled thick and fuzzy from his lips.

"You know, when Highness denied my sewing up that leaky cesspool of a hole in your face, I thought we were going to be stuck with you, coherent and corrosive, for much longer than this," Nikko said, and with a final tap on the board, the capsule in which Tres lay exhaled, raising the hairs on his body.

For the first time, Tres noticed tiny holes as small as pores perforated the sides.

Nikko looked oddly at home in a way he hadn't among soldiers with lightning sticks and militant visages. "Lucky me," he said, words slick with a threat as he turned toward Tres. Yes, here among the cold and subservient machines, Nikko reigned.

Something very closely resembling terror took up somersaulting in the space between Tres' gut and throat. Sure, Highness had stuck him with knives. Brutality, the simple parting of flesh, was something he understood, something he could see. But poisons that turned his faculties to mush and alien machines that emit their own light and talk—there was something about being left alone with this man that made his skin crawl.

Fear. Strictly another human defect, it had no Faen translation.

"Quit teasing me," Tres said with his most convincing grin, "and tell me what you've got planned for our little playdate. I know you're dying to."

The crazy ones are always talkers.

"I do love to experiment, not like the pretenders Elsie incentivices to indulge in their perverse research here. No, I'm the real deal, and my hobbies require a steady supply of guinea pigs. It's been a long time since we've discovered a deviant," (Tres' brow was beginning to arch at all the words he did not know) "a true magic user, you know, and even all those that came before were distant relatives of the faeries, mortals who knew little more than parlor tricks. I had anticipated Highness keeping you as a pet, a spectacle to parade around as a reminder of the cause," he said, like Highness' whims were fit only for impressionable children, "but I suppose one's enough or the impressionables might start to talk."

Even now Tres wondered what the methuselah had given up for a larger cage, why he hadn't popped her neck like a dandelion stem.

"You spoiled things impressively fast. She has failed to control you one too many times, and those you've disfigured walk around as stark reminders. But I'm sure you knew what you were doing when you went for the faces," he said with a small smile.

Not, really. Was that a hint of admiration in his voice?

"Either get over here and give me a kiss or the punchline. Make up your mad mind."

It warmed Tres to see him tense up.

"You find yourself in a cryogenic chamber of my own design."

"A what now?"

Nikko nodded impatiently. "Yes, it stands to reason your savage brain has never heard of such a scientific triumph, so all I'll say is its purpose is to keep you asleep and in a suspended state—that is, if I perfected the algorithms on the first go, a phenomenon unheard of in science, really—out of sight, out of all minds but mine as I conduct research on what makes you burn and how to rip it out of you."

Good luck with that. Tres gave an audible yawn. "How do you plan to do that, if you have me sus-ss-sup—"

"Suspended," Nikko spat. "That's where the needles, or the tentacles as Highness fondly calls them, come into play."

Tres' fear gremlin belched at the thought of more needles.

"Let's begin, shall we."

Nikko turned back to his magic window, gave the board a single tap and the lid of Tres' pod slid into place and those pores lining the sides started to issue ice-cold jets of air.

"Doc. Let's talk about this," Tres said, his words crystallizing before his eyes. "I am more than my temper, my jokes," he said, his voice rising as Nikko continued tapping away. "Hey," Tres shouted, frost coating his throat.

Moons, she says. Moons, I've been here. That girl could be anywhere. He even nursed a fleeting thought for Hurgo before the cold kiss of a potentially eternal sleep sent his gut gremlin into a frenzy.

Pod looks like one of those capsules that humans plant their dead in—

It was his last thought as needles as thin as thread shot out of those pores faster than he could blink.