It's not mine. None of this is mine. My skin is too soft, too lustrous, too fault- less. I don't know my body without scars. I don't know the back of my own hands. Eo would not know me. Mickey takes my hair next. Everything is changed. It is weeks of physical therapy. Walk- ing slowly around the room with Evey, the winged girl, I'm left to my own thoughts. Neither one of us cares much to speak. She has her demons and I have mine, so we are quiet and calm ex- cept when Mickey comes to coo about what pretty children we would make together. One day, Mickey even brings an an- tique zither for me, with a soundboard of wood instead of plastic. It is the kindest thing he's ever done. I do not sing, but I play the solemn songs of Lykos. The traditional ones of my clan that no one beyond the mine will ever have heard. He and Evey sit with me sometimes, and though I think Mickey a wretched sort of creature, I feel as though he understands the music. Its beauty. Its importance. And afterward, he says nothing. I like him then, too. At peace.
"Well, you're a bit sterner than I first measured," Harmony says to me one morning as I wake "Where have you been?" I ask, open- ing my eyes "Finding donors." She flinches as she sees my irises. "The world does not stop because you are here," she says. "We had work to do. Mickey says you can walk?" "I am growing stronger. "Not strong enough," she surmises looking me over. "You look like a baby giraffe. I'1l fix that." Harmony takes me beneath Mickey's club to a grungy gymnasium lit by sul- furous bulbs. I like the feel of the cold stone on my bare feet. My balance has returned, andit is a good thing, because Harmony does not offer me her arm; instead, she waves to the center of the dark gymnasium "We bought these for you," Harmony says. She points to two devices in the cen- ter of the dark space. The contraptions are silver and remind me of the suits knights wore in past centuries. The armor hangs suspended between two metal wires. "They are concentraction machines."
I slide my body into the machine. Dry gel hugs my feet, my legs, my torso and arms and neck, till only my head is free. The machine is built to resist my movements, yet it responds even to the tiniest stimuli. The idea of build- ing muscle is to exercise it, which is nothing more than using the muscle intensely enough to create microscopic tears in the tissue fiber. This is the pain one feels in the days after an intense workout-torn tissue- not lactic acid. When the muscle repairs the tears, it builds on itself. This is the process the concentraction machine is built to fa- cilitate. It is the devil's own invention Harmony slides the device's faceplate over my eyes. My body is still in the gym, but I see myself moving across the rugged landscape of Mars. I'm running, pump- ing my legs against the concentraction machine's resistance, which increases according to Harmony's mood or the lo- cation of the simulation. Sometimes I venture to the jungles of Earth, where I race panthers through the underbrush, or I take to the pocked surface of Luna before it was populated. But always I re- turn home to Mars to run across its red soil and jump over its violent ravines.