In captivity, no reproductive shyness, no nervous gooseflesh of exposure can stand up long against the soon-to-come. The first rendings were twisted tendons, muscles rebraided with metal fibers. He grew used to the feeling of slit skin: that special dermal nudity. The slavers wasted no time dissecting him and cutting the agency from his body like a cancer. In and out of consciousness, he wondered if he could expect that he'd been changed every time he opened his eyes. The different shapes of stings, the spread of splayed invasion, being hewn and sewn— all of it, for months, exclusively constituted his horizontal existence. The twitch of elbows would rise over the insides of his thighs and he would hope it was not as it seemed, that the hands were not disappearing inside him. The firing of neurons dampened. He kept himself conscious reciting the planes and quadrants of himself; he began with the first things he knew and dropped the weight of thought through his memory, a fast-falling ball caught in webs of such a thin silver past, one that ripped so easily and left him, again, anesthetized.