He barely flinched. The pin jabbed into its fingertip, and she pulled it away quickly, pressing a skinny glass tube against the wound. It slowly filled with blood, more slowly than usual, and she squeezed its finger, pressing out more. The flow stopped before she could even fill the tube.

“Your blood pressure might be low,” she commented, sealing up the tube with a frown. “Usually I can fill two vials on one finger. Unless…” She peered in closer, watching the blood in the tube as it started to congeal. She looked at its finger, prodding the hole gently. It had already sealed itself closed. “That’s amazing,” she whispered. She held the glass tube up to her eye; the blood was turning a rusty brown, firming up until it was capped on both ends by a small, solid scab.

She looked back at the Partial. It said nothing.

Kira’s first impulse was to poke it again, deeper this time, but she recoiled from the idea almost as quickly as she had it. She wasn’t here to torture it, and fast healing or not, it could still feel pain. Its flinch at the finger poker had been proof enough of that. She didn’t have the stomach to wound it just to watch how it reacted.

And yet … wasn’t that what the Senate wanted? Wasn’t that what she was here to do? She wouldn’t just go cutting him with knives, but they had told her to study him, and if the Partial resistance to RM was based on a powerful self-regenerative system, then she would have to test the limits of his healing power and determine how, if at all, they could use it for themselves. If she couldn’t find the answer elsewhere, she would have to look there.

Could it take a gunshot? What would happen to the bullet? Her gut warred with her scientific curiosity. She shook her head and set down the scabbed-over tube.

“I’m not going to torture you,” she said, going back to the drawers and retrieving a small plastic syringe and a short, sharp needle. “But I do have to get another blood sample. The medicomp needs liquid blood to give me a good picture of what’s going on in there, so if you scab over on instant contact with air, we’ll have to keep air out of the equation for as long as possible.” She fitted the syringe with the needle, found a tube of saline solution, and drew it in and out of the needle until she was fairly certain all the internal space had been filled with liquid. She swabbed the vein on the Partial’s inner elbow and held the needle above it. “Get ready for another poke.”