“How many have you killed?” Mary kept her tone conversational, not accusatory. “Do you keep trophies, other than their body parts?”

Victor flinched, a look on his face as though he had smelled something unpleasant. “I do not enjoy it. I regret the necessity of the killing. I tried for some time working with reanimating tissue that had been dead for longer. But the deterioration was too much. The connections I needed for the current to enervate a whole body were broken down. Fresher material was required.” He paused, holding a vial of noxious-looking yellow liquid. “I did not think I could do it. The first time was awful for me.”

“For him, too, I imagine,” I said.

Victor surprised me, his lips twitching with a smile that previously would have felt like a gift. “His suffering was brief. I had to live with the high price of my ambitions. It has been a burden, I assure you.” He rested the gun on the table, still pointed at Mary, as he injected the liquid into his father’s milky, unseeing eyeball. I did not look away.

I would never again let myself look away.

“If you admire the stitchwork,” he said to Mary, gesturing to the black lines of thread, “you should compliment Elizabeth. She is the one who taught me to sew. It is quite wearing on the hands, though.” He took the gun again and lifted both hands, turning one empty palm up and considering it thoughtfully. “It is all quite demanding. This hand has to be capable of the most minute cuts. One slip, one twitch, and I can ruin an entire body’s usefulness. Not to mention the strength required to strangle someone. I had never considered the sheer physical demands before I started. It was all lofty mental ideas, problems explored on paper.” He sighed. “Such is the nature of science, though. At some point theory must be turned into reality, and there will always be more work than anticipated.”

Mary tutted sympathetically. “It must have been exhausting, killing my uncle. He was not a small man.”

Victor looked up at his pole, then turned another dial. “Who was your uncle?”

“Carlos Delgado.” Her calm deteriorated in the face of his ignorance. “The bookseller! Your friend!”

He frowned, searching his memory. “Oh! Yes. I had just lost much of my material because of a trial amount of injection gone wrong. I needed a replacement immediately. He showed up at my door. It was bad luck, really. But tell me, did anyone look for him? No. No one ever did. All the men I took from the dark streets, the drunks, the foreigners, the vagrants looking for work. No one ever looked for them. And that is what brings me comfort. I gave them a purpose higher than they ever had in their lives.”

“I looked for him!” She took a deep breath, deliberately relaxing. “I looked for him.”