“It may never wake up, Mahlia. I know you hoped to turn this monster to your purpose, but it’s fantasy. Given the wounds it has sustained, you should be amazed that the medicines worked at all. It has taken grievous injuries.”

Injuries. Indeed. The catalog of insults he had received was almost infinite. But now he was healing, and soon he would be fully himself. Soon he would hunt as he was meant to.

The hands reset a bandage around his ribs, then moved to the bandages of his torn shoulder. Delicate fingers prodded at the place where the alligator had buried its teeth.

“It’s closed up,” the girl said, surprised.

The man leaned close, tobacco sweet on his breath. “Don’t think of a half-man as human. It is a demon, designed for war. Its blood is full of super-clotting agents and its cells are designed to replicate as quickly as a kudzu grows.

“If you cut a creature like this with a knife, the wound closes itself within minutes. Deep punctures heal in only a few days. Flesh torn down to the bone. Ligaments ripped apart. Bones snapped. None of it matters to a creature like this.” The man rocked back. “All the wonders of our medical knowledge, and we use it to create monsters.”

Tool could practically hear the man shaking his head.

“Why do you care?” the girl asked.

“Because I’m an old fool who imagines our sciences turned to healing, instead of war. To saving your hand for instance, instead of designing a more resilient killer. Imagine that. Imagine every person in the Drowned Cities with hands and feet, and nothing to fear from soldiers with machetes. Now that would be a true medical advancement.”

The girl was quiet. Tool couldn’t ascertain from her breathing if it was embarrassment or agreement or thought. Finally she asked, “Will it wake up, or not?”

“It’s alive and healing,” the man snapped. “It will wake, or it won’t. You should be glad it heals more quickly than any human being on the face of this earth.”

Quicker than you know, man.

Indeed, even as the man and girl spoke, more of Tool’s faculties were returning, the world opening around him like a flower, petals splayed wide: scent, touch, taste, hearing. The world began to illustrate itself in his mind.

Salt scents and rippling water. The ocean whispering, pushing brackish fingers into swamplands. Water skippers skating over glasslike swamp ponds. Sun dappling over his skin. Rustling kudzu. Birch leaves shivering in the wind. Bird calls: crows and magpies, jays and cockatoos. In the far distance, the yip of coywolv and the squeal of a pig.