Except for the swim cap, Candy McClure was naked. She loved being naked, though right now it was for work, not pleasure. That’s why she was hunched forward, the corpse flopped atop her back, marble-white arms dangling over her shoulders as she carried it toward the conveyer belt leading to the crematory unit. The dead body pressed against her skin wasn’t the most pleasant thing she’d felt this week, but she went to great lengths on disposal operations to avoid leaving fibers or residue at the scene.

It was one of those pet joints. She preferred animal mortuaries to human ones. If you could get around the inevitably cutesy names—they all seemed to be called “Loving Paws” or “Puppy Heaven”—they had certain advantages, looser security being foremost.

She’d broken into this outfit, Faithful Companions, in the glam outskirts of Muskego, because it used the Power-Pak II, her cremation unit of choice and the same one used for humans. Nice and roomy. Ideal for a St. Bernard or an investigative reporter from the Journal Sentinel who’d decided to start asking questions about black-budget allocations.

She flopped Jon Jordan’s body onto the track atop a rigor-mortised, three-legged American Shorthair. She’d preheated the unit before retrieving the body from the stolen van she’d parked by the back loading dock. Ramming the heel of her hand into the button, she engaged the equipment and watched the unlikely twosome rumble into eighteen hundred degrees of obliteration.

Curiosity killed the cats.

Snapping her gum, she stretched out her shoulders, limboed a bit to loosen her lumbar. The flesh of her back itched and burned. Jon Jordan was not a small man. She caught sight of her naked form in the stainless steel of the crematory unit and paused to admire herself.

A knockout body by all accounts. Large, firm breasts that still sat high and proud. Tapered waistline befitting a cello. Wide, feminine hips. Shapely legs.

But.

She turned slowly, bringing her mottled back into view. Since Orphan X had knocked her on top of her own jugs of concentrated hydrofluoric acid, she’d had countless skin grafts and scar-tissue-release surgeries. The pain was intense and unremitting, infections always one shower away.

From the front, a centerfold. From behind, Freddy Krueger.

Though she loathed to admit it to herself, the scarring had eaten away almost imperceptibly at her rock-star confidence. Self-doubt was not her strong suit. In fact, it wasn’t a trait she could remember experiencing, and yet there was something familiar in the shadows of doubt that crept beneath the repulsive surface now. Something from her early days in which she’d more or less raised herself, emotion she’d buried out of sight, excavation deep.

The question, like a whisper in her ear: Are you still good enough?

After all, the Orphan Program liked its products pristine. Candy had been perfect before. Now she had an incontrovertible flaw. Which made her human.