Whether he wanted to or not.

* * *

TIME unraveled in Haverty’s lab.

Eli thought he knew pain, but pain for him had become a bright and fleeting thing, an instant’s discomfort. In the doctor’s hands, it became a solid state.

“Your regeneration truly is remarkable,” said the doctor, retrieving the scalpel with bloodstained gloves. “Shall we find its limit?”

You’re not blessed, Victor had said. You’re a science experiment.

Those words came back to Eli now.

And so did Victor.

Eli saw him in the lab, watched him circle the table at Haverty’s back, slip in and out of Eli’s line of sight as he studied the doctor’s incisions.

“Maybe you’re in Hell.”

You don’t believe in Hell, thought Eli.

The corner of Victor’s mouth twitched. “But you do.”

Every night, Eli would collapse onto his cot, shivering and sick from the hours pinned to the steel table.

And every morning, it would start again.

Eli’s power had a single flaw—and ten years after Victor first

discovered it, so did Haverty. Eli’s body, for all its regeneration, couldn’t reject foreign objects; if they were small enough, he healed around them. If they were large enough—a knife, a saw, a clamp, his body wouldn’t heal at all.

The first time Dr. Haverty cut out Eli’s heart, he thought he might finally die. The doctor held it up for him to see before cutting it free, and for a fraction of a second Eli’s pulse faltered, failed, the equipment screamed. But by the time Haverty set the heart in its sterile tray, there was a new one already beating in Eli’s open chest.

The doctor breathed a single word.

“Extraordinary.”

* * *

THE worst part, thought Eli, was that Dr. Haverty liked to talk.

He kept up a casual stream of conversation as he sawed and sliced, drilled and broke. In particular, he was fascinated by Eli’s scars, the brutal crosshatching on Eli’s back. The only marks that would never fade.

“Tell me about them,” he’d say, plunging a needle into Eli’s spine.

“There are thirty-two,” he’d say, drilling into Eli’s bones.

“I counted,” he’d say, cracking open Eli’s chest.

“You can talk to me, Eli. I’m happy to listen.”

But Eli couldn’t talk, even if he wanted to.

It took all his effort not to scream.

X

TWENTY-FIVE YEARS AGO

XI

THE FIRST HOME

ONCE upon a time, when the marks on his back were still fresh, Eli told himself that he was growing wings.