I'm dreaming of nothing when their hands find me. A firm pressure on each bicep, lifting me from the cot as if I were a piece of equipment. Their silence is the most unnerving part. The silence of beings that see no point in words.

  They walk me out into the grey dawn. At the foot of a warped metal tower, one of them presses a boot against the ground. The trapdoor has been there all along, indistinguishable from the grime around it until it moves.

  It groans open, and the smell that rises from the darkness is a physical assault. It is the layered stench of a slaughterhouse built on top of an apothecary. Old blood, sharp chemicals, and rot so old it has turned sweet.

  The staircase spirals down, and with each step, the air grows thicker, coating my tongue. Down here, the walls are slick with a dampness that isn't water.

  We pass rooms. Through a slit in a heavy iron door, I see what might be a person strapped to a metal slab, their body is a ruin of weeping sores and pulsating lumps. From the room comes a low, wet, steady sound, like a heart beating in mud.

  Something strange seeps from the next room, the opposite of the revulsion I felt moments before. Inside, under a harsh, clinical light, are vats of liquid midnight. I feel a strange pull toward it, as if I am staring into an abyss that is staring back. This, I know with a certainty that settles in my bones, is the colour of a forgotten memory.

  The catalyst. The end of the cycle.

  I peer through a grimy viewing window into the next room. Grey shapes drift in tall tanks. One turns in the thick liquid, hair fanning out like a dark halo. For a second, there is something in the line of her jaw that reminds me of Grace from the tavern, but it is dissolving like sugar in water, the features blurring into nothing.

  I must have made a sound, because the Collector on my left pauses. It watches me for a long moment, letting the wet sound from the room behind us pulse in the claustrophobic space.

  We reach a final, heavy door of iron. The chamber might have been a laboratory once. White tiles still gleam under the grime. But the grout between them is stained a deep, rust-red, and the air smells of bleach and burnt meat. A dark handprint smears the wall above a drain. A single leather strap, gnawed through, lies on the floor.

  They guide me to the table in the centre of the room. It is a slab of hard, unforgiving metal. They lay me down. Their movements are devoid of malice or care. I am simply a task to be completed.

  Straps are pulled tight over my chest and limbs. The heavy door groans shut.

  A dead, heavy quiet presses in. Every small sound is a puncture. The creak of the table beneath me. The whistle of air through my nose. The dry click of a single gear turning in the corner. And loudest of all, my heart.

  My eyes drift to a small tray beside the table. On it, two objects. The first is an iron bar with a vertical line forged into its tip. The brand. A crude, ugly thing. Beside it rests a glass tube, labelled with a horizontal line. The liquid inside does not move. It is a solid, perfect black. It eats the light.

  A scuff of boots against tile breaks the silence. From a shadowed alcove, two figures emerge.

  Not Collectors. Just men.

  They wear heavy leather aprons over simple clothes. Their faces are bare, the skin around their eyes slack and bruised.

  The larger of the two, a man built like a brick outhouse, approaches the table. His eyes, small and buried in a fleshy face, assess my body with the quick, cold examination of a butcher. They stop on my side.

  He leans in, a low whistle escaping his lips. "Hey, Stitch. Get a load of this. We got ourselves a pre-marked one."

  A thinner, twitchy man, who had been cleaning a set of long needles, ambles over. He doesn't look at me, but at the brand. "Oh, thank the gods," he sighs. "I'm still not done cleaning up from the last screamer."

  He wipes a smear of black, oily fluid from his fingers onto his already filthy apron. "It's the noise they make when their flesh starts to slip, you know? While they're still babbling about their kids. It just gets everywhere. That's why I always mark 'em first now."

  The big man points a thick, gloved finger at Stitch. "Be careful with that juice. That stuff's a reactive agent."

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  Stitch gives a thin, humourless smile. "Relax, Grimm. Takes more than a little splash to start the transformation. The body's gotta be full of the stuff for it to take hold."

  He gives his stomach a soft pat. "Besides, after ten years of breathing this stuff in, I reckon I'm more poison than man anyway. A splash of that stuff would probably just sober me up."

  Grimm just shakes his head. "Don't come crying to me when your fingers melt off."

  "Yeah, yeah." Stitch flicks a hand. He looks me over once more, a butcher sizing up a cut of meat. "This one won't be a problem." He gives a brief nod to Grimm. "Give him the juice."

  I lie on the table and listen to them talk. A memory surfaces. Nora's book. The drawings of men turning to soup.

  I remember the strange relief I felt seeing those images. It was ugly, it was horrifying, but it was a reflection. That is what I am, I thought. One of them. It was an answer.

  My own transformations are a form of becoming. Controlled. Every seam invisible. The result is a perfect copy. A perfect theft.

  But these men, these jaded scientists, their words don't fit. Their words are the language of destruction. A process that creates only the hollowed, shuffling things I've seen in this yard. There's not a single one like me.

  The reflection fractures into a hundred wrong angles. I am not seeing myself at all. They did not make me. Their crude art is not my art.

  The relief I felt is replaced by a fear that makes my skin feel too tight. A terror that I am something nameless, with no known maker. If I am not their creation, then whose am I? What am I?

  My focus narrows to the needle in Grimm's hand. That black liquid is poison for a man. If their poison is designed to remake a human, what will it do to me?

  Grimm pushes the plunger. The blackness floods my veins.

  I lock my jaw, waiting for the agony, for my flesh to dissolve as Nora's book promised.

  Nothing comes.

  Only a warmth. It starts in my arm, a slow, gentle tide. It moves up my shoulder, across my chest. It is a balm, spreading through my limbs, unknotting every muscle.

  I lie still, my eyes closed, bathed in the strange, soothing heat. I hear the clink of the needle on a metal tray. The scrape of boots as Grimm and Stitch step back from the table.

  The silence that follows is a pause that lasts a lifetime. I can feel their eyes on me, waiting for the screams to start, for the flesh to fail.

  A minute passes.

  Then another.

  I hear Stitch clear his throat. A low, confused grunt from Grimm. The shuffle of their feet is hesitant now. Then, the door thuds shut.

  A moment later, a series of clicks. The restraints fall away from my limbs. I am free.

  I push myself to a sitting position, bracing for the protest of old bones, for the deep ache in a lower back that has hauled a thousand kegs.

  But there is nothing. The movement is fluid, effortless, alien. It is the smooth motion of limbs that have never known a single day of strain.

  I glance down at my hands. They are not Derrick's hands. They are small, elegant, with skin so flawless it looks like polished ivory. It glows faintly, as if a candle is lit just beneath the surface. I make a fist, and the skin pulls tight, unnatural. I press a nail into my palm. It is like pressing a finger against a cold, smooth stone.

  A brittle laugh bursts from my lips. What is this body?

  Trembling, I lift a hand to Derrick's face. I trace his jawline, his cheek. There are no lines or pores. No scars from a life of brawls and toil. No wrinkles from laughter. A perfect, empty canvas.

  I tear at my tunic, looking for the brand on my ribs. It is gone. Erased. In its place is the same impossible, glowing skin.

  I need to see.

  I scramble for a shard of obsidian, my movements frantic, clumsy.

  I raise it. I hold my breath.

  The face that stares back is Derrick's. Or, it was. Thirty years ago. A boy of twenty. It has his eyes, his mouth, his jawline, but there is no history in them. It is Derrick's face, but emptied of every memory, every scar, every laugh line that made it his.

  The glass slips from my numb fingers and shatters. I stare at my hands, trembling.

  The Voice speaks. The familiar pressure in my skull is gone. Instead, the sound comes from the light, a vibration in the air around me.

  The catalyst has scoured you clean. The Vessel is purified.

  The Blight is Dormant, its pulse a soft thrum.

  .

  The Echo of Derrick, now unopposed, ascends to Resonant, its flame a silent, internal star, achieving its final form.

  ?

  There is no Vessel now. There is only Derrick. You are lost in him.

  For the first time, perhaps in my entire existence, there is no conflict within me. There is only euphoric stillness. A terrifying peace.

  The soothing warmth that was once a balm on my skin intensifies, sinking deeper. It leaves my skin and seeps into the muscle, into the bone. It has found my blood.

  The emptying is done. I am a whisper you can no longer hear. Go now, until you are needed ag—

  Then the Voice is gone.

  And the Blight, the frantic and ugly thing inside me, is gone.

  In the vast, silent space it leaves behind, the Echo of Derrick rushes in to fill the void.

  I am Derrick. My name is Derrick. And a pure, all-consuming thought rises in the quiet of my new mind.

  Belladonna. My daughter. I have to keep her safe.

  The love is a clean, hot fire in my chest. I look down at my hands, the hands of a father ready to protect his child. But they are not a father's hands. These are the hands of a boy.

  The groan of the heavy door pulls me from my trance. A new squad of Collectors enters. They have come to drag a broken thing back to its cell.

  They see me. Standing. Whole.

  Their forward momentum halts. The nearest Collector goes rigid, his silver mask unable to conceal the shock in his posture.

  His hand, slow and trembling, rises to his face. His fingers fumble at the clasp. The mask comes away, revealing a face of scars and sunken flesh. He looks at me as a starving man looks at bread.

  He falls to one knee. The sound of his armoured leg hitting the grimy tile is a sharp crack.

  Then the one beside him follows. And the next. One by one, they kneel. They bow their heads.

  I stand among them, and the sight of these broken men kneeling makes my heart ache. I'm no longer their prisoner. I am their god. And I am more trapped than ever before.