He found himself in the dark. Pressed against a smooth, cold floor and a smooth, cold wall, stuffed into the corner like an old, forgotten coat.

He couldn’t see.

He couldn’t remember how to see. He couldn’t remember how to move, or where he was, or who — what — he was.

There was a sound — muffled, and far away, or so it seemed — and then he was pulled away from the wall and the floor. He was floating. Being carried, by his arms and legs.

He had arms and legs, he remembered. He found them, feeling them out. Elbows and knees, wrists and ankles.

Then he dropped back to the floor, and he lost them again.

Things were fuzzy, and trying to hold onto them was like trying to hold onto sand, or smoke. Memories and thoughts swam through him like schools of terrified fish, dispersing and darting away as he approached, taunting him with flashes of bright, silver scales as they fled.

He gave up, settling back into a comfortable non-existence.

There was another noise, and a fish carrying the memory of ears swam up to him. He had ears, and his ears took in sounds and turned them into ideas.

“Is it even alive?” someone was saying. He didn’t know what that meant, but the noises seemed frustrated.

“Pretty sure figuring that out is your job,” the noises continued, and these rumbled through him in a way the first noises didn’t.

It was exhausting, remembering his ears. He let them go, and the noises muffled and faded away.

He tried remembering his limbs, again. His shape solidified, and he found all four of them sprawled over a bed. He explored their joints, trailing along them until he found their ends — the hands and fingers, the feet and toes. This shape was comfortable. It felt correct, and holding onto it was almost second nature.

He came back the other way, finding the points where the limbs joined the rest of him. There was a torso in the middle, and in the middle of that were his organs, and in the middle of all of that was an empty space.

He touched it, and as he reached inside, he found that it wasn’t empty. There was something in there, but he had as much success grabbing it as he did holding onto anything else. He would let it be, he decided.

This was too much to deal with at once. He pulled back, forgetting the empty space, forgetting the organs, forgetting the torso, and forgetting the limbs. He floated, fading once more into nothing.

Rested, he found his limbs, again. It was easy, now, and his shape was becoming familiar.

He would try moving. He felt the bed under him: the scratchy sheet, the wrinkles and the folds, the firm mattress. He spread his fingers over the fabric, then flexed them, gathering the sheet up in his fist. But then, when he tried the same with his other hand, he realised he had forgotten it — lost it, again. He searched for it, found it, and subsequently lost the first hand.

This would take some concentration.

He let go of everything but his hands, his arms falling away into nothing. He tried moving them simultaneously — this was easier, it gave them less of a chance to slip away, unnoticed. He clutched at the sheets with both hands, twisting them. Then, when he was comfortable with that, he let go of them slowly, raising one finger at a time.

He managed to get eight fingers in before he lost track and his hands fell away.

He let them go.

He started resting inside of himself, instead of letting himself float away into the aether. He sunk into his body, and it soaked him up like newsprint. He started thinking of himself as solid, as a thing with a definite shape. As something that exists.

He explored his torso, again, and found his neck, and then his head. A fish came by with a word.

Séb … Zebra.

This seemed wrong. He didn’t think zebras had fingers. He couldn’t remember the word, but they didn’t have hands, didn’t have arms like he did. Like he thought he did.

Another fish came by with cat, which was just as wrong, and then another with dog, and bird, and lizard, and then hundreds of fish were swarming him with memories and thoughts and he had to escape, he had to forget everything again.

His body was gone, and it didn’t matter whether he had hands or not, anymore.

He was jerked back into his body, falling out of nothing and crashing into his chest. Into one of the organs there. He tried to back away, to get some perspective, but there was a jolt of pain — blunt and explosive — and he was forced back down.

He tried to forget it, but another jolt reminded him that it was there. It twitched, in his chest, calling his attention to it again and again. He couldn’t remember anything else.

Another jolt, and another, and his heart started beating, thudding irregularly and sending blood into his body, spreading his attention too thin.

He was aware of everything, of every vein and every artery, of every organ and every square inch of skin. His heart would beat, jerking him back to it, and then he would spread out, and jerk back, and spread out. It was too much, but he couldn’t do anything about it — he couldn’t forget, and he couldn’t float away. He was stuck.

“So, you are alive,” someone said, and the noises passed over and away from him.

His heart faltered and everything started fading, until another jolt brought it back. He knew, then, that his chest had been ripped open, that someone was jabbing something into his heart and shocking it every time it threatened to go still.

He grabbed onto his heart, held onto it and anchored himself against the ebb and flow of his blood. He thought about it — remembered it, not just as it was now, but as it was supposed to be, and its beats fell into a predictable rhythm.

There was more noise, more speech, but he couldn’t spare any attention to his ears for fear that his heart would jutter to a stop and he’d be shocked again. He focused on keeping it going, keeping it steady, until a series of small, sharp pains ran down his chest. An ache followed, and he turned his attention from his heart — which faded immediately — to his chest to feel out what was going on.

His chest was pulling closed, being sewn up. They were done. Whatever they wanted from his heart, they were done with it.

He could ignore that. Compared to the shocks, that was such a little pain. He put it out of mind and let himself float away.

He wasn’t alone. Of course, he already knew that, but it hadn’t occurred to him that it would be a problem until now. Until they cut him open and poked his insides.

He touched his heart. It twitched away from him, sore and exhausted.

Sore, a fish said, and he shooed it away.

He couldn’t stay like this, he decided. Passive and dumb. He would need to learn how to inhabit himself. He would need to find the rest of his missing pieces. Sort out those fish, those memories.

He remembered his ears. Finding them was easy, but using them was difficult. It required concentration in too many places — he not only had to let the sounds in, but he also had to remember them and translate them into something he could understand. He had to find context for them.

He listened, and after a while was able to recognise the noise around him as a fan. As several fans — as a ventilation system.

Another noise.

Footsteps. Cheap shoes on tile, growing closer and then farther away, closer, and farther away. Pacing, or patrolling, or multiple people passing each other somewhere out of his range.

He listened for some time, until he was able to do it while letting his focus wander. The sounds seeped into him, and found their way into understanding without his guidance. It helped that the sounds were simple and repetitive.

He let his ears go and readied himself for something harder. He remembered his eyes.

His eyelids were closed, and he let them stay that way at first. His eyes moved behind them with little twitches that were barely under his control, that shouldn’t have been under his control at all.

The world was a wash of cool grey light, warming occasionally to something more orange. He held onto that, keeping it in mind while he shifted his focus back to his ears.

He listened and watched at the same time. It was easy, and simple. Processing white noise and grey fog took almost no effort at all. It was almost like a person should be able to do that without a thought, without having to remind themselves that their sensory organs exist.

He opened his eyes and lost everything in shock.

It was too much. He expected that. But, now he had a glimpse of what was coming, and he could better ready himself for it.

He tried again, only remembering one eye, this time.

The world was colours, and shapes, and light, all coming together in harsh and unexpected ways to create a picture he couldn’t yet comprehend. It was all blurry, and he tried to focus but found that his eye knew better what to do than he did. He backed away from it a step and it did its job, and everything came into focus, and the light became tolerable.

He was on a bed, either again or still. The sheets were a faded yellow, and rumpled but still tucked in. He was laid on his side, in a way that gave him full view of the room. It was sparsely decorated, and he was grateful for that. He was also grateful for the dimmed lights, though he would have appreciated them more if they flickered less.

The room was small. There was a plastic curtain in one corner, reaching from the ceiling to the tiled floor, and his bed, of course, and other than that the room appeared empty.

The wall across from him was glass.

Something moved on the other side of it, and he had trouble processing that, had trouble following it. His instinct was to grab tighter onto his eye, to force it to work with him, but he let it go, staying connected to it with only a light touch.

The something was a person — a woman. Walking into his room, carrying something, a bag, and looking at her watch. She looked up at him as the door swung closed behind her and stopped, her eyes wide and her mouth open like she was about to say something.

Maybe she was about to say something. He reached for an ear.

“Oh!” she said. That wasn’t a word, and he found himself annoyed that she was wasting his time and effort like this, but then she did say words: “You’re — are you awake?”

He could kind of understand that. He lost the eye for a moment while he thought about it, and when he found it again the woman was much closer.

She thumbed his eyelid up and shone a penlight into his eye, which he didn’t appreciate, and then she did the same thing to the eye he wasn’t using. Her mouth moved, again, and noises came out, but he’d let go of his ears by then. She probably wanted him to say something.

Being a person was going to be exhausting.

He scrambled for his throat and tried to work it, but produced only faint clicking sounds that the woman didn’t seem to notice. He went further down, to his lungs, and pushed air out into a groan.

She dropped her penlight.

More noises. More words. But he couldn’t reach his ears again, he was struggling to even keep his attention on his eye. Everything was too much effort, and it faded away as he faded away.

He was still tired when he came back, but he was recouped enough to give sight another go. He wanted to try both eyes, again.

He opened them, and it was easier to process visuals with them working together, it took less time for him to work out what he was looking at. What he was looking at was another person outside his room.

They were sitting down, and were staring at something they had propped in their lap. But when they looked up at him and saw that his eyes were open, they tilted their head and stood.

He got ready to grab his ears.

They walked into the room — a woman, with black hair and pale skin, wearing a thin, white coat. She was watching him with interest, her head still tilted.

She touched his arm, and for a second he lost his vision as his arm came into existence. She wasn’t saying anything, which he found odd but something of a relief.

She touched his neck, next, and this time he was able to prepare himself for the contact and didn’t lose anything. She held her fingers against his throat and stared at a point somewhere behind him. When she pulled her fingers away, again, she was frowning.

He felt like he should do something, but his options were limited. She still wasn’t looking at him, had turned away from him, in fact, touching her index finger to her lips as she thought.

He grabbed his lungs and squeezed, groaning again. That got her attention — she turned back to him with narrowed eyes and one raised eyebrow.

She opened her mouth, and he switched to his ears just in time for her to speak.

“You don’t have a pulse,” she said.

He didn’t know how to respond to that, but apparently that didn’t matter because she continued without him.

“You’ve barely responded to any stimuli since you got here, I had to tear you open myself to even prove you were real and not some trick.”

So it was her who had done that.

“Can you even hear me?” she asked. “Are you conscious in there?”

He tried to groan, but his lungs were running out of air and what came out was a rattling hiss. He would need to remember to inhale before he tried again.

“Inconclusive,” she said, and she sounded much closer than she had a moment ago. She sounded like she was inches away from him. “But promising.”

She touched him, again, prying his jaw open with her thumb. His tongue came unglued from the roof of his mouth and flopped, dead, between his lips.

Then her hand was gone, and she wasn’t saying anything. He found his eyes and watched her as she left.

She watched him, sitting outside the glass for hours at a time. He watched her, too, as he got used to keeping his eyes open, got used to using them. She never looked happy — mostly, she looked suspicious, but sometimes she would look angry. Or, rarely, worried.

Sometimes she would disappear, and he spent those hours practising other things. Moving, mostly, although sometimes he would lay in bed and just breathe. It was an odd feeling, the air passing into and out of him, his chest expanding and collapsing, rising and falling. There was an energy to it, and that was a foreign, strange feeling to him.

But despite his audience, he was left alone, for the most part. Except that one day, the woman came back into his cell.

She had been gone longer than was usual, and when she finally arrived, she did so with company — a slender man in some kind of uniform, the same uniform he had seen patrolling the hall outside his room. The man reached for him, managed to get hands around his arms, and then lifted him over a shoulder. The tactile sensations did not quite drive his other senses away, and he felt a little proud of himself.

He was carried out of the room and down a hall. It was brighter out there, and he let his eyes go, letting his world narrow down to the sounds of footsteps and the pressure against his still-healing chest.

“Y’right?” someone said, and the man holding him responded: “A’right.” It was nonsense, even with all of his concentration working at understanding it.

Something beeped, beeped again. A door opened, and the footsteps resumed.

“You’ve got 2-E,” the man said.

He could feel the sounds in his chest, echoing through the hollow space there.

“E again,” the woman said. “I guess we’ll make do.”

“Don’t know what you plan on doing, anyway. I can barely hold it.”

“Mm. Well, wouldn’t it be nice if your enemies could barely hold you.”

“Dunno, I’d like to be able to hit ‘em.”

“We’ll manage something.”

Another beep, another door. The man dropped him and he disappeared, briefly.

There were sounds, but they could wait. He wanted to see where he was, first, so he remembered his eyes and opened them.

It was bright, and there was a lamp shining directly into his face. He was on a table, some kind of metal table, and surrounded by white walls and white cabinets, confronted by that white light and the white, tiled ceiling behind it.

Everything felt familiar, somehow, and the feeling of déjà vu doubled when he started listening, too.

“—BT-IN-2265-A,” the woman was saying. She was behind him, somewhere, out of his field of view. “At eleven-thirty-six. Specimen again lost solid form when contact ceased.”

Mercy, a fish gave him.

The woman came around to his side, pulling blue nitrile gloves over her hands. She had a surgical mask covering the lower half of her face, but her eyes were serious, analytical, emotionless. She reached out to him and waved vaguely where his arm should be, and eventually she managed to grab it.

“Contact, when attempted before the specimen becomes solid, is achieved roughly sixty-percent of the time,” she continued. “Contact seems to force the body-part involved to become solid and tangible. I’m going to touch your chest.”

It took him a moment to realise that she was talking to him, with that last statement, but anticipation of her touch made him remember his chest, and she did not struggle to find it. She pressed her hand against his stitches, and it stung.

“Announcing intent of contact increases odds of success,” she said. “Though specimen’s existence seems incomplete — its chest is here, but it is not breathing and has no pulse. Hypothetically, it presently has no heart or lungs.”

She pulled back, and his chest fell away.

“Specimen’s body in its default state is nebulous and gaseous in appearance. There is no tactile sensation to passing through the specimen’s non-body, and it is easy to lose track of it visually in inadequate lighting. If BT-IN-2265-A’s abilities can be harnessed, this specimen will be invaluable to field agents, especially in regards to reconnaissance.”

He was getting tired. So much of what she was saying was difficult or impossible to follow, and the light was so taxing. He let his eyes close, slip away, and he tried to fade.

“I am touching your chest,” the woman said. He remembered it, but something was wrong. Cold, in the center of his ribcage, and then pain — sharp, searing pain through the bones. His chest spasmed, twitched, tried to wrench away from the cold and the pain, but it followed him, stuck inside of him.

Mercy. The fish, again.

“As hypothesised, specimen’s chest is empty.”

He opened his eyes, desperate to see what was happening to him, and the woman’s wrist was embedded in his chest. His ribs were distorted, warped around her hand. He was bleeding — only a little, and slowly, but bleeding.

“Your heart,” the woman said. There was something in her voice, an excitement that hadn’t been there before. Her eyes, too, sparked with a new giddiness.

He tried to forget his chest, but the pain — and now his heart, he remembered his heart and it tried to beat but she was holding it still, her fingers wrapped around it.

Mercy.

“Lungs.”

Breath, ragged, gasping — the pain — forced his lungs empty and he struggled to refill them. He was dying, she was killing him.

She squeezed his heart and it crunched, and he felt all at once cold and nauseated. A chill ran through him and for a moment he remembered everything.

Mercy!

He caught a breath, gasping, filling his lungs — and managed to force it back out into speech. “Mercy,” he croaked.

The woman attempted to jerk back, though was stuck fast in his chest. She did let go of his heart, and it beat — tentative, and weak, but it beat.

She leaned in close, staring into his eyes with a combination of anger and confusion that was not reassuring.

“Where do you think you are?” she whispered to him.

She straightened, and took up a metal contraption that she then wedged into his ribcage, next to her hand. She fumbled with it, struggling to use it one-handed, but she did succeed and it spread his ribs.

His stitches ripped and tore, his rips popped and floated free in his flesh, and another shuddering chill worked its way through him as she pulled her hand out. Everything hurt.

“Specimen is capable of speech,” the woman said, and walked away, leaving the metal thing inside of him. “And feels pain. It may have demonstrated average-level consciousness and cognition, having made a request of the presiding scientist, Dr. Jones. Yours truly. Could be coincidence, will follow-up with further experiments.”

He started fading away, leaving the pain behind. The metal thing clanked against the table as he went.

It was unacceptable. He would not be manipulated like this.

His heart lurched every time he went near his chest, and brought with it that same cold, sick feeling.

He would have to safeguard against it, somehow. He refused to exist, except on his own terms. Not at the command of some bloodthirsty sadist.

A fish swam up to him with a word and he tossed it aside without looking at it.

No, he thought, holding the fish by its tail before it could swim away. It flashed silver, shining other words at him that he ignored. You have some explaining to do. What is the meaning of any of this? Why do you bring me these words? These memories? Why these memories and not others? Why “lizard” and not who I am? Why “mercy” and not my name?

Sébra, the fish said.

Sébra. There was something to that, something familiar about its edges. It felt rough, and dusty, and old, but it fit well enough. He could get used to it.

Sébra let the fish go. It darted away, joining up with a school of fish that flashed words and ideas at him before swimming out of his consciousness.

Cellar. Knife. Cat. Razor. Patron. Cut. Meat. Play. Blood. Game. Prize. Burn. Mercy. Loss. Loss.

He would tease meaning out of them, eventually. He had more important things to worry about in the immediate future, like perfecting his coordination, and learning how to think about pieces of himself without summoning them into existence. Thinking about pink elephants without thinking of pink elephants.

He was interrupted before he could get started, the door to his cell opening. He opened his eyes.

The woman — Jones? Dr. Jones, he thought she’d called herself — walked in. She stopped in the middle of the room, standing in a way that implied she had better things she could be doing, that she had important things on her mind.

Maybe if he forgot about her, he could make her disappear. He’d have liked that.

She looked at him, finally, and smirked. “How’s your heart?”

Don’t — but his heart juddered and he curled around it, shaking.

“Did some real damage to it, I guess,” Jones said. She squatted next to his bed, cocking her head and grinning at him. “Might have to cut you open again and fix it.”

He pushed the heart away and took a breath to steady himself.

“Say something. If you can hear me, say something.”

He shook his head, too tired, too focused on breathing to manage the fine manipulations required for speech. Something else he needed to practice.

Jones’ grin warped, turning down at the corners into a snarl. “But you do hear me,” she said. “You understand.”

It wasn’t a question, so Sébra didn’t answer.

She closed her mouth, her lips pressing into a thin, thoughtful line. “You’re very interesting,” she said, standing and turning to the door. “I must say you have caught my attention.”

She didn’t make it sound like a good thing.

“I think we’re going to have fun together,” she added as she left. “You, me, and your heart.”

He shuddered, him and his heart.

The doctor was right, though. His heart was badly damaged, and he didn’t know if it would get better while it didn’t exist. He didn’t know if it would get better at all — this sort of injury was usually fatal, as far as Sébra knew.

His chest, too, was damaged, but in a less fatal way. Touching his chest didn’t bring him to death’s door, with chills and nausea. It hurt — a lot — but it was familiar, ordinary pain. He held onto it, onto the stitches, and the holes, and the dislocated ribs.

He wondered why he knew this pain so well, but for once, no fish came by with opaque answers. They were driven away by it, just like the rest of him. He did find his hands, and he brought them to his chest, touching his wounds in a more literal, physical way.

The ruined stitching was over his breastbone, and he could feel it, pressing his fingertips into the bumps and ridges through the incision there, the healing one that had torn back open. There were a pair of grooves on the side that almost sucked his fingers in, gripping them with a spongy vacuum seal.

The more recent wound was just to the left of it — a predictably fist-sized hole, straight down past his ribs to where his heart normally was. It flickered into existence, but he stamped it out before the pain could hit. He was dealing with enough of that, at the moment.

He probed two fingers into the hole, felt his ribs where they shouldn’t be. They moved at his touch, sinking deeper into his chest.

They weren’t broken. At least they weren’t broken. If he could relocate them, that would be half of his problem solved. Then he would just have to deal with a couple of open wounds and four crushed ventricles. That wasn’t so bad. He’s had worse, probably.

He was going to kill the doctor. As soon as he could walk and hold a knife at the same time, she was dead.

He fished around in his chest for one of the ribs and got his fingers around it. He pulled it up, and it popped into place with a sharp pain that made him lose himself. But when he came back, the pain was fading. Not entirely, but there was less of it. He took his hand again and searched for the other rib.

It didn’t want to move, at first. It seemed stuck, somehow, jammed under the others. But it did give with enough force, and it, too, popped back into its socket with a crunch and a jolt of pain.

And then he felt better. Relief flooded him, and he took an experimental breath. The holes in his chest protested, sending ragged signals back to him, but it didn’t seem so bad. He could handle this. He could deal with it until the wounds healed.

He opened his eyes, and caught the doctor watching him on the other side of his door. She winked and pointed a finger gun at him, her face splitting into a large, toothy grin.

Sébra forgot his chest, hiding it, feeling suddenly naked with an audience.

The doctor laughed, though he couldn’t hear her through the glass.

She didn’t come back. Hours passed, and more hours, and though Sébra watched the glass for her, she didn’t reappear.

He would take the opportunity of her absence to practice existing. It was getting easier. Holding onto himself didn’t require active concentration anymore, and holding onto more than one thought at once was no longer a monumental task. Moving was still a problem, but it was coming to him. He would get there.

He rolled onto his back, then sat up. He didn’t know how long it would be before someone came to check on him, or Jones returned, and he didn’t want anyone watching his attempts. Not only were they likely to result in embarrassing failure at this stage, but keeping his captors in the dark seemed valuable, strategically. He would have to hurry.

He kept his chest in mind as he worked, hopeful that letting the wounds breathe, as it were, would enable a speedy recovery. The pain in them had already dulled, and only spiked when his chest was pulled into an odd angle. Not having to breathe, he suspected, was a great help.

He twisted, moving to the edge of the bed. He thought about his legs, and the rough sheet below them. About the give of the bed beneath his weight. About the cool floor under his feet.

How long had it been since he last stood? Had he ever? Had he existed at all before he appeared in this cell? His legs looked too thin, now that they were real. There was a laxness to his pale skin, a sickly impression to the way it fell over his flesh, to the way his bones seemed too long, too prominent.

He looked weak. He was weak. What was it he had said, he wouldn’t allow himself to stay passive and dumb? That had gone well, clearly — he certainly hadn’t allowed himself to become comfortable in doing and being nothing.

He should never have let it get this far. He shouldn’t have let any of this happen. He shouldn’t have —

Cat.

Sébra bristled at the fish, chased it and all of its friends away with clumsy, vicious attempts to grab them. He wanted to hurt them, to take them up and tear them into sparkling pieces.

He thought about his hands, thought about them as fists and thought about them swinging up and down against his useless legs. But that was nothing, he was too weak to hurt even himself. Even the attempt was exhausting, and his hands and arms fell away.

He thought about his heart.

It tried to beat, twitching in his chest, weak and erratic. The nausea hit him and he pitched forward, gagging. He fell off the bed and onto the floor, the impact jolting his chest and making everything that much worse. He held onto the heart and let the pain consume him, let the cold wash over him in chills. Let everything else disappear until there was nothing but his struggling heart and the cold tile.

When he came back, he was still alone. How long had it been, he wondered. He had no way of knowing — he could have been gone for minutes, or hours, or days. It all felt the same to him.

He let himself lay on the floor and breathe, for a while. There was something soothing about breathing. It was monotonous and repetitive, but it was … it felt natural. Very little felt natural, these days.

He would have to get back on the bed, somehow. His limbs, when he remembered them, were shaking. He’d really overdone it. He’d have to be more careful of his temper in the future.

He rolled onto his stomach and got his arms under himself. Luckily, he didn’t seem to weigh much, so supporting it was less of a problem than it should have been. He managed to get his legs under him, next, and propped himself up on all fours.

His elbows gave out and he slipped, falling back down onto his face and shoulders.

A minor set-back. He tried again.

Deep breath. Arms straight. Steady. Steady — no. He fell, again, and this time he let himself stay down.

The bed wasn’t that great, anyway. What did he gain by hauling himself back up to it? The floor was perfectly comfortable, and didn’t scratch and itch against his back like the sheet did.

Another breath. Instead of propping himself up on all fours, he pushed himself up into a seated position. At least now he was vertical, mostly. Halfway there.

He hooked his elbows over the edge of the bed, got his feet under himself, and with one burst of effort, leveraged himself onto the mattress.

He collapsed.

The bed was nice.

Screw the floor.

Standing was out of the question. To say nothing of walking — he may as well try to fly while he was at it.

Sébra wasn’t going anywhere unless someone else was carrying him. And while there was some appeal to that, he would have preferred having some say in where he went and when he went there. Fixing this would take a while — it would take a very long while — but there was something else he could work on in the meantime. No one could take him anywhere if they weren’t able to grab him.