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unfinished painting on the table with its misplaced blotch of yellow, then swung his gaze back to Luka. Before, when Luka had watched him playing football after work, Pero had been twenty or twenty-one, his silky blond hair always breezing in a soft fringe around his sculpted features before the game, then hanging in sweat-darkened strands after. Now it was combed back off his smooth forehead, so sleek it almost looked like it had been molded from plastic. Three years earlier, he'd looked like an American Superhero. Now, in his red Vega uniform, he looked like Rocky's nemesis Ivan Drago, like Protocide, a supersoldier.
    “How long did it take, after I broke your hand, before you could draw again?”
    The doctor had taken the splints off after four weeks, but the stiffness in his joints had lasted months. He'd tried to draw using his left hand, while he waited to heal, but he'd never managed to draw anything he'd been satisfied with. Luka shrugged.
    “Guess you like being a sick pervert more than you like being able to use your hands. This time, I better break them both. And not just the fingers. Fingers heal too easily.”
    As if the pain and terror of Pero snapping his fingers one by one, of the doctor manipulating and bracing them was hitting him again, a sudden surge of nausea erupted from the pit of Luka's gut. “Pero, please. None of my art is like that, anymore.”
    “Like what?”
    “It was a dumb, childish phase.”
    Luka felt the tears blurring his vision spill onto his cheeks. Pero grinned. Then his shoulders shifted, and Pero pointed his AK47 at Luka's face. “Get on your knees.”
    Tears rolling down his cheeks, fighting desperately not to crumple into a fit of sobbing, Luka forced himself to meet Pero's cold stare. “I'm sorry about before. About the picture. It was stupid of me.”
    “Down. On your knees or I'll shoot you right now.”
    Luka dropped to his knees. Searching, desperate, he couldn't see any trace of the hurt or doubt or shame that had clashed with Pero's anger the night he'd inflicted his punishment on Luka behind the pet store. He didn't even see anger. It was like everything was locked away inside a cold, beautiful shell that used to be a boy playing football, hair tugged back by the force of his body slicing through the air as he ran, chest and back bared to the sun, body and soul dynamic and free.
    Maybe Pero would just shoot him, without torturing him first. Was it so terrible to die? Luka tried to soothe himself; maybe the nothingness of death was better than the fear and pain and solitude of life. But he couldn't stop shaking, couldn't stop crying.
    Pero circled the room, his massive bulk making Luka's little nest look like a kid's playhouse. When he came to the three milk crates Luka had stacked and secured together as a makeshift bookcase, he snatched a sketchbook from the top cubby, flipped through it for a second, then plunged his hand back in, extracting the other five sketchbooks in one handful, and tossed the lot onto the floor in front of Luka.
    “You shouldn't keep trash around in the house for so long. Spreads disease.”
    Pero grabbed the folding chair Luka used when he was working or eating, and sat in front of Luka, towering over him. Watching the tears course down Luka's cheeks, Pero fished a pack of Prima cigarettes from the breast pocket of his uniform and lit one, drawing deeply, the cherry flaring and chewing away a quarter of the cigarette in one inhale. When he stood and brought the metal trash can over and set it at his feet as he seated himself again, Luka felt almost grateful to him for being polite enough to flick his ash into the can instead of onto the floor.
    “Hand me that one.” Pero pointed at the pile of sketchbooks scattered at his feet. “The blue one.”
    It took a second for Luka to obey his order, or for his body to obey his own brain. He leaned forward, picked up the book and handed it over. Pero flipped the cover back, and he stared for a few