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wanted.
    Very soon now I’d join the ranks of the powerful, the blacksuits.
    My brothers.

    He hadn’t been lying: it did hurt like hell.
    I must have blacked out with the first incision, the sensation like somebody holding a blowtorch to my skin. But even under a shield of sleep I could feel them working on me, as though the nectar wanted me to sense the pain in my muscles, in my bones, to feel the transformation taking place.
    The agony filled my head with images that must have been memories, but which I couldn’t place. Ipictured a boy being beaten to a pulp in an old gymnasium, other kids with skulls on their bandanas letting loose with kicks and punches. I saw the same boy caught in the jaws of a foaming river, only luck keeping him from being torn to pieces on the knuckled walls. I saw him falling into the flames of an incinerator, pulled from the fire before it could take hold.
    And that same boy – whose face I knew so well yet at the same time didn’t – followed me into my dreams, where he pleaded with me to remember who I was. But even as the guards carried him off into the black recesses of my nightmare the kid couldn’t tell me what my name was.
    He too had forgotten it.

    The pain was so intense that it consumed every other emotion. Except for the anger. I lay on the table, alone in the small room, while the fury inside me grew. It was as if the searing heat in my legs was a fire, one that literally made my blood boil.
    I didn’t know what fuelled the hatred inside me. It wasn’t directed at the wheezers, or the warden. Certainly not the blacksuits. It was everything else. All the pathetic people of the world who led their lives as meekly and quietly as possible, who had no idea of the forces at work beneath their feet. All those who relied on others to fight for them, who didn’t have the strength to survive by themselves. The thought of them, the idea that I used to be one of them, made me sick with revulsion.
    I shifted my body as best I could beneath the leather straps, the movement causing a fresh explosion of pain in my legs. I couldn’t lift my head high enough to see what the surgeons had done to them but I knew anyway. They would resemble immense slabs of muscle, barely contained by the skin stitched around them. As soon as they healed I’d be able to outrun anyone, catch any prey. And I would show no mercy to those who could not defend themselves.
    I wanted to see past the anger, to remember how I’d got here. Surely I hadn’t always been like this, so full of rage. But there was nothing in my head other than Furnace. I must have been born here, in this place. Yes, this was my home, and the warden my father.
    And yet still something tugged at the back of my mind, a nagging thought that came and went too fast to make any sense of, like a bluebottle smashing its haphazard path from window to window. There was something else, something I had forgotten, something important.
    How important could it be? I had the nectar swimming in my veins, giving me strength I never knew I could possess. And I would soon have the body to match my mind, one that would never know what it was to be weak.
    Again the thought fluttered and I saw the boy from my dreams, his whine like the furious beat of the bluebottle’s wings. I pictured myself reaching into my head and snatching the image, crushing it beneath my heel until nothing remained but a gritty smear. There wasno other world, only this one, only my one. And here I would be king.
    I laughed, but the sounds were pistol shots fired out from the anger in my gut. I squirmed against my restraints, desperate to be free so that I could unleash the fury I felt on the first thing I saw. Opening my mouth, I shouted for the wheezers to finish what they had started, but all that came out was the deep, throbbing growl of an injured lion. It didn’t matter. I had no use for words, only violence. What good was speech when you were getting pounded by broken knuckles?