The town was abandoned, erased from the maps. They tore the tower down and hushed and hid the records. Only twelve people had survived the experiment when the great bell rang out. They hushed and hid them too.—1911
—from the journal of L.U.C.
Itook the corner along the fence. Lizard would be quickest to check on since we’d just fed it this morning. Then we’d go to Pony, the leapers, then the chickens by the barn.
“How do you walk around if you can’t feel?” I killed the engine and hopped out into the grass. Yes, I should be asking him a dozen more important things, but I just couldn’t seem to let this go.
“A man can get used to all manners of things given enough time.” He got out of the truck, shut the door, and walked around. “I have an awareness of my body. Distant, muffled. In extreme circumstances I can feel pain.”
“Getting your guts cut open isn’t extreme enough for you?”
“No. Is that mountain breathing?”
Lizard was napping in the middle of the field, its belly swollen with crocboar.
“Sleeping. I understand that galvanized are a collection of folk who went comatose and survived some kind of disaster a while ago.”
“Nineteen ten.”
“All right, a long while ago.” I opened the box where the fence controller was housed. “What I don’t understand is how that made you immortal.”
“No one understands it. It can’t be duplicated, and the records of the disaster are sketchy at best. There was an experiment, the Wings of Mercury, that seems to be the crux of the event.”
“Never heard of it,” I said.
“The name of the project is all that survived. Well, and us.”
“So, you’re saying if you had a heart attack, or if someone cut off your head . . .”
“My awareness, my memories, remain trapped in my brain.”
“And if someone shot you in the brain? Blew all your gray matter to bits?”
“Sufficiently damaged, my brain would fail. If my body survived, a new brain could be transplanted into my body, though there are complications with galvanized metabolism that would burn out a nongalvanized brain within a few years. It isn’t theory. They have been . . . thorough in their tests over the years.”
“Who?”
“Scientists, doctors, torturers.” He shrugged.
“Torturers?”
“It’s been a long life, Ms. Case.”
“Matilda,” I corrected.
He smiled.
Dammit. He’d done that on purpose.
I checked the wires, battery, and ground to the fence. All gold.
“What does it eat?” he asked.
He was staring off at Lizard, his right arm snug against his gut, even though I supposed he couldn’t feel the pain from that wound. Must have been habit and instinct to keep pressure on it.
“Feral critters. We get mutant beasts out here. Something in the soil, I think.”
“Ever had that tested?”
