One day, Mickey even brings an antique zither for me, with a soundboard of wood instead of plastic. It is the kindest thing he’s ever done. I do not sing, but I play the solemn songs of Lykos. The traditional ones of my clan that no one beyond the mine will ever have heard. He and Evey sit with me sometimes, and though I think Mickey a wretched sort of creature, I feel as though he understands the music. Its beauty. Its importance. And afterward, he says nothing. I like him then, too. At peace.
“Well, you’re a bit sterner than I first measured,” Harmony says to me one morning as I wake.
“Where have you been?” I ask, opening my eyes.
“Finding donors.” She flinches as she sees my irises. “The world does not stop because you are here,” she says. “We had work to do. Mickey says you can walk?”
“I am growing stronger.”
“Not strong enough,” she surmises, looking me over. “You look like a baby giraffe. I’ll fix that.”
Harmony takes me beneath Mickey’s club to a grungy gymnasium lit by sulfurous bulbs. I like the feel of the cold stone on mybare feet. My balance has returned, and it is a good thing, because Harmony does not offer me her arm; instead, she waves to the center of the dark gymnasium.
“We bought these for you,” Harmony says.
She points to two devices in the center of the dark space. The contraptions are silver and remind me of the suits knights wore in past centuries. The armor hangs suspended between two metal wires. “They are concentraction machines.”
I slide my body into the machine. Dry gel hugs my feet, my legs, my torso and arms and neck, till only my head is free. The machine is built to resist my movements, yet it responds even to the tiniest stimuli. The idea of building muscle is to exercise it, which is nothing more than using the muscle intensely enough to create microscopic tears in the tissue fiber. This is the pain one feels in the days after an intense workout—torn tissue—not lactic acid. When the muscle repairs the tears, it builds on itself. This is the process the concentraction machine is built to facilitate. It is the devil’s own invention.
Harmony slides the device’s faceplate over my eyes.
My body is still in the gym, but I see myself moving across the rugged landscape of Mars. I’m running, pumping my legs against the concentraction machine’s resistance, which increases according to Harmony’s mood or the location of the simulation. Sometimes I venture to the jungles of Earth, where I race panthers through the underbrush, or I take to the pocked surface of Luna before it was populated. But always I return home to Mars to run across its red soil and jump over its violent ravines. Harmony sometimes accompanies me in the other machine so I have someone to race.
She pushes me hard, and sometimes I wonder if she’s trying to break me. I don’t let her.
“If you’re not vomiting during a workout, you’re not trying,” she says.
The days are excruciating. My body is a misery of aches from the arches of my feet to the back of my neck. Mickey’s Pinks massage me every day. There is no better pleasure in the world, but three daysafter beginning my training with Harmony, I wake up vomiting in my bed. I shiver and shake and hear cursing.
“There’s a science to this, you wicked little witch,” Mickey is shouting. “He will be a work of art, but not if you pour water on the paint before it’s set. Do not ruin him!”
“He must be perfect,” Harmony says. “Dancer, if he is weak in any way, the other children will butcher him like a freshmade drillBoy.”
“You are butchering him!” Mickey whines. “You are ruining him! His body cannot handle the muscle breakdown.”
“He has not objected to the treatment,” Harmony reminds him.
“Because he does not know hecanobject!” Mickey says. “Dancer, she has no understanding of the biomechanics involved in this. Do not let her ruin my boy.”
“He is notyour boy!” Harmony sneers.
Mickey’s voice becomes softer. “Dancer, Darrow is like a stallion, one of the old stallions of Earth. Beautiful beasts that will run as hard as you push them. They will run. And run. And run. Until they don’t. Until their hearts explode.”
There is silence for a moment, then Dancer’s voice.
“Ares once told me that it is the hottest fire that forms the sternest steel. Keep pushing the boy.”
I resent two of my teachers after overhearing their words: Mickey for thinking me weak; Dancer for thinking me his tool. Only Harmony doesn’t anger me. Her voice, her eyes, seethe with an anger I feel in my own soul. She may have Dancer now, but she lost someone. The unscarred part of her face tells me that. She is no schemer like Dancer or his master, Ares. She is like me—brimming with a rage that makes all else so inconsequential.
That night I cry.
Over the next days, they feed me drugs to expedite the protein synthesis and muscle regeneration. After my muscle tissue has recovered from the initial trauma, they train me harder than before, even Mickey—though his eyes are underlined with dark rings and his thin face is sallow, he does not object. He has grown distantthese last weeks, no longer telling me stories—as though he fears what he has created, now that I’m taking fuller shape.
Harmony and I speak very little to one another, but there is a subtle shift in our relationship, some sort of primal understanding that we are the same sort of creature. But as my body grows stronger, Harmony can no longer keep up even though she is a hardened woman of the mines. That is after only two weeks. The distance between our capabilities continues to grow. After another month, she is like a child to me. Even then I do not plateau.
My body begins to change. I thicken. My muscles become strong and corded in the concentraction machine, which I now supplement with weight workouts in highGrav. Gradually, strength builds. My shoulders grow broader, rounded; I see tendons emerge in my forearms; a tense mass of hard muscles bind my torso, like armor. Even my hands, which were always stronger than the rest of me, grow more powerful in the concentraction machine. With a simple squeeze, I can pulverize rock. Mickey jumped up and down when he saw that. No one shakes my hand any longer.
I sleep in highGrav, so that when I move about on Mars, I feel fast, quick, more agile than ever before. My fasttwitch fibers form. My hands move like lightning, and when they hit the gymnasium’s human-shaped punching bag, it leaps like it’s been struck by a scorcher. I can punch through it now.
