As it turns out, Scalpel’s concept of “work” is as peculiar as the rest of her.

Her long, pale, fingers—multi-jointed with too many segments—skitter across my left forearm, her sharp nails pricking the skin. Tiny drops of blood well up and drip onto the floor. Numbness spreads from her fingertips. Soon, I can’t sense my arm at all. In that moment of wrongness, she strikes.

A single finger from her other hand touches the arm, parting skin and muscle like water. The twin flaps of my flesh peel back, yet somehow the blood doesn’t gush across the floor, and I don’t feel any pain. She touches the bones of my wrist, tracing an inscription in sun-bright runes of pure mana. When she finishes, she waves her hand back over my left arm, and the sundered flesh knits itself back together, leaving only unblemished skin behind.

“Warded,” she announces with a hint of satisfaction. “Don’t run.”

My feet shuffle along, seemingly of their own accord, as we travel deeper into the manor house. I touch my wrist experimentally, still processing the shocking display of power. Could she regrow my hand? I shiver. I’m too afraid to ask her about that. What if the answer is yes, but she simply declines to help?

Scalpel leads me to a tiled room with metal vents in the walls and drains in the floor for water runoff. The blue tiles glisten under the even illumination of mage lights. The white grout on the wall is pristine, although a dark stain in the center of the floor makes me shiver. Do I want to know what happens in here?

“Strip,” she demands. “We have to disinfect you from the grime of your journey.”

When I balk at disrobing, she huffs a frustrated sigh and stalks out, swapping places with one of the male guards. He stomps into the bathing chamber on his heavy boots, glaring at me as though incensed that I have the audacity to make him actually do something.

“Is Scalpel always this . . . scandalous?” I venture to ask once the metal door clanks shut behind Scalpel. My voice squeaks, and my cheeks are burning with embarrassment.

The spindly guard sneers at me, turning his pockmarked face into a leering mask. “Trust me, she ain’t interested. Not like that.” He glances over at the shut door, apparently afraid she might be listening, and the blood drains from his expression. He swallows hard, suppressing a shudder. “Trust me, you gotta be human first.”

I grimace, but drop the line of question. Wordlessly, I peel off the sweat-soaked, raggedy clothes I’ve lived in for months, tossing them in a pile in the corner. The guard activates a lever, and cold streams of water jet out from the wall to scour my body. A few moments later, the high pressure sprays cleans me, and I rinse off the last few suds from my impromptu bath. Toweling myself dry feels like a luxury after the cramped, smelly traveling on the way into the Capital.

I dutifully shrug on the clothes the guard hands me, relieved to see that they’re at least an upgrade in quality from the filthy rags I’ve been wearing on the road. For the first time in six weeks, I’m starting to feel like myself again.

Perhaps this captivity won't be so bad after all.

Freshly scrubbed and dressed, I rejoin Scalpel in the waiting room outside. She makes no snide remarks at my reticence to clean off, nor offers any annoyed commentary on the delay. She simply takes off, striding briskly in her no nonsense manner toward our final destination. We soon arrive at an expansive workshop with several benches and beds interspersed throughout the room. She takes a seat on a stool behind a massive desk.

I frown. I don’t recognize many of the tools in the room, and the ones that I do look like they belong in a blacksmith forge or a carpenter’s workshop. It’s certainly not a hot shop, I think with a bit of wistful regret. I do miss working with glass.

A thick, leather-bound tome dominates the center of the desk where Scalpel sits. The imposing book feels like it carries more weight or significance than it ought to, likely a result of the heavy concentration of mana pooling around its ink-smudged covers. She snatches up the book and flips through the yellow, dog eared pages until she appears to find what she’s looking for. With a satisfied grunt, she jabs her finger down onto the page twice.

“As suspected. [Greater Heat Manipulation],” she barks out.

My eyebrows crawl up my forehead in surprise. Greater? I don’t think it’s upgraded yet. Then again, I can’t tell since it’s a twisted mess. Maybe I was on the cusp of ranking up, and all my practice on the journey tipped me over the edge.

I lick my suddenly-dry lips while trying to figure out what she saw in the book that gave her such confidence in declaring both the Skill and its rank. Perhaps she has a Skill similar to Casella, who seemed to be able to review my core space. Her Skill must provide her with even greater detail. Yet how she looked at the twisted slag heap that’s left of my [Heat Manipulation] and successfully deciphered which Skill it is—that’s a mystery to me. If I didn’t already know what Skill I have, I don’t think I could identify it anymore. Clearly, she has some keen insight into how Skills work.

Her hand cracks against my cheek a split second later, leaving a stinging imprint. I yelp and flinch away from her. She stands there impassively, staring back at me with her unblinking, lidless black eyes. “Don't make me wait again. Show me your [Greater Heat Manipulation].”

“No mana,” I croak out, shaking my head. What happened to not hurting me?

“Ah, right. You’re the broken boy.”

Her words are calm and dispassionate. Slapping me doesn’t seem to be an expression of anger; she’s just getting her point across. That only makes me more uneasy. I vow to tread more lightly around her in the future, at least until I learn what sets her off.

Scalpel rummages in a drawer underneath the desk, whispering to herself too quietly for me to hear. She pulls out an oblong mana crystal the size of my thumb, examines it with a slight scowl, and shoves the valuable resource into my hands. “Absorb the mana if you can. With your impairment, it may prove difficult.” She smiles abruptly in her unnerving way. “I’ve never met a problem I can't solve by throwing more mana at it. Harvest the mana, then activate [Greater Heat Manipulation]. No more excuses.”

I take the mana crystal from her and cradle it in my hand, blinking back tears.

After all the weeks of sipping in the world’s energy through a straw while under the mana suppression field, drawing in the mana from the meticulously-cut mana crystal feels like trying to drink down the entire ocean in a single gulp. I sputter and wheeze, overwhelmed by the influx of raw power. The familiar burn, like acid on skin, courses through my chest, but I press onward in a heady mixture of joy and grim determination.

I feed the rushing torrent of mana into the Skill structure to try to heal its edges, but as my control slips, I abandon the restorative process. Instead, I guide the flow of mana to ensure that my [Heat Manipulation] activates without any blowback or uncontrolled pillars of flame. I’m not going to win any favors from Scalpel if I set her workshop on fire.

Light and heat bloom in my hands. I touch a small, folded flower sitting on the desk near me, and it ignites in a heartbeat. Pure, blue-white flames immolate the paper construct before the mana seeps out of my perforated channels and fractured core. The Skill gutters out, leaving me feeling strangely cold. I sigh longingly at the release of my oldest and truest friend.

The scritch of quill on paper draws my attention back to the present. Scalpel is staring at me with the deep, void-like pits of her preternaturally wide eyes, taking notes on everything I do without breaking eye contact.

“Lie down,” Scalpel orders as soon as she finishes scribbling her notes. She sets down the black-plumed quill and picks up a wand that glimmers with the telltale glow of enchanted runes. The arcane inscription gives off wisps of mana vapor.

I barely have time to follow her commands, settling back on the bed before my whole world is awash in blinding white light. The next thing I know, we’re standing in my inner core space, floating above the twisted structures. I’m present as a caricature of myself, but instead of a person, Scalpel appears as a gleaming blade.

I’ve never heard of such a Skill. Suddenly, the [Adjutant]’s threat about cutting me open and learning my secrets one by one begins to take on a sinister new light. I realize now that he wasn’t being figurative.

I open my mouth to ask a question, only to realize that my floating avatar has no mouth. I’m a vaguely humanoid shape, not a detailed representation of my actual person. I’m not here bodily; I’ve simply sunk into the core of my being. Sound and speech have no meaning here, not in the traditional sense. Besides, I’m not sure if I can communicate with the sharpness hovering next to me. I can’t even look at the awful blade without feeling cut. Painful lacerations cover my body if I focus on the scalpel for too long, although I can't tell if they're phantasmal or not. Will I bleed when I’m back in my real body?

A chilling thought strikes me next. Will she let me out at all?

Without warning, the blade moves. The razor’s edge blinks forward, cold and calculating, and touches an intricate whorl on my [Heat Manipulation] Skill structure. A frisson of alarm pings through me. The sleek, shimmering scalpel descends on the Skill framework, like a guillotine dropping onto the neck of a condemned man. A thin slice of crystalized mana flakes away.

My body contorts in a silent scream. A small part of my soul feels like it’s been severed, cut away, irrevocably detached from who I am. What little magic I have left is further diminished; whatever hope of recovery I still clung to dies in the darkness.

With a jolt of pain, I sit upright and return to the waking world. Instinctively, I clutch at my chest with my right hand, so I can gather up the shards of my Skill and cram them back into my core. The churning storm of pain, like a surging maelstrom inside me, is fading already—as is my awareness of [Heat Manipulation]. At this moment, even if I had enough mana to ignite my Skill, I’m not sure anything would actually happen.

A strangled cry of anguish tears out of my throat before I can stop to consider the ramifications. “What have you done? You cut away a piece of my soul!”

Immediately after my outburst, I shrink back in terror. My breath grows stale and heavy in my mouth. The blood pounds in my temples as I stare at her otherworldly eyes. Who knows how well protected I actually am under Lady Evershed’s agreement?

Unperturbed by my outburst, Scalpel tosses me another shard of mana crystal. “Show me again,” she orders, picking up her journal and quill as she sits poised to observe.

I force myself to breathe shakily, nodding at Scalpel. Antagonizing my jailer is incredibly stupid, especially after she’s casually demonstrated multiple abilities I’d never imagined possible before today. She can excise part of someone’s core space, slicing apart a Skill as easily as I might whittle a stick with a pocket knife. And what was that thing with my arm? She carved a set of runes into my bones with only her finger!

I force myself not to dwell on her strange, segmented hands, or her abyssal eyes. All I need to do is take in mana. It will hurt, but it’s nothing I haven’t wrestled with before. This time, when I push through the agony of liquid fire pouring into my chest, I only manage a faint pulse of heat. Even touching the scrap paper on the table barely produces a flicker of flame.

The Skill winks out before I run out of mana, which surprises me as much as anything else has today. Greedily, I circulate the meager remnants of mana within me, trying to infuse as much of it as I can into the vast, cratered landscape of my inner core.

Once again, Scalpel scrawls down her thoughts, all the while observing me with her obsessive, assessing gaze. What does she see? What does she want?

“Was . . . was that supposed to happen?” I ask, my indignation overcoming my eternally underdeveloped sense of self-preservation. “I barely felt any connection to the concept of heat.”

She pauses from her note-taking and puts down the journal. Her sharp eyes never leave my face. “I was not aware you were familiar with higher order concepts. Perhaps you’re more valuable to me than I first thought. Hmm. Recalculating.”

With that, she loses herself in another flurry of notes. I glance at the door, wondering if it’s possible for me to slip out unnoticed, but then I remember the runes inscribed on my bones. Running seems foolhardy.

She finishes her next round of notes and picks up the carved wand again. Her slender hands gestures for me to take my place on the examination table. “Next test,” she murmurs to herself, largely ignoring me. “Let’s try taking off a bit more this time—I want to see how many extraneous folds we can cut away and still retain core functionality.”

“What’s a fold?” I ask reflexively. Curiosity wells up in me. “Is that the whorl patterns on my Skills? I’ve always wondered what they’re for. Could you teach me?”

Scalpel frowns. Her insectile-like fingers, with more joints than any human possess, lift up and tap my mouth. Bands of mana glimmer into view, visible for a brief moment without my [Manasight]. They sink into my skin with a buzz that makes my teeth itch, and threads of power stitch my jaw shut. The glow disappears as the mana settles into its new form.

“My secrets. Silence.”

My captor lifts up her wand and circles it in front of my face. The world blossoms into spell fire and chaos, engulfed in gold and glory. Against my will, I sink back beneath the waves of my consciousness, spiraling through the liminal layers of reality to emerge into my core space once more.

I lose track of how many times the pattern repeats: the snicker-snack of the vorpal blade; the tingling sensation of foreign mana interfering with my own; the keening sorrow and towering, helpless rage as I lose another key part of my Skills.

With each incision, I feel as though I’m losing a part of myself that I can never get back. Invisible tears streak down my incorporeal face. Yet all I can do is watch in impotent fury and horror as Scalpel’s blade sings within my inner world, reaping and trimming. My identity bleeds away, piece by piece.

And all the while she takes her notes. Endless, interminable, dreadful notes.