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In the trees all around her were natives from the village through which she’d passed. They were strung up like Adam had been, their brown skins stretched out and attached to tree branches like hammocks. Some of them still breathed, driven insane by the physical inversion they were now experiencing as they watched their hearts beat outside of their bodies and saw their colons expel waste onto the leaves and branches above them, defying gravity. Marla looked for the source of all this pain. She found him standing there, dressed in his great fleshcoat, maniac eyes hidden behind those dark goggles. Another of the villagers screamed and died, answered by the terrified pleas and prayers of those others who still lived but who hoped they might expire next. Marla ignored them all, intent now on knowing what was behind those unblinking eyes. She was just inches from him now. She reached out and touched his face, her fingers skittering across the rough surface like a blind woman’s. He stood, dispassionate, as she went about her probing and did not even flinch when she slipped her fingers beneath the bone frame of his goggles and into the slick goo of his eyes.

Visions pierced her brain like shrapnel from a roadside bomb. She saw his work, felt his hands as though they were her own. In that moment she knew his life’s labors, felt the long dark decades of his alchemical work stretching out in front of her. She heard the terrified voices of the natives as he hunted them down, mercilessly, and understood their tongue. To them he was a demon, come here from the western world to corrupt them and steal their skins. They had a name for this white demon. Skin Taker. She tasted salt blood as he drank it from the bowl of a skull, helped him distill spinal fluid into a vial, joined him in his reverie upon discovering an albino child naked and cowering in a mud hut, chanting a spell over and over—a spell that would neither protect it from nor deter the intentions of the Skin Taker looming over it. Marla understood the intricate beauty of the Skin Mechanic’s craft, the long dark suffering to which he had willingly subjected himself in return for its secrets. And as night fell in his old Amazonian hunting grounds, she felt the power of the ancient entities to which his workings were offered. Theirs was the lifeblood of youth, every evisceration keeping their dark names alive. Names that whispered through the canopies of this great forest and out across rivers and oceans until they attracted new followers, new disciples of youth and beauty and hot blood. Marla saw them again, pale figures from the West standing naked before the Skin Mechanic. They were begging for his touch. And he blessed them. He was their pastor, their surgeon and their savior.

Chapter Thirty-Four

This island can change you, Marla.

The voice was like warm chocolate, simultaneously stirring Marla from her rainforest dreams and soothing her. Half asleep and numb as a dead thing, she mistook the voice for Jessie’s. She opened her eyes without feeling the lids move and looked around without the sensation of having turned her head, expecting to find herself curled up in bed back at the summerhouse after a long dream. But it couldn’t be Jessie—she was dead. And the summerhouse was out of reach now, a construct and a dream forbidden. Marla had opened her eyes to a reality as stark and threatening as a scalpel blade.

She was in another white chamber, filled with candles and little halogen lamps suspended like eyeballs from snakelike mounts. Tables filled with reflective dishes and tools could be seen lurking in alcoves, threatening little suits of armor and weaponry. And all around her stood the urbane nudists of Meditrine Island, their passive expressions in a limbo land somewhere between boredom and indifference. She tasted the air and found it powdery and clean, without the sense of having opened her mouth or felt the air leave her nostrils. Marla desperately tried to focus. Something stood between the people and the walls of the chamber, like a vast hospital curtain. She unraveled the structure with her eyes, perceiving it to be a network of wire frames woven all around her. Each frame was lined with pale, tautly stretched fabric and decorated with bright ribbons and bows. The white teeth and bright eyes of her strange, smooth audience glimmered in the lights. Marla felt butterflies in her tummy as they each smiled politely at her and turned away to face the curtains. They didn’t want me to make a speech did they, oh no please anything but that, I’d not know what to say, I’d be so embarrassed I’d simply die. But she was safe; she felt no mouth with which to speak even if she had the will. So, her mind raced instead. Oh my God, my Jesus what have they done to me? She saw Welland again, glancing over his shoulder at her and smiling wryly. His voice returned to her, echoing inside her skull. Comfy? Good. I started out just like you; as a Lamplighter. I loved it so much I joined The Consortium full time. I’m sure once you take the test you’ll work out just fine. Marla could see them all now, in a perfect circle looking in on her like she had dozens of eyes, like a fly. Oh what have they done?

Marla watched them, each and every one, as they stepped forward into the curtain. Her nerve endings screamed, white raw. She was the curtain—she knew that now. The taut fabric was that of her own skin, cured and treated and stretched out by way of techniques both ancient and forbidden. The ribbons and bows decorating the intricate frames splaying her unraveled self around the room were her organs and veins. Base tissues and cardiovascular conduits had been reworked into the stuff of miracles, pumping blood and moisture around the living canopy of derma into which the naked beauties had stepped. Marla flinched, flinched that’s a good one I don’t even have a face anymore, as each man, woman and child held out their arms and legs in a star formation. Their veins found hers, their hairless bodies fusing with her body until they were one being. The sensation, or rather a million sensations, was mind shattering. Every moment of every life of every person that had joined with her penetrated her consciousness. My brain? Do I even have a brain now? And she slipped out of herself.