Radix

In an isolated vine-cove, he lashed at the trees with his machete, his bones throbbing. Distantly he thought of run-ning away. But there was nowhere to go.
Then, like an avalanche in his world of unhappy aware-ness, memories crowded in on him, and his machete flailed uselessly at the air. Vivid images of his old, cluttered room and his scansule and his three-wheeled bottle-green car and his mother's spicy cooking overwhelmed him, and he dropped to his knees. What had become of him? He looked down at his hands and saw scabby, callused, reptilian flesh. He cov-ered his face and began to cry.
He longed to go home. He longed not to die. But then starker images shaped themselves behind his lids: images of black-uniformed men with leering grins, ripping off his clothes, fondling him, pissing on him, striking him until he couldn't see or breathe—
He howled and slashed out with his machete. Lurching to his feet, he cut at the trees with a stupendous strength, hacking at their hard wood until he was staggered and his breathing got tangled in his throat with his rage. Lolling against a moss-padded tree, his face pressed into the cool bark, his machete arm trembling, he tried to cry again. But he couldn't.
With the blood still thundering in his ears, he turned and went back to work.
Broux realized that Sumner had become dangerous. Soon the boy would turn on him, and the guards would have to kill him. Very quickly now, he had to be readied for sale. The optimum price would be offered by the Black Pillar only for a protomale—a human whose physical strength and agility were clearly superior to others of his size. Certainly Sumner's white card helped, for that meant he would not suddenly molt into a distort. And as a result of Broux's arduous work assignments, Sumner had the bulk and the strength of a protomale, but he was not yet lithe enough. His muscles had to be stretched and limbered—and swiftly.
To help him, Broux employed Derc, an army masseur. He had a chest like a wall and arms as long as an orangutan's. He knew the human body with his hands as well as Broux knew it with his eyes and mind. Together they remade Sumner.
Stretched out on a cedar table, Sumner learned a new kind of pain. Derc's iron fingers felt out
muscle-locked ten-sions and kneaded them loose, then went deeper, pushing past the fascia that held the muscles in place, probing the fiber-bunched memories jammed close to the bone.
Derc started with a foot, slicing down the sole with the hard edge of his thumb, pushing deep into the sensitive meat of the arch and then flaying the foot wide, separating each toe and its ligaments. The years of abuse that the foot had ab-sorbed from Sumner's heavy, pounding gait bloomed like fiery flowers. The big toe was the worst. It had gone stiff in the confines of Sumner's boots and had to be ripped free from its locked position. The pain blared through Sumner's bones and poured out of him in a cold sweat.
Days on the cedar table passed, before Derc, heavy-lidded and blankfaced, had moved his fingers through every inch of Sumner's body. And though the pain was brain-smoothing, especially around the scars where his flesh re-membered indignities his mind had shut out, there was something beautiful about feeling his muscles slide free un-der his skin.
The worst of it was when Derc collapsed Sumner's face. His nose had been so thoroughly shattered by his police torture that the physicians hadn't even tried to build it up. They removed a lot of cartilage and bone, widened the nasal cavities and let the nose heal over, lumpy and almost flat to the face. As Derc worked on his nose and lips, thumb-ironing the muscles pinched into scars, Sumner returned to the fleshlight pain that he had known in the police barracks of McClure.
Those brief, lucid moments of pain-charged beauty were the only joy left in Sumner's life. With Dice gone, Kagan was drained of all fellow feeling, and he sank into a deep silence disturbed only by an occasional surge of revenge-lust. Even-tually even that passion became silent—though it did not disappear.
Sumner's body had become sleek and limber in a few short weeks. Broux was happy, and to round out his training, he personally taught Sumner how to swim in the deep, silent fish pool far back in the jungle. White-crested harpy eagles dominated the pools, diving noiselessly out of the highest trees to pluck a thrash of fish out of the water. They watched through wild masks of rage as Sumner splashed and lurched across their feeding pools.
The water's spell and Sumner's new body returned him to a feeling he had not known since he was the Sugarat. What had been dread in him then had widened into a psychic stamina that was indefatigable. Restlessness became vigor, and anxiety became clarity. The stronger he got, the more sharply he sensed what he had to do. Somehow, in a way that would leave him his life, he would have to kill Broux.
After Sumner mastered the feel of his new body in the water, Broux moved him to the broad river north of the settlement where a handful of men did the fishing for the camp. Long nets were lowered each morning and raised again in the afternoon.
Sumner spent most of his time clearing the thick weeds along the river edge, but occasionally he was sent into the water to free a net or help lift a catch. Watching the men around him, he learned how to dive hard with a rock in his hands and how to make snorkels by weaving together the bladders of giant pirarucu fish with slender river reeds. Each day he strengthened his lungs and legs by swimming under-water against the drunken currents.
One giant-clouded afternoon, with the sunlight sweeping like wind over the water, Broux came out to supervise Sum-ner's work. He sat in the leaf-patterned shadows as Sumner laboriously dredged fallen trees nearby, making way for a shallow-water harbor that was being built. When the call went up that one of the nets had snagged, Broux signaled him to go down and work it loose.
Sumner dived into the water immediately, but this time he was careful to catch a balloon of air in his shirt. He angled down to the bottom and surveyed the net. It had caught on a tree limb and would be easy to pull free, but he left it tied off. He settled into the shuddering feelers of river-kelp and felt around for a rock. He found a fist-size stone, touched bottom, and waited.
He knew Broux would come for him as soon as he thought his animal had been tied up. He sat on the bottom, gently sipping at his air supply.
Minutes passed, and then a cloud of air exploded the light-slick surface. Broux came kicking down fishfaced toward the net. Sumner thrust the rock before him and rose to meet his master. The stone caught the diving man over his right eye and knocked him senseless.
Broux unfolded like a paper doll in the bloodsmoked water, his face stupid and kind, and Sumner took him from above by his shoulders. He pulled the body down and forced the head through the net. The last of Broux's life streamed out of his mouth in a bright vapor as Sumner tangled the man's arms in the rope and twisted him to look as if he had snagged himself. With death-clouded eyes, Broux watched as Sumner rose toward the light.
Sumner had almost drowned himself forcing Broux's body into the net, and two men were needed to resuscitate him after he was washed to shore. That, of course, made his story of Broux's bravery believable, and the only uncertainty for the Masseboth was figuring out to whom Kagan belonged now.
Black Pillar authorities decided, with their usual grim justice, that the Tactical Diving Corps—the most perilous, hardworking crew in the military—should get him. With that week's cargo strohlkraft, Sumner was flown from the western rain forests of Meat City across the continent to the rocky headlands on the east coast, south of Carnou. Three days after the river incident he found himself diving from swaying derrick towers into deep but narrow water troughs. He was forced to swim marathon distances at night with a sandbag lashed to his back, and for days on end he was left treading water far out at sea, a wooden spar his only solidity. In a confined pool, with a small club, he had to apply combat techniques against bolt-eyed sharks. And though the horror of his life had intensified, he was glad to be free of Broux.