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He finds the scar on his left thumb, put there when he lost his temper at Afresh and punched out a window to let in birdsong. But he was eighteen when that happened. The hand he is looking at now belongs to a little boy, and the scar is a pale reflection of its original. This hand has never punched anyone in anger, never laid itself across a woman’s breast, never clasped himself in secret pleasure. Cain wishes for a mirror, but touching his face is enough to convince him that he is a grown mind in the memory of his small boy’s body.
    The knowledge leaves him strangely flat. His childhood is nothing to covet. He is here, in this room, and somewhere out there his father’s life continues. Somewhere farther out there, real life works its way through time, passing hours and minutes, days and hours, in whatever cycle nature or God has set it upon.
    In here only silence, and time frozen in place.
    Cain opens his mouth to wake up his dreaming self, but a noise like an air-raid siren blasts into his skull. He screams and the siren roars again, a brief, unbelievably loud burst of white noise right inside his head. This time he does not scream, but as he clasps his small hands to his ears and leans forward—he is sure there will be blood, his eardrums feel hot and tingling—he utters an unintentional whine of pain.
    The siren explodes again.
    Cain bites his tongue while the pain slowly ebbs away. He stays hunched over, staring at the concrete floor, certain that there are eyes upon him. He should feel love in their gaze, but it is something far baser that prickles at the back of his neck. Though it is not malevolent, he does not care for it at all.
    At Afresh he read many books about torture when he could get them. The Voice had decided that they were unsuitable reading, and Cain’s argument that they had no right to hobble his intellectual development fell on deaf ears. The Face merely smiled and nodded in agreement, and then left the room filled with books on philosophy, history, and science. But another one of the patients smuggled books to Cain’s room with his fresh bedding, and he immersed himself in what was one of the oldest of the Arts.
    Torture had been around ever since humankind discovered its thumbs. Cain read of its use for spiritual fulfillment and enlightenment in ages past, and as a means for extracting information in more recent, so-called civilized times. There were books that detailed the psychological implications on both the tortured and torturer. Others concentrated on the more gruesome side of things, reveling in descriptions of dismemberment, eye-skewering, limb-chopping, genital-burning atrocities. Some writers considered torture from biblical times, while others posited that modern society was creating more monsters every day. Now, they suggested, rather than torture as ritual or for information, it was mostly practiced for pleasure.
    And yet, through all his reading, Cain could ally none of it with what had happened to him. It had been torture, there was no doubt of that, but the reasons behind it were far less clear. He once read of a Russian self-mutilation cult that expressed love through pain. The idea was grotesque, the facts unbearable, the feel of the story awfully familiar.
    None of this knowledge belongs in that small boy’s head, and yet it is there, because the older Cain is dreaming this memory. He opens his mouth as if to talk, wincing against the expected siren, but it remains silent. His heart thumps in his chest, blood rushes through his ears, and he is terrified that if he concentrates long enough on these sounds, the siren will hear them as well.
    The more he listens to his heart, the louder it becomes. At first it is little more than a sensation, a movement in his chest as familiar as breathing, and equally ignored. But then it changes from a sensation to a sound, louder, louder still, until he begins to suspect that his father is outside crashing his hand