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told me to call him Ben. He wasn’t actually a doctor, he said. Which made sense. Doctors took care of people, right? Sick people, injured people. People. I wasn’t one of those, not anymore. Thanks to Ben . My mechanic.
    Call-me-Ben wheeled me down a long corridor. I couldn’t feel the body, couldn’t feel the seat. It felt like I was floating through the hall, just a set of eyes, just a mind, just a ghost. My parents stayed behind. My mother said she couldn’t see it again. It, she said. My father didn’t say anything, but he stayed with her.
    “We’ve kept it in cold storage for you,” Ben said from behind me. “Most clients request a viewing.”
    It.
    We wheeled into a narrow room, its white tiled walls lined by silver plates. Ben pressed his palm to one, and it slid out of the wall, revealing a long, metal panel bearing a sheet-covered lump. A body-shaped lump. “You sure?” Ben asked, guiding the wheelchair into position. “This can be difficult.”
    I couldn’t stand to hear the computer speak for me, not here. Not now.
    I blinked once.
    He began with the feet. Foot.
    The flesh was red and ruined, gouged. Mottled with deep, black scabs. There were thick streaks of pearl white, as if the skin had calcified. Or maybe the flesh had been flayed and I was looking at bone. The knee was bent at the wrong angle; the other leg was gone, ending just below the thigh, swirls of dried blood and charred flesh winding around one another, like the rings of a severed tree stump.
    The sheet drew farther back.
    I wish I could say I didn’t recognize it, that it was some monstrous mound of skin and bones, broken and unidentifiable.
    It was. But it was also me.
    I recognized the hips jutting out below my waist, always a little bonier than I would have liked. The dark freckles along my collarbone, still visible on a patch of skin the fire had spared. My crooked ring finger, on the arm that remained intact, a family quirk my parents had chosen not to screen out, the genetic calling card of the Kahns.
    My face.
    The burns were worse there. Pockets of pus bubbled beneath the skin. One side had caved in, like my face had been modeled from clay, then crushed by an iron fist. The left eye sagged into a deep hollow. My lips were gone.
    There was a gray surgical cap stretched over my head.
    “The brain?”
    I felt as dead inside as the voice sounded.
    Call-me-Ben sighed. “You don’t want to know the technical details.”
    “Try me.”
    He did.
    He told me how the brain—my brain—was removed.
    Frozen.
    Sliced into razor-thin sections.
    Scanned.
    Functionally mapped onto a three-dimensional model, axons and dendrites replaced by the vector space of a quantum computer, woven through with artificial nerves, conduits that would carry impulses back and forth from an artificial body, simulating all the pains and pleasures of life. In theory.
    He told me how the frozen leftovers were discarded. Because that’s what you do with medical waste.
    Now I understood: Skinner was the wrong word after all. I wasn’t the thief. I hadn’t stolen an identity; I hadn’t stolen anything. They were the ones who stole from me. They flayed back my skin, reached inside and dug up whatever secret, essential quality made me who I was.
    Then they ripped it out.
    They ripped it out—ripped me out—and left me exposed, a naked brain, a mind without a body. Because this thing they’d stuck me in, it wasn’t a body—a sculpted face, dead eyes, and synthetic flesh couldn’t make it anything but a hollow shell. Maybe I hadn’t lost the essential thing that made me Lia Kahn, but I’d lost everything else, everything that made me human.
    I wasn’t a skinner.
    I was the one who’d been skinned.
    When we were kids, Zo and I used to fight. Not argue. Fight. Hair-pulling, skin-pinching, wrist-burning, arm-twisting, squealing, spitting, punching, shrieking fight . And once—it wasn’t our worst fight or our last one—after she kneed me in the stomach,