Ichiro's mouth tipped and then righted. "They had rooms," he said. "Dark ones. Warmer than this. Colder than this when you were alone. They never said please. They had gloves."
Lynea's fingers curled against her knee, nails making half-moons in her skin.
"Dozens of us," Ichiro said, and the word dozens was measured and measured again and still came up wrong. "For a while. They put… Stones. Or tried. I don't remember the day. I remember after. The lights went kind of inside my eyes for a week."
The stone in his shoulder pulsed, a slow seep of brown-gold under the skin that didn't decide to be pretty. Keahi flinched, barely.
"Most of them died" he said. He didn't turn it into a story about their names or their last sounds. He said the truth the way a door opens and either you walk through it or you pretend the hinge is a kind of music. "They were… We were… Test subjects. Disposable lives."
