They didn't kill him quickly.
Grigor had cleaned enough murder scenes to know the difference between cold violence and recreational violence. A professional killer aimed for speed—arterial punctures, spinal transection, blunt force to the temporal bone. Quick. Clean. Economical.
This wasn't economical.
Kiv started with the calves—not out of cruelty, but out of freshness. Grigor understood that, in a distant, clinical way that made the horror worse. The meat closest to the extremities cooled fastest. You worked from the outside in if you wanted to maximize quality.
The rebar's hooked end slid under his skin with the precision of a veteran butcher. Kiv didn't hack. He peeled.
A long, curving strip of flesh, maybe three inches wide, unrolled from Grigor's calf like ribbon from a spool. The sound—wet, tearing, fibrous—was louder than the rain.
It was the sound of separation. The sound of a man becoming ingredients.
Grigor screamed.
The scream echoed off the stone, joined the chorus of the drowned, became background noise. Nobody looked. Nobody came. In the Hatcheries, screaming was as common as rain.
'Analyze. Analyze. Stay in your head. The pain is information. The pain is—'
The woman bit into his thigh.
She didn't use tools. She used teeth. Her jaw clamped down on the soft inner tissue, and she tore, her head shaking like a dog with a chew toy. Blood sprayed across her face. She didn't blink. She chewed.
Grigor's vision went white.
When it came back, the boy was kneeling on his chest, holding him down with a weight that seemed impossible for his size. His eyes—those old, empty, inhuman eyes—stared into Grigor's face with something that might have been curiosity.
'He's watching me die,' Grigor realized. 'He's studying it. Filing it away for later.'
Kiv carved. The woman ate. The boy held.
The pain stopped being pain after a while. It became something larger—a pressure. An environment. A weather system that encompassed everything Grigor was.
He couldn't feel individual wounds anymore. He didn't feel the skin leaving his legs or the teeth in his thigh.
He was simply made of wounds. He was a geography of nerve endings being mapped by fire.
'I'm the stain now.'
The phrase echoed from somewhere far away. His first life. His last thought. A cosmic joke without a punchline.
He felt his intestines shift. Someone was pulling on them—not the woman, she was still working on his thigh. Kiv, maybe. Opening the abdominal cavity to access the organs while they were still warm.
'Liver first,' his crime-scene brain supplied. 'It degrades fastest. Then kidneys. Then heart. The stomach is usually discarded—too acidic, fouls the meat.'
He was cataloguing his own autopsy.
Somewhere, in the deepest part of his mind, something stirred. The voice. The one from the membrane, the one that had whispered clean it as he drowned.
It wasn't whispering now.
It was screaming.
But the sound was internal—trapped inside a body that was being systematically disassembled, crying out to a soul that no longer had anywhere to go.
'This is Hell,' Grigor thought. 'Not the drowning. Not the monsters. This. The fact that you feel everything, and you can't stop, and you can't die, and—'
His heart stopped.
The woman had bitten through something important. An artery, maybe. Or perhaps it was simply blood loss, the final insult to a system that had been insulted past the point of function.
His vision darkened. Not all at once—in patches, like a television losing signal. The last thing he saw was the boy's face, tilted, observing.
The last thing he felt was the phantom weight of the silver cat, seared into his palm. Even now. Even now.
'Clean it.'
The voice was everywhere.
'Clean it clean it clean it—'
Darkness.
---
The first thing he registered was the texture.
Soft. Slick. Wet.
Membrane. Warm membrane pressed against his face, against his back, against his curled knees. The fibrous surface. The leathery skin of a snake.
The second thing was the temperature. Hot. Feverishly, sickeningly hot. The heat wrapped around him like a fever, like the inside of a mouth, like being digested alive—
'No.'
The denial was absolute. Primal. A rejection of reality so intense that it felt like a physical force pushing against the walls of his prison.
'I was dead. I was DEAD. They were eating me. My heart stopped. I—'
He tried to inhale.
His mouth opened automatically—the brainstem overriding conscious thought, the ancient reflex demanding air—and thick liquid rushed in. Tasted of salt and copper and old seawater.
He was drowning.
Again.
'You cannot be drowning. You already drowned. You already escaped. You already died.'
But he was.
The fluid entered his lungs with every involuntary gasp, hot and thick and wrong. It filled the spaces where air should be. It provided just enough oxygen to sustain consciousness, just enough to keep the synapses firing.
Just enough to feel the membrane pressing in.
Just enough to hear the distant, muffled chorus of ten thousand others experiencing the same hell.
Grigor's hands pressed against the wall of the sack. It was tough. Rubbery. Familiar.
'Not the same sack. Different. The glow is dimmer. The heartbeat outside is... different. A different tower. A different position.'
The logic assembled itself despite the panic.
He was in a new sack.
He had died—been killed, been eaten—and his soul had ejected. No white light. No judgment. Just a transfer. A metaphysical respawn into a fresh body that had been grown for this exact moment.
'This is the economy,' he realized. 'This is inevitable.'
'You die, you reset. You drown, you hatch, you die again. The loop. The LOOP.'
Grigor's jaw tightened.
He had done this before. He knew how it worked. The membrane resisted fingers but not teeth. The pressure could be exploited if you created a fissure first.
'Bite. Tear. Escape. Run.'
'Die.'
'Repeat.'
He opened his mouth. The fluid rushed in. His lungs burned.
He bit down on the membrane.
The taste of copper and rot filled his mouth. The fibers resisted, then gave. A tiny crack. A thread of cold air.
'Again.'
Outside, somewhere in the Hatcheries, a sack popped. A scream spiraled into the mist. The chorus continued. The heartbeat throbbed.
And deep in his chest, the voice that had been screaming during his death settled into something quieter. Something patient.
'Clean it,' it whispered.
'Clean all of it.'
Grigor pulled at the membrane. The fissure widened.
This time, he knew what waited outside.
This time, he would be ready.