“Here it is,” Perses said, carefully placing a gray piece of metal so small it was barely visible to the naked eye on a napkin so Asteria could see it. They were standing in the newly constructed operating room, or as Hines liked to refer to it, the toy room. The tweezers he had been using to hold it were bloodied but not nearly as much so as the scalpel lying on the table next to it. Hines had been disappointed Larkin hadn’t been awake for his first experiment.

“That’s ...