uck, it’s bright. It’s sewing pins into his eyeballs. He’d like to rush back to his darkened office, shut his eyes beneath the soft gray blanket of the security-camera monitors. It’s a chicken instinct. He’s here for a reason. It’s time to step in, face Deus Brânquia, force Hoffstetler’s experiments to completion. No, not Deus Brânquia. The asset, that’s all it is. Why has he started thinking of it as Deus Brânquia again? He’s got to stop that. The good old Alabama Howdy-do, the heavy-duty Farm-Master 30 cattle prod, is long and straight in his palm, a handrail guiding him from an opiate haze back into the real world.

Only took two MPs to help him fish it from the tank and chain it to the post, not a single finger lost. The MPs won’t say shit. He’s their boss. He’d sent them packing after that, only to discover he’d left the Howdy-do in his office. His office—the desk drawer, the pills. A coincidence. He didn’t leave the cattle prod there on purpose. He didn’t.

He thinks of Lainie’s distraught report of how she’d caught Timmy cutting open a lizard. It hadn’t bothered Strickland at all. Hell, he’d been proud. He ought to take a lesson from his own son. When was the last time Strickland has been alone with this lizard? He’d have to go way back, the Amazon, gripping the harpoon gun in a dim grotto echoing with monkey screams. Deus Brânquia—the asset—speckled with rotenone, reaching out to him with both arms. As if they were equals. The arrogance of it. The insult.

Now look at it. He’s got a nice, clear view of its suffering. Quartered on bloody knees not capped to bear weight for this long. Bleeding from uprooted sutures. Sections of its abhorrent anatomy palpitating and pulsating for air. Strickland holds up the Howdy-do and waggles it. Deus Brânquia bristles its webbed spines.

“Oh,” Strickland says. “You remember?”

He relishes the finicky click of his heels as he circles the post. The moments preceding torture are always sensuous. The tumescence of fear. The ache of two bodies being kept apart before inevitable impact. Acts more creative than Strickland has patience for flowering in the victim’s imagination. Lainie would never understand this sort of foreplay, but any soldier who’s felt the blood rush would. Lainie’s blood-smeared neck slides into his mind. A fine, invigorating image. He takes a green candy from the bag, sucks it, pretends its sharp tang is that of blood.

When he bites down, the crunch shatters his eardrums. Elisa Esposito must be the only point of silence left in the world. His own is being eaten away by the monkeys, which have returned. Chattering from behind security monitors. Hooting from under his desk. And screaming. Of course, screaming. When he’s trying to think. When he’s trying to sleep. When he’s trying to nod along to his family’s tedious daily chronicles. The monkeys want him to resume the throne of Jungle-god. Until he does, they’ll keep screaming.

So he gives in. Just a little. Just to see if they’ll soften, just a notch. The Howdy-do? Why, it’s not a cattle prod at all. It’s one of the índios bravos’ machetes. The monkeys giggle. They like it. Strickland finds that he likes it, too. He rocks the machete like a pendulum, imagining he’s chopping through the buttress roots of a kapok tree. Deus Brânquia reacts violently, pulling against its chains, the paroxysm of a fish you’d thought was dead. Its gills fluff, widening its head to twice its size. A dumb animal trick. Doesn’t work on humans. Not on gods, either.

Strickland flips a switch. The machete hums in his hand.