Everything hurt.

Amir opened his eyes as the door to his cell slid open, but didn’t try to sit up. The beatings from the day before, or at least he thought it was a day ago, time was difficult in a windowless cell, had left him with cracked ribs.

Breathing was agony, and the rest of his injuries would make themselves known the moment he moved.

Beating. Electrocution. Drowning. Exhaustion. Starvation. Dehydration. They even tried to burn him, not that fire would ever be his enemy. He murmured a prayer in his grandfather’s language and wondered if he ought to use his Wish to get out now, while he could.

But no. Rescue was coming. Vree would never give up on him, and even if he did, Luka wouldn’t. He just had to survive long enough for them to get to him.

The worst of it was that the torture didn’t seem to be personal. They weren’t asking questions. Didn’t care about anything except their machines, and what a human could survive when it really came down to life or death. Curiosity. Damn it all, Amir was a scientist himself, but this…. this wasn’t science.

“Get up,” one of the aliens, fridd, he thought, commanded shortly in accented, clicking Common. Its mandibles rattled together when he still didn’t move. If they wanted him, they could come get him. “Retrieve the specimen.”

Amir bit down a scream when they hauled him up and dragged him off down the hall to their horrific testing chambers. Pain made his vision go white, and he felt one of the cracked ribs break through as they wrenched his arms back.

“So, what is it today?” he rasped, on his second day without water, throat like sandpaper and so dizzy he probably couldn’t have stood if he tried. “You haven’t tried cold yet. On second thought, don’t. I hate being cold.”

In the beginning, he tried to fight back. After the first two died, they put a collar on him that would electrocute him if it got too hot. Not a bad way to contain a pyromancer, all things considered. His djinn blood never did like electricity.

“Hold the specimen steady,” the leader said. Amir couldn’t tell if it was made or female. Maybe fridd had no designation. Some species didn’t. They were built like towering hairless apes, all raw blue skin with patches of dark hair here and there. Their heads were that of giant spiders, and he still wasn’t sure how they spoke around their mandibles “Begin recording.”

It turned away. When it turned back, Amir’s heart stopped in his chest, and fear left him shaking, covered in cold sweat. Panic made him struggle, but the collar kept his most dangerous abilities locked away. It snapped warningly when he tried anyway, and the convulsions robbed him of whatever strength he had left.

Find this and other great novels on the author's preferred platform. Support original creators!

The air shivered as the fridd powered up a heavy saw, made for cutting industrial steel. It whined as the blade got up to speed, and Amir struggled to get away. To no avail. The two fridd holding him were far stronger than he was and wrenched his arm into position.

“We will remove the limb at the wrist joint,” the fridd with the saw said loudly as it moved in on him, the air screaming around the sawblade. “Specimen shows resistance to flame. Cauterize wound with electricity to prevent premature death from fluid loss. If it survives, we will move to the next joint up, and remove remaining- what is this?”

The air rippled with watery heat mirages, silver and wavering as it glimmered in a perfect sphere that left the floor blackened in a ring.

Amir’s skin burned, hot and itchy like it always did when he set himself on fire. But the collar hadn’t activated a second time, and still the heat under his skin continued to grow. Small sparks glittered through the air, here one moment and gone the next, only to reappear again a moment later. Without thinking, Amir let the sparks weave between his fingers, leaving streaks of red-sheened-gold wherever they touched his skin.

Maybe he had more of Grandfather’s blood than he thought.

“It burns!” one of the fridd howled and leapt away, hands smoking where they touched Amir’s skin. Moments later, the other one leapt away as well, bulbus eyes flickering wildly as it tried to put out the small flames that ignited cloth and hair alike. “The restraints! Lock it down!”

“It’s too late for that,” Amir told them distantly with a steadiness he shouldn’t have. The collar fell off his throat, smoking wildly, only to burst into flames the moment it hit the floor. “It’s much, much too late.”

They tried to run, but not fast enough.

Flames roared up around Amir, deep, angry red, and so hot that the three fridd vanished as waves of blistering heat rolled off his skin. When the flames settled, there was nothing left but piles of ash and bone, and the melted slag of the saw they were going to use to cut him apart.

The fire raged inside him, and then all he could see was red.

Smokeless fire rolled off his body, leaving red-gold waves across his skin that slowly faded back to his natural tan.

The fridd kept coming, first in ones and twos, and then a wall of bodies and clicking mandibles sharp enough to bite through cloth and flesh alike. Amir fought with flames, and then with anything that came to hand.

He didn’t remember finding a long, barbed knife, but somehow it was in his hand as he cut deeply through blue skin and spread blue blood down the sleeves of his shirt.

He did remember one of the fridd throwing a chair at him, a last-ditch effort to keep him back. He remembered blasting it away, a twisted pile of sharpened metal that buried itself in the chest of another enemy.

Bodies trailed in his wake as he made his way to the bridge, the panels under his feet warping with each step as heat radiated off him.

The captain was waiting, with an honor guard of twelve.

They died before they could take more than a step towards him, washed clean by fire that erupted at his slightest thought.

“What are you?” the captain clicked as Amir advanced on him, flames wreathing him, and fury glowing from the fiery pits where his eyes were supposed to be. “We thought you were human!”

Amir raised his hand, armed with a blaster he didn’t remember picking up.

“I am.”