My alarm went off at four-thirty, which I set the night before like a responsible adult who did not want Vale to add laps for being late, and I hit snooze with the kind of hatred usually reserved for personal enemies.
The second alarm at four-forty won.
I dragged myself out of bed and into the bathroom, where the mirror showed me someone who no longer looked like the guy who woke up in this body six weeks ago with a death timer and a stomach that hung over his waistband. The jaw had sharpened. The shoulders had filled out the frame instead of drowning in it. Four pale scars ran from my collarbone to my hip where a leopard the size of a motorcycle decided I looked like breakfast, and beneath them the graft pulsed with its steady warmth, eight rings burning in the back of my skull and one flickering at the edge like a signal that couldn't decide whether it wanted to come through.
