The factory workers lined up at the feet of their dormitory beds, in darkness punctured by pinprick candlelights, in air weighted by the smoke and scent of burnt incense, naked except for their rough spun underwear. Goosebumps rose on the skin of some of them, and others quaked in the chilling cold, and still others stood silent like locked-tomb sentinels. All of them were bathed, as told by their damp hair and the scent of flowered bathwater. All of them were cleansed, but not in the most important way.

The factory workers lined up in waiting, though they didn’t remember what it was they were waiting for. They had done this every night at bedtime since they entered the factory, though that crossing they also didn’t remember. They only stood neatly spaced in their line because their bodies told them so, as if their feet had known better than their heads. This was true, though that too they didn’t remember.

From far down the corridor outside their room, a cold draft carried the soft tinkling of bells, high-pitched and hollow. The factory workers glanced at the closed door, ears prickling. The chiming grew louder and louder, rhythmic like a trot, and soon it was joined by the clatter of claws, by wet snorts and pants that stopped right outside.

The door creaked open. A man in a worn-out white robe entered the room, and in his hands were chains, and at the end of the chains were black hounds vast as night, prowling in a neat line. The hounds, if they were to stand on their hind legs, were as tall as the tallest worker in the group. Their slick black bodies took up all the space in the room, replacing its candle-pricked darkness with their own, so much so that the factory workers recoiled to make space, until their calves hit the footboard slats of their beds and they had nowhere else to go.

Each of the hounds stood before each of the room’s residents. The man in the white robe, the houndmaster, stood before all of them. He said, “Here come the hounds of Bak-Ankham, to cleanse you.”

At the foot of the bed closest to the window stood a young woman about twenty winters old, scrawny and shivering. She stood the straightest and most silent among everyone—even her breath trod carefully in her chest. And when the hound before her stalked forward, her breath silenced entirely.

“Let them cleanse you,” said the houndmaster in a hypnotic voice. The room relaxed in a unified letting out of breaths—except there was nothing relaxed about the young woman’s exhalation. Somehow, her body knew there was too much at stake in this one breath. Somehow, her body knew if it had held on to the one breath, the hound wouldn’t have liked it. The hound would’ve smelled her defiance.

The young woman stayed still as the hound scented her, its snorts wet and hot against her skin. The sour smell of its breath made her belly churn and made her want to run, but she knew she couldn’t run, mustn’t run. She felt just beyond the horizon of her mind what was going to happen next, and instead of running, she braced herself.

“Recondition,” the houndmaster announced.

The hound standing before the young woman opened its mouth, venting breaths like boiling steam, baring fangs like sabers. Its tongue darted out, pink like raw flesh peeling below burnt skin, as long and wide as the young woman’s palm. The tongue slithered up her arm in one giant lick, drool coating her and dripping to the floor. It caressed and grated her at the same time, like velvet if velvet were serrated. Soon she felt like she was being skinned alive and broiled in the slobber of her feaster.

The hound licked her from toes to thighs, fingers to shoulders. When her limbs and torso were all glistening, the houndmaster said, “Kneel.” She sank to her knees, and so did all the other factory workers, and the hounds bent over them and started working on their heads.

The hound licked her cheeks, licked her forehead, licked her chin and mouth and nose until she inhaled nothing but its putrid breath and sour spittle. More than one worker retched, but not her. She could taste puke at the back of her throat, but her attention was fixed somewhere else.

The man on her right. Scrawny, just like her, just like everyone else in the room, on his knees like all of them. But something was alight in his eyes. Feverish. More feverish than the breaths of the hounds.

The man’s gaze wandered wildly and found her, locked her in. “I don’t think it’s right that we don’t remember,” he said.

“Ssh!” she said, sharp and quick, before she even knew she’d uttered the word, as if her tongue had schemed beyond her awareness.

But still, between every lick the man gasped, “I don’t think…I don’t think…I don’t think it’s right.…”

The young woman’s eyes, saucer-wide, were fixed on him as she endured her own licking with a mounting dread she couldn’t quite comprehend, the sound ssh, ssh, ssh stabbing out of her in rote urgency.

She felt in her bones that she’d been here before. Staring at the man and shushing him as he rambled about something which shouldn’t be said. Realizing, with dismay, that he was never good at protecting himself, and that tonight wouldn’t be an exception. This was a fever dream she’d had before, one she couldn’t remember, not in her head.

But her guts remembered. Her guts, which blubbered with bile rising acidic up her throat.

“Never say you remember,” she said to herself and the man, a whispered warning. Never say you remember, never say you remember, she recited frantically, willing the words to be inscribed at the back of her mind and in her flesh, like a reflex.

The hound finished; her entire head was licked clean. Her panic disappeared the instant its tongue left her skin, the final syllable of her cut-out warning dropping dead on her lips. The man too fell silent. The hounds stepped back.

The factory workers stared at one another in confusion, not remembering why they were on their knees. The young woman looked at the man on her right, but she couldn’t understand why she felt at the pit of her stomach that the man must shut up. The man, after all, was already silent, and she didn’t remember him ever being otherwise.

The houndmaster said, in that same hypnotic voice, “Rise, and go to sleep.”

The young woman, the man on her right, and the other factory workers rose as one and climbed into bed, because that was what they had always done every night since they entered the factory. They fell asleep quickly, because their bodies knew they must. And because all of them were now cleansed, in the most important way.

The young woman and the other factory workers opened their eyes at dawn, when the censers had run out of incense, when the fragrant smog blanketing the air had thinned. She awoke; they awoke; together as one they swung their legs to the floor. By the time the door opened, they were already standing in a neatly spaced line at the feet of their beds. Rote, like they had done this all their lives.

They remembered nothing about the night before. Or the day before, for that matter. But the young woman at the end of the row looked to her right and found a man standing there, but at the sight of his face—which was adorned with a frown, like he was trying to remember—her heartbeat picked up, and she felt the urge to tell him to please not say anything.

Never say you remember.

She didn’t understand why she had this urge. But almost as instinctively as breathing was to her, she knew she should trust her urges.

In came three guards in black uniforms, brass buttons marching down their chests. They were pale, as pale as the bedsheets, paler than the smoke-tainted walls of the room, much paler than the workers themselves. They had muskets slung across their backs, which made the young woman stiffen, feet shifting ever so slightly into a brace position, as if she knew the weapons and uniforms should make her bolt, though she didn’t remember ever seeing them before.

“Recitation,” the guard at the center of the room announced. The other two moved to either end of the room. Together as one they exclaimed, “You are the workers of Bak-Ankham. We take care of you. You have a sickness that makes you unable to hold memories. Do not be alarmed. We take care of you.”

The young woman’s head lashed to the side, to the other workers, all of whom now stared at the guards with eyes blown wide. The man on her right shook his head, lips moving soundlessly. She moved her lips too, a quiet ssh, a plea for him to keep himself safe.

“This factory is your home, your shelter,” the guard continued. “We protect you against yourself, and against the world outside, which is war-torn.” The workers all turned their heads to the window. The young woman, who was closest to the window, saw smoke hanging thick on the horizon, over the shimmering line of a river. It made her heart twist in her chest, though she didn’t remember ever knowing the land beyond the river.

She looked back at the man on her right. The man was looking at her, mouth open like he wanted to call out her name but couldn’t find it in his mind. She didn’t remember her name either, or the man’s name for that matter. But the clenching in her stomach told her she wasn’t supposed to remember. Even if she did, she mustn’t say it.

“We protect you, shelter you, feed you, take care of you,” the guards recited. “In return, you work at the factory, you contribute to our effort toward peace. Every night the hounds cleanse you, and in doing so, they slow the progression of your illness.”

One of the workers raised his hand. “How can we work if we don’t remember?”

He hadn’t even finished his question when the guards said, “Your body will remember.”

All the workers nodded, like this made perfect sense to them, like they had always known—or be trained to know—that in the absence of a solid mind, it was their body that would tell them what to do. And they trusted that, because they had nothing else to trust.

They got dressed, all in the same brown rough spun shirts and pants that might have been white once upon a time. The fabric chafed against the young woman’s skin, but she took a deep breath and ignored it. She marched in line with the other workers, out of the dormitory room and down the stairs, across a courtyard, toward a hulking building with chimneys like fingers raking at the sky. There were other workers in a similar line, on a similar march. They didn’t talk to each other.

In the factory’s anteroom, they put on rubber coveralls, gloves, and boots that hid their entire bodies. Their faces disappeared behind goggles and masks with snout-like attachments. The young woman whimpered. She knew the masks would help her breathe, but still she gasped, sweated, recoiled. She wasn’t the only one.

The factory door opened, and hot air rushed out. Giant metal tanks towered to the ceiling, enveloped by spiral tubes. Occasionally steam would leak off their tops, accompanied by rumbling puffs like the heaving of a heavy beast. The guards took them past the tanks, toward a glass-encased room with smaller tanks that huffed more often, which made the young woman’s muscles stiffen in warning. But the guards also led them past this room, toward a network of conveyor chains and machines hovering over them. At this sight, the young woman was limp with relief.

They settled on the assembly line. The man on her right was still there, and she was vaguely grateful for the masks, because that meant his words were less audible. He was muttering again, though it was muffled by his mask and the factory’s creaks and whirs. The guards shouldn’t be able to hear anything. They mustn’t.

The conveyor chains started moving, bringing cases of hollow cylinders. As one, the workers reached up to the machine hovering over them, pulling it downward. The young woman understood that her job was to ensure the spouts at the machine’s belly were aligned with the cylinders’ mouths. And whatever came out of the spouts, her fingers must be nowhere near them.

The machine whirred. The young woman withdrew her hands. She was relieved to see the man on her right do the same, but the stranger on his other side struggled with their cylinders and spouts, which seemed to have stuck in misalignment.

“Hey!” she heard the muffled shout of the man on her right. “Get away!”

The stranger shouted something back, which she couldn’t hear. The machine whirred louder. A yellowish liquid spurted out.

It spilled right onto the stranger’s gloved hands. Petrified, she watched it pour down the rubber surface of the gloves. A skin-deep relief washed over her—the stranger was safe, surely; the gloves would protect them—but then icy dread shot up her spine.

The seams. The seams never held.

The stranger began screaming, shaking their hands, shaking their gloves loose. The fingers emerging from them were covered with boiling yellow blisters, bubbles of two inches wide close to bursting.

The young woman shouted and lunged at the stranger whose hands were blisters, catching their flailing arms, calming them down, searching for—what? What did her guts tell her?— a piece of cloth, or water, something to wash off the yellow liquid consuming their flesh. But she couldn’t find anything.

“Help!” she shouted. The workers around her recoiled, and a small part of her knew that was the correct, safe response. She turned to the man on her right—hadn’t he wanted to save the stranger?—but the man was clutching his head, a moan building at the back of his throat.

“No,” the young woman whispered. “Ssh. Ssh.”

Never say you remember.

The man on her right added his own shout to the blistered stranger’s screaming. “This has happened before! Don’t you remember?”

“Ssh!” the young woman said, but her voice drowned under the shouts and screams.

The man on her right ripped his mask off. “They made us forget! It’s not right we don’t remember!”

Guards flooded the space, muskets brandished. The young woman threw herself at the man on her right, shaking him. “Ssh, ssh, ssh!”

He didn’t cease his shouts.

One of the guards said, “Man’s got a loose bolt in his head, been so for a while. It’s time.”

Another guard nodded. “Someone call the houndmaster.”

The man shook the young woman loose until she fell to the floor, then he launched himself at the guards, still shouting the same things that shouldn’t be said. Icy dread and fiery panic shot up the young woman’s veins. She wanted to call out the man’s name, felt the urge to bid him farewell when she still could. But she didn’t remember his name, nor did she understand why she needed to say goodbye.

The guards caught the man, restraining him, stripping him of his coverall. The injured stranger stood forgotten, whimpering softly, cradling their blistered hands.

The hounds came, three of them. They looked menacing under the daylight streaming from the windows, their black fur gleaming, sunlight glinting off their bared saber teeth and the slobber dripping down their maws.

A man in a white robe held the chains attached to the hounds’ collar. “Reconstruction,” he announced.

The hound in the middle stalked toward the man who used to stand on the young woman’s right. In her terror, sensations flashed through her body: ghost memories of her muscles tensing in readiness, her legs shoulder-width apart and bent, her fingers curling around some kind of weapon, the warmth and solidity of someone else’s back against her own. But a fight was inconceivable to her now, for she was on the floor overcome with sobs and a weakness, like her body knew there was nothing she could do now.

The hound growled louder as it approached the man. Its lips were curled, barring its saber teeth. She noticed the black fur framing its snout was peppered with white, as if it had started aging. The other hounds didn’t have a drop of white. She found herself hoping this hound with flecks of soft cloud would be kinder than its siblings.

She was wrong.

It lunged at the man and severed his neck with one crunch of its jaws. A fountain of blood spurted out, arching red before splattering on the floor. All the workers screamed, but the young woman couldn’t, for it felt like it was her own neck being ripped apart.

The man’s head rolled on the floor, his mouth frozen open in a silent scream, eyes rolling back. His upper half dangled from the hound’s maw as it chewed, crunched, squelched, swallowed. Blood pooled on the floor.

When the hound was done with the chunk, it dove in for the rest, ripping off a foot, flipping it into the air and catching it with open mouth, swallowing it whole. It did the same with the other foot, then thighs, then shins. The lower half of the man’s torso came last. Then it slurped off the intestines that had fallen on the floor and licked the pool of blood clean.

It left the man’s head alone. The houndmaster grabbed it by the hair, his movements almost loving compared to the hound’s violence. Then he was gone, and the hounds with him.

That night, as the factory workers stood waiting at the feet of their beds in a state of stupor, the young woman looked to her right and found only empty air. But in automation her lips still curled and said ssh, ssh, ssh, and to herself she recited, Never say you remember.

But she still remembered the way the man disappeared into the hound’s maw. Her sobs returned. Her body was wracked with a bone-deep grief that was beyond her mind to explain, a loss so deep it was insensible.

They made us forget, the man had said.

She knew she shouldn’t consider the possibility of this being true, just like she shouldn’t say she remembered, if she ever remembered.

She wanted to remember him. She wanted to carry him with her. She would inscribe him onto her body, because her body would remember.

So she closed her eyes and relived the severing of the man’s neck, the way the hound’s white-flecked snout tore into the neck’s fragile curve, ripping tendons and arteries alike. Her hand flew to her own neck, fingernails grating against her skin and drawing blood, etching pain onto her flesh.

And at the same time, she thought of him, of his body disappearing down the hound’s maw. She imagined what it would’ve felt like if it had been her instead of him. Once again she was awash in the terror that had clenched her when his blood spilled to the factory floor.

As a hound licked her clean, she pressed the terror even deeper into her flesh, willing her body to remember this, in the hope that it would also remember the man.

In the morning, the young woman got out of bed and looked to her right and found only emptiness. There was emptiness in her heart too, one she couldn’t explain beyond a vague sense that it had to do with the occupancy beside her. She pressed a hand to her chest, trying to rub the ache away. She found tears on her cheeks too, and sobs at the back of her throat. She couldn’t tell where those had come from.

It was only that night, upon seeing the hounds, that she got the first inkling of what had caused her hollowness. At the sight of the hound with white flecks around its maw, her head started pounding, her neck searing with phantom pain. And though her eyes were wide open and she wasn’t dreaming, she found herself not in her cold dorm room but on the warm factory floor, a white-flecked hound ripping her apart. She knew, somehow, that this wasn’t something she had experienced herself—this had happened to a man who used to stand by her side.

She shook her head until the image went away, and she was back in the incense-laden dorm room, her gaze slipping down the row of hounds before her, seeking a white-flecked maw.

Yes. There it was. Just two spots to her right. The hound with the white-flecked maw was the biggest in the room, biggest because its belly was bulging, as if pregnant. As if holding the undigested body of a man.

That night, as another hound licked her clean, she thought again of the man who was torn apart by the white-flecked hound, and the ripping agony of his consumption. She pressed these sensations into her body, unrelenting even as one of the hounds bathed her in its putrid slobber. She did this every night since then, and every night since then, she would lay eyes on the man in white and the hounds that came with him, and she would remember—very quietly—the man who used to fill the emptiness on her right, and the white-flecked hound that consumed him.

The white-flecked hound grew more and more bloated. On the dozenth night after the man’s consumption, it showed up more bloated than ever. It marched into the room confident as ever but sagged as it stood before the row of workers, as if it had only feigned the strength to hold its own weight.

“Recondition,” announced the houndmaster, whose eyes were focused on the workers and not on the pregnant hound.

The other hounds stalked forward, but the pregnant, white-flecked hound merely trembled, knees bending like its weight was pulling it closer to the earth. A growl and a wheeze rose from its gullet. The other hounds froze, massive heads turning to it. The workers held their breaths.

The young woman never took her gaze off the white-flecked hound. She watched its bulging belly, watched it tremble, watched something inside it shift. Sharp bony ridges rose under the skin of its belly, as if something was thrashing against the confines of its flesh.

The hound choked. The hound opened its mouth wide, retching.

The houndmaster hesitated, clicked his tongue in impatience and annoyance. Then he announced in a resigned voice, “Rebirth.”

All the other hounds stepped back, giving the white-flecked hound a wide berth. The white-flecked hound retched again, opened its mouth wider, wider, wider until its jaw creaked, until a loud crack sounded and the jaw went unhinged. The corners of its mouth teared, spurting blood.

It bowed, laying its head closer to the ground until its unhinged jaw touched the black floor. It retched, and something inside it squelched. Blood streamed out of its mouth, at first thinned with spittle, then thickened with something membranous.

Then, a small paw, climbing out of its gullet. Claws finding purchase on its tongue, tearing its pink surface as the owner of the claws dragged itself out of the hound’s belly. The hound gagged and choked, wheezed and whimpered, blood and drool dribbling down its chin. The beast in its belly pulled itself out, and soon the paw became two paws, then a slender muscular leg covered in matted black fur. Then, at last, the head of a juvenile hound, about as large as a child’s head.

The juvenile hound extricated itself from the maw of the white-flecked hound, shaking off blood and spittle as it stepped onto the dark floor. Raising its head, it turned its gaze to the young woman.

She cried out, took a step toward it with her arm reaching out, though she didn’t understand why she was doing so. But before she could reach the newborn hound and embrace it, the houndmaster in the white robe snapped, “Recondition.”

The other hounds stalked forward, keeping her and the other factory workers captive before their threatening maws. Helpless, the workers were bathed once more in spittle and snorts.

All of them fell asleep without remembering a juvenile hound clawing itself out of the belly of another hound. But the young woman had burned into her body the sensations of what had happened. The cracking of the hound’s jaw as it unhinged, the claws tearing its tongue, the shine of mucous blood against the black tiles of the dorm room. The vomit climbing up her throat as she watched a hound climb out of the maw of another hound. She knew, instinctively, that it was the man who used to occupy the bed on her right, hound-like though he’d become.

The young woman’s sleep wasn’t quiet as usual; it was plagued with nightmares of something red against a black floor, a person coated in blood. Even in her sleep she felt it was someone she’d cared about, who’d been twisted and contorted into a collection of sharp edges bound by rotten sinews. But she wanted to hold him all the same. Needed to, more than ever.

When she awoke, her body remained clenched in the horror of the nightmare, and in her chest sat a persistent hollow ache. She got out of bed under the grievous yellow of faint morning sunlight. She turned and caught the sight of the empty bed next to hers, and the black floor of the room, which gave off a faint shine as if someone had spilled some liquid and failed to clean it thoroughly, leaving it half-dried.

She realized the drying liquid was reddish. She realized it was blood.

Nausea seized her, a wave of disgust and grief that took her aback. She retched. At the back of her mind flashed a vision of the same dormitory room, with the same black floor, but in darkness punctured by pinprick candlelights. There was a hound with an unhinged jaw, and a man in the shape of a hound crawling out of its belly.

For the rest of the day, she stood and walked and worked in a hunch, like she was in pain, like she was holding with her whole body something that mustn’t spill. She kept quiet, waiting for nightfall like she was the moon itself.

When night did come, she stood expectant at the foot of her bed. Something, something was going to happen. A cold draft carried the sound of bells and clattering claws. She held her breath. The door opened. The hounds stalked into the room, and among them was a hound smaller than others. The juvenile hound looked right at her, like he too had been waiting all day. He bounded across the room to stand before her, metal chain stretching almost taut from the new collar now clamped around his neck. He whimpered, staring at her with wet eyes.

“Recondition,” the houndmaster announced.

The juvenile hound stalked forward, but instead of running its tongue over her, he nuzzled her cheek, a warm and sour kiss. He lay his head on her shoulder, chest fluttering against her with bunny-soft heartbeats.

She gasped, crumbled, choking with sobs. It’s him, he remembers me. She wrapped her arms around him and sank into his slick black fur. Her tears bathed him just as his tears rolled down her nape, searing like tea out of a boiling kettle. Her heart soared and soared and soared, an unbearable lightness, so light she didn’t mind the sobs stealing breaths from her lungs.

The houndmaster spoke again, more insistent this time, “Recondition.”

The juvenile hound raised his head and turned to the houndmaster. He bared his fangs, shaking his head.

“Don’t you forget, this is an act of mercy,” the houndmaster said. “Her life is easier, less painful, if she doesn’t remember.”

The juvenile hound barked. The sound of it echoed, piercing her ears.

The houndmaster rattled the chains he held, picked the end of that which led to the juvenile hound’s collar.

“Recondition,” he said, a calm warning.

The juvenile hound bent his knees in preparation for a lunge, muscles rippling down his length. His lips curled out in a growl, in a bark, and he launched himself at the houndmaster.

She watched, and it was like he was frozen in the air, black sinews curving in graceful violence. Spit trickled from the corners of his bared mouth like glittering diamonds.

Her body knew, beyond the reasonable doubt of her clouded mind, that he’d fought for her before, in exactly that roaring way. And all this time she too had done nothing else but fight for him, only that she was never one who roared.

Never say you remember, she’d told him. That was how she’d tried to protect him.

The houndmaster tightened his hand around the hound’s chain. A bright blue crackle zapped down its links to the hound’s collar, and there it lit up brighter, sizzling, singeing, roasting until the air filled with the smell of burnt flesh.

“No!” she exclaimed as the hound dropped limp to the floor.

“Would you risk her reconstruction?” the houndmaster’s voice rang. He kneeled before the juvenile hound, who trembled in his effort to rise. “I’ve been kind enough to leave her be, despite her leaking memories. But we both know she cannot be allowed to remember. You must cleanse her. Or do you want her shackled in the body of a dog?”

The hound growled. The houndmaster sent another blue crackle down his collar, and it didn’t stop until smoke and the steam of boiled blood rose from around his neck.

She screamed and rushed toward him, to hold his sweat-slicked body. He lay limp in her embrace, eyes rolling back in search of hers.

The houndmaster said again, “Recondition.”

The juvenile hound moved agonizingly to face her. Tears streamed down his face, a cry escaping from between his saber teeth. His tongue tumbled out like he no longer had the energy to keep it in.

“No,” she begged. “I want to remember you.”

The hound shook his head.

“Didn’t you want to remember too?” she said. “Let me remember you.”

He lay his forehead against hers as their tears melted together.

Then, he began cleansing her.

“No, no, no,” she said, each syllable stabbing out of her the way ssh, ssh, ssh used to. She wanted to push him away, but he lay a paw on her, keeping her in place, as if saying, Never say you remember—never remember—not at all.

She sobbed. After all her pleas for him to be silent, to keep himself safe, he had finally listened. Not to keep himself safe, but to keep her safe.

But now, she had something else she wanted more than the safety of silence, just like he did before he became a hound. She wanted to remember him, to know him entirely: who he was as a human, how they’d gotten to know each other, why she yearned and feared for him even when she barely remembered him.

Because it was one thing to carry so much grief and longing, and another to not understand where that agony was coming from.

“I’ll remember you,” she whispered. “I’ll know you entirely. I’ll find my own way.”

And that feeling was what she willed her body to remember, before her cleansing completed. That, and the sensation of his body warm against hers, the searing teardrops on her skin, the smell of burnt flesh.

She woke up with an ironclad sense of resolve, though the why of it remained veiled in her misty mind. She sat clutching her head, digging around for a memory, a shred of explanation. She found only a mute echo. But when she rose to join the other workers at the feet of their beds, when the faded incense smoke revealed the lingering smell of blood and burnt flesh, everything came back to her.

I’ll remember you. I’ll find my own way.

She recited it all to herself throughout the day. She thought and plotted. This wasn’t easy to do with her hazy mind, but she’d bite the inside of her cheek, and the pain would clear her head. If she wanted to get to know him, she’d need some time with him, without the guards. There must be a place the hounds went when they weren’t performing their duties—a kennel, perhaps. She didn’t know where this was. She very well couldn’t ask the guards or the houndmaster.

When she was working the vent valves of the factory’s giant tanks, she came to an idea for what to do. She would stay up past the cleansing. Her body had built little paths back to the memories of the man on her right; surely it could do the same for one command. And then, once the houndmaster was gone and the guards relaxed because they thought everyone had gone to sleep, she’d follow the smell of the hounds’ sour breaths.

To remember all this, she bit hard into the palm of her hand, gnawing at it until she drew blood. With the eruption of pain, she inscribed her message onto her body: Don’t fall asleep. Find him and know him. This is what this wound means.

That night when the hounds came again, when she saw the juvenile hound with his neck still peeling and cracking, when he stared at her with glistening eyes, she held her own tears and pretended she hadn’t remembered him. When he cleansed her, she closed her eyes and clenched her fist tight, letting the throbbing wound on her palm remind her of what she must do. Don’t fall asleep, don’t fall asleep. Find him and know him.

She didn’t fall asleep. Her palm continued throbbing; her body remembered. She held her breath as the houndmaster and the hounds exited the room with bells ringing and claws clattering. She counted to a hundred, then silently climbed out of bed.

The corridors and stairwells were empty, and she could indeed smell traces of the hounds in the close air. It led her outside. The full moon shone bright, illuminating tracks left by the hounds’ paws on the courtyard’s dirt. She followed these, careful to stay in the shadows.

Soon she found out where all the guards had gone: the guardhouse, now the only lit building in the compound. Laughter and the clanking of ale tankards echoed from within. She carefully avoided the building, finding the deepest shadows that still put her within sight of the hounds’ footprints.

She smelled the kennel before she saw it, pungent with sweat and piss. It was a squat stone building away from the others, and when she got close enough, she saw it was built like a jail. Each hound had its own cell barely bigger than their bodies, sealed with metal bars.

For many a breath she stood at the shadow of the building closest to the kennel, watching, waiting with a pounding heart. When no one passed, she crept toward the kennel and peered into the cells, looking for her hound. They stared back at her knowingly, some with narrowed eyes, some with widened eyes, but none of them made a noise, as if they understood why she was there and accepted her. It occurred to her that once upon a time, all these hounds had been workers of the factory too.

She halted before a cell in the middle of the row. Her hound was there, snout peeking from between the bars, panting, as if he’d been waiting for her.

He whined, a sharp urgent sound. She gripped the bars because she felt like losing her balance.

“Do you remember me?” she asked.

He whimpered and laid his forehead on her fingers at the bar. Then he raised a paw and scratched lightly at her fingers around the bar, as if trying to peel away her grip. He grunted, nuzzling her away.

She held on. “You remember. How much do you remember?” Everything, she hoped, even things from before. “What’s your name?” She paused, bit her lip, then gestured at the ground. “Can you spell?”

He hesitated, but when he looked at her, there was longing in his eyes. He raised his paw, and—with awkward movements because hounds were made for ripping, not writing—spelled a name letter by letter on the ground.

“Peteya,” she whispered, voice cracking. The sound of the name reverberated in her, and it felt true. “What’s my name?”

Tears pooled in his eyes. The whimper he let out was mournful yet also gentle, so gentle, like the hands of a soul-friend stitching back the wound bleeding you dry. Tesua, he spelled. And she whispered it, tasted it on her tongue, let it call her body to attention until she felt more awake than ever. Her body knew better, and it knew her name.

“Who are you?” she asked, her other hand reaching to hold the hound’s face—Peteya’s face. “Why do I yearn and grieve for you so?”

He hesitated, raising and dropping his paw a few times. Warm tears leaked from his eyes and pooled in the pocket between her fingers and his fur.

The young woman, Tesua—she must get used to her own name—drew her fingers tighter around the hound’s cheek, and begged like her entire self depended on it, “Please, I need to know. I need to underst—”

“Hey!”

Tesua froze. Pebbles crunched behind her. A ray of light fell on the hound Peteya’s face, reflecting off his wide eyes. He shifted his stance, whole body tensing, teeth bared, growling.

She turned around to face two guards. One rushed at her and pinned her against the bars, squeezing breath out of her lungs. The metal pressed cold and biting against her spine.

The other guard pierced the night with a whistle blow.

“Got a screw loose in your head, huh?” said the guard holding her, his breath stale with ale. “Thinking it’s time to be a dog, huh?”

Peteya barked, wielding his claws from between the bars, tearing the guard’s sleeves and drawing blood. The guard cursed and yanked Tesua away, keeping her arms pinned behind her. She yelped in pain.

Shouts sounded from afar, followed by pebbles crunching under running feet.

“Please!” Tesua screamed. “It’s not his fault! It’s me! I just need help!”

“Clearly you do,” the guard said. “Help getting eaten!”

The newly arriving guards burst into laughter. “Can’t wait to join your people, huh?”

“You’ve always been dogs all along, all of you.”

“Filthy, stinking vermin. Still think you’ll win this war?”

The guard behind her never loosened his grip as he laughed. “Call the houndmaster,” he said.

She struggled; Peteya barked and rattled the bars. The guards stayed in place with their grating laugh and bruising grip.

When the houndmaster came, he didn’t contribute his own laughter. He gave her one placid look.

“Please!” she begged.

He walked over to one of the cells and ushered its occupant outside, clipping a length of chain to the hound’s collar. “Reconstruction,” he said.

Peteya roared and threw his body against the bars.

The nameless hound grunted, looked at the houndmaster, at Peteya, then at her. It stood unmoving.

“Reconstruction,” the houndmaster repeated.

The hound whined. It took a step back, then another, head shaking, body trembling.

It occurred to Tesua that perhaps, in the life before this factory, they all had come from the same place, had known each other, spoken each other’s names. Wouldn’t it be harder to kill someone whose name you knew, and who knew her own name?

The houndmaster yanked at the chain, sending down a blue crackle. The nameless hound jolted, smoke around its neck, the smell of burnt hair and singed flesh wafting out.

“Reconstruction,” the houndmaster said again, clearly a warning this time. “You know I’d hate to put you to sleep. This is your third chance at life, and she still has her third chance too.”

The hound let out a moan. When the houndmaster sent another crackle to its collar, it finally lunged forward, maw wide open.

The cracking of her own ribs echoed loud in her head. The shock of the pain turned her eyesight red. She wanted to scream, but only a gurgling noise came out. Belatedly she realized she was trying to speak over a river of her own blood.

With a loud squelch and a sudden toppling weightlessness, her entrails spilled out. And she thought, briefly, that they were just red snakes dipped in oil, nothing that used to be a part of her.

Then, mercifully, darkness claimed her.

For a few turnings of the sun, the young woman born as Tesua was no more. Or perhaps it was more accurate to say she was no more than half-digested meat and fragmented bones, floating in a soup of blood. The hound’s stomach was a warm, dark, pulsing hollowness, a perverted womb. Here she was turned from human to hound: soft flesh becoming chewy sinews, arms becoming front limbs, hair becoming fur.

The fetal hound who’d been Tesua—was again becoming Tesua—had no head, for Tesua’s human head was left severed on the kennel’s courtyard, at the feet of the hound who’d been Peteya—was Peteya. But the rest of her body had enough soul in it, and the soul remembered even better than the body did. And because of that, it knew how to build an entirely new cranium cradling an entirely new mind, one that hadn’t been nicked, poisoned, and washed clean by the theurgists, surgeons, and soldiers of Bak-Ankham. Much as they disliked the creation of a new mind free of their tampering, they had no choice. Their magic allowed only the shackling of the mind or the shackling of the body, not both at the same time.

And that was why, when a head and an unshackled mind formed on the fetal hound that was Tesua, she came to remember her past. It didn’t all come at once, of course. But in the warm wetness of the hound’s belly, she came to dream about the land beyond the shimmering river. She knew the land was hers, her people’s. It used to be green instead of ash-black, its fresh air smelling of grass, not smoke. The river used to bathe her, and it had felt like a caress, not serrated velvet; its water cool and clarifying, not blistering.

Blisters. Yes, she’d had those too. Not as a factory worker—before that, when she was fighting for the grassy plains beyond the river. They had…they had dropped…right into her village…canisters of poison gas that blistered.

Poison gas they made her produce, later, as a worker of Bak-Ankham. Her new mind burned with this realization, flailed in screaming guilt. She remembered now the gas’s boiling heat as it wafted over her village, the way it blew her skin up like a balloon, the screaming of her folks as they inhaled air that burned their lungs. And to think she’d been the hands dealing this boiling death to her own people…

She never meant to. Never wanted her people’s blood on her hands.

It was their fault—the powers of Bak-Ankham. They were turning her into a hound, but before that, they’d turned her into something else: a worker, a weapon, a maker of massacres.

They would pay for this most of all.

She remembered the night of her capture. Remembered fighting with Peteya, his back against hers, swords swinging in the same rhythm they’d practiced together through their youths, as their clan’s bonded shields. This one was a losing battle, they’d known—they’d lost too many of their shields and got no time to train new pairs.

She had wanted to flee, to rebuild and fight another day. He had wanted to fulfill his duty. This was both the most admirable and infuriating thing about him: He was never one to back down, so stubborn was he, so determined, so wedded to his duties. Whenever she faltered, whenever her muscles burned with leaden exhaustion, she’d take a look at him and the unwavering swing of his sword, his incessant battle cries, and she’d feel as replenished as if she’d taken a long nap under the cool shade of a banyan tree in the summer.

In contrast to his brash and ever-burning fire, she was always the one who reminded him to get some sleep, that a torn tendon needed six weeks to heal, that if they didn’t stop to fill their flasks right now it would be days before they’d come across another river. And on that day of their devastating loss, she told him it made more sense to give up their village and retreat, find somewhere to hide and recover, maybe gather others of their clan who had fled when the soldiers of Bak-Ankham approached. And then they could fight another day.

He told her, teary eyed, that he would rather haunt his home than leave it, would rather die right now than be their clan’s last surviving shield. She had always been the voice of reason; he had always been the more honorable.

He’d kept spitting and screaming at their captors and conquerors far after she’d fallen silent. He’d only fallen silent long after, when he’d become a hound holding her life in his paws, that night in the dormitory when the houndmaster threatened her consumption if he wouldn’t cleanse her. When they were shields, he’d cared for her in his own way: by pushing her to fight and fulfill her sworn duty, no matter the costs. Now, he’d cared for her in her way: by keeping silent, by keeping safe, by carefully calculating the distance between resistance and survival.

But where had that led them? Right back to the same place, the same shackles.

On the dozenth night after her consumption, the hound Tesua felt a quickening within her host. It was time. She stirred awake, stretching her limbs against stomach lining and spleen and liver, pressing against ribs that arched over her like a dark roof. She found the opening to the gullet and crawled her way up it, propelled by her host’s retching.

She came into the world in a flood of blood and spittle. She opened her eyes to a bright night, much like the night of her consumption, though not the same. With her first gasp of breath she was overwhelmed by the smell of piss from the kennel, the incense smoke clinging to the houndmaster’s robe, the alcohol-tinged breaths of the guards, the flint in their muskets.

And Peteya. The familiar scent of his sweat, the heat radiating off his clenched muscles. Their eyes met, and for a second she saw the old fire that had propelled him into battles, that had sustained her own fight.

But then it flickered off, and in its place there was only fear.

He barked, launched himself at the bars of his cell. His claws raked thin air, helpless to reach her. The houndmaster shot him a look, and he dropped low on the ground like he was bowing, his ears lying flat, tearful eyes fixed on her. The whines escaping him sounded pitiful, like a desperate plea to stand down so she could live.

This, above all, lit fury in her heart. They’d broken him so thoroughly. He used to be so proud and immovable; he never would’ve abandoned the fight, not even for her sake.

She shook herself straight. The houndmaster clapped a collar and chain around her neck, but before he could do anything more, she threw him off and spun to face the guards. She bared her teeth at them, at the people who’d kept her down and would perhaps always keep her down.

I remember you. I remember all the things you’ve done to me.

And if a beast was all she’d be for the rest of her life, she’d make use of it. They’d taken the fight out of him, but she still had a piece of it—she was a piece of him, after all. She would rise, in his name, as he had always done.

She lunged at the guards, bounding across the courtyard so fast no one realized she’d moved. In this moment, before her collar singed her, before she could be reminded of the pain of fighting back, before this pain shackled and silenced her, she was most powerful.

Because now she remembered. For whatever it was worth, she remembered.

 

(Editors’ Note: A. W. Prihandita is interviewed by Caroline M. Yoachim in this issue.)

© 2026 A. W. Prihandita