Zero Point One Zero Eight
I have cleaned four hundred and eleven latrines and I can tell you what species used each one without looking.
Sevi is a Meren: one metre fifty-one, thirty-eight kilograms, sanitation detail, tiers nine through fourteen of a warship eleven kilometres long. His species was taken in a single afternoon by four ships, because it had nothing to shoot back with.
When he speaks out of turn, they put him on the firing range as a moving target. He is supposed to last eleven seconds. He gets to forty-one metres - and somebody writes it down.
So they take the arm and give him a better one. Then the leg. Then the eye, the spine, the lungs. Nine years of it, and every time he wakes he is faster, sharper, and further from whoever he used to be. The fear goes. The hunger goes. The weight behind the sternum goes.
And he is glad.
By the ninth year he is a champion of the clan, sworn to a household, in love with the Suzerain's daughter, and following something that has been calling him since the fifth year - which he has decided is his purpose.
It is not his purpose.
A novel about the seduction of being made into a weapon, and about what an empire actually measures when it says it is testing your worth.
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