"Ex Muro" originally appeared in Dana William Paxson's short fiction collection Neuron Tango from Scorpius Digital Publishing.

Author's Note: "What happens to the mind of a serial killer after that mind has been in prison for ten thousand years? Jono is one possible answer, but at first he repelled me. The first few pages of this story sat untouched for several years, and then I learned to hear the rest of Jono's dreadful thoughts and moves. His tale is removed from our world by light-years and millennia, but its street children are near-kin to the technosavages of war-torn countries we know all too well. As I wrote down Jono's words, I began to wonder: Is he lying to me? Just how far from us is he, really?"

ELECTRIC DAWN APPROACHES. I stretch my arm out before me into the corridor dark, luxuriating. The skin of my upper arm tightens and thins out where it becomes one with the wall in which I am embedded. It tightens and thins, but it refuses to break. Damn its strength!

Every so often in the slow-walking years I tried to rip it, tear myself free with these long heavy fingernails, and walk out into this darkness like those people who pass by me once in a long time. Jono is my name, the name I forgot for too long. Jono, who took so many men and women and hollowed out their skins and stuffed them lifelike and put them back in their places in life to be found making little endless movements and shedding endless tears.

Twelve thousand years imprisoned here, and no one remembers me, except to descend two or three hundred levels in this ageless underground City, to laugh and point and wonder at the man locked in the stone wall.

I will make them all remember me again.

I thrust my neck and jaw forward, straining against the bond between my toughened skin and the stone wall around me. This time I will stay uncaught, and I will take many human insides and make of them a single flesh creature, tubes and bags and vessels and cords and muscles and bones and nerves, a great heaving sentient thing to be left in the fountain at Aswal Narr. A living, sobbing memorial to my long power and skill as a maker. My ancient vats are waiting.

I count the days in this underground world by the brightening and dimming of the corridor ceiling lights, synthetic memories of the sun seven hundred levels above this empty street. The last passer-by here, maybe ten years ago, an andro woman laughing and drunk with hallucins, left a shard of cryssteel on the floor. Since then, four thousand synthetic dawns have passed in this dusty stone hallway, and each day I reached for that tiny shard and came just short. Until today.