The Kiss of the Sphinx
One layer of skin at a time. The cost of failure didn't sound so bad at first.
I mean, humans have what, seven layers of epidermis or something like that?
He had so many tries to figure out the Sphinx's riddle.
Yeah...
He looked down at his hands, winced from the pain and took off his spacesuit's glove. The hand was... Well, it was sinewy. He flexed the fingers, he could see the muscles on his lower arm pulling against the tendons that controlled the fingers. Well, look at that! There were no muscles inside the hand, only the one for the thumb.
How interesting.
And, ow.
Actually, he didn't hurt at all. That was three tries ago, when he gave the wrong answers and the top layers of his skin got peeled off. After a few tries, there was no pain, only the aftertho
