He'd often heard the phrase "blood running cold" and until arriving on Deus hadn't ever properly experienced it, not really. A sick chill swept through him and his face was white and livid and bloodless. He was spared the humiliation of having to answer that--and what was there to say? To deny it would be ridiculous; to attempt some observation that at least he'd known when to quit would have been self-defeating; the world emptied out and left in the place of everything that he could have said a deep, stomach-knotting shame--he was spared because the clone, sensing the momentary distraction, sensing the sudden weakness in his hands, broke free even though in the confines of the elevator there was nowhere for it to go.
Predictably it launched itself at Taym, and the distraction afforded by wrestling it back down, pinning it to the floor of the elevator car, was blessedly effective and tragically brief. At the end of it he didn't dare look at H, didn't dare look at what he knew to be a face unruffled by both Taym's humiliation and by the sudden outburst of violence, both incidents the merest blips--all the enormity of Taym's experience, of his hate and his shame and his fear, an endless stream of noise and not so much as the hint of a signal.
(Five, six hours prior Taym had been kneeling on cold tile with a thirteen year old boy trembling in his arms. Five or six hours: the thought of it, flitting across his mind now, was like a memory filed away months ago.)
He said nothing. He knelt on the clone's back on the floor of the car, wiping his own blood off his lip onto the back of his hand and only succeeding in putting more on his face, and he breathed deep and hard and steady and he waited for this ordeal, this one last task in a long day, to be over.
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