His legs were watery; his hands were wracked with intermittent tremors. He inwardly hoped that everyone came out of the damned pods looking this rough, and knew that they didn't. Probably they rolled up onto their teenaged heels with a smile and a salute. Probably they didn't feel like they were going to heave their stomach acid up if they thought too hard about the vague snippets of memory that were piling up, threatening to demand attention at any moment. He felt convinced that he had died. Repeatedly, somehow.

Malneirophrenia: the feeling of uneasiness after a nightmare. The opposite of euneirophrenia. Mal- and eu-. Prefixes from the Latin and the Greek. Odd linguistic asymmetry.

But he did not process any of these thoughts into the corresponding emotions. Where nausea and shakiness persisted, no associated anxiety or fear or even triumph manifested. Malneirophrenia was just another interesting word. It had no application here.

Maybe others felt shock, or grim resignation. Satisfaction. Terror.

Whoever was having those feelings right now, whatever version of himself, wherever it was, it wasn't the same person doing the thinking.

Aside from the buzzing craving for a cigarette (among other things), anything approaching feeling had neatly detached from him, drifting about ten feet off to the left, it seemed like. His brain helpfully floated the terms for him: depersonalization and derealization. His hands moved along the walls of the dark room without his input; his feet took steps and his brain absently wondered who'd told them to do that.

They'd told him he'd know. He coughed into his elbow.

Touching the tablets brought a certain level of sensory input, not quite painful but distinctly unpleasant, and so he at first made it a point to drag his fingers across as many as he could. The little jolts did nothing to resolve the sensation of watching himself through a screen, and so he pulled up slowly to a halt, his arms useless and limp at his sides.

"I don't know what to do," he said aloud. His own voice made him jump, like a stranger's voice.

Most of us don't.

Whatever he'd been expecting, it hadn't been that. The voice was soft and feminine; it sounded young, and stern, and disciplined. It'll slither into your head and you'll just have to deal with it, Rep had said.

It's worth the price you pay, Rep had said.

Again, his brain obligingly furnished a word: "Cynosure," he whispered. He watched himself put a hand again to the wall, to a tablet marked with the shape of a knife.

If you like to think of it that way, sir.

He put his shaky fingers to the edges of the stone, prying it gently loose. "Don't call me sir."

I'm sure we'll synergize wonderfully, sir.

He realized he didn't have to talk aloud. He didn't know how he knew this, and the realization turned his stomach, and he was relieved by how immediate and real the nausea was. Don't call me sir. It makes me feel old.

All right, she said. Don't be afraid. You're doing fine, she added. He wanted to say that he wasn't afraid, that he wasn't anything. That the fear existed, and he was aware of it, but that it failed to find a home. That some receptor, somewhere, was turned off. He didn't.

The tablet came loose, and then was not there. What he had instead, by some process he had not quite understood, was a foot long dark blade, the hilt in his palm the cool, ridged surface of an antler. A rough mark gleamed gold-white in the dark. He turned the blade in his fingers, held it in the ice-pick grip of a street-trained knife fighter, the sort of grip that'd get you laughed out town by a professional, but the kind that maneuvered and turned with the absent flick of a wrist. It felt right. Who are you?

Fionnghal, sir.

Don't call me sir. That's a hell of a name. Can I call you Fiona?

If you're feeling informal. What would you like me to call you, then?

Obadiah. Taym, if you're feeling informal.

I look forward to working with you, Obadiah.

And then he grinned a grin full of teeth, and his sudden, nervous laugh was like a cough and a bark. The blade dissipated; a cold band of steel circled his finger. I'll try not to let you down, sweetheart.

And I the same, sir.

Don't call me sir.

Don't call me sweetheart, was the prim and disapproving reply. He grinned again.

He ran his thumb around the ring, and when he took a step to go back the way he'd come it accompanied the breath-catching shock of falling into his body when a flying dream suddenly ended. Reality tipped back in in a gentle surge of fear. Relief came in on a tide of anxiety.

Let's get to work, sweetheart.

Yes, sir.