He ran a hand over the stubble on his head. It was weird to him that he’d been given so much control over his bodily functions and yet still found himself making nervous gestures. For some reason talking about her made him want to cover his face. The impulse was wired into him, deeper than the carbon fiber that laced his bones.

“That sounds tough,” Sardar said. He managed to look concerned without showing pity. “I can’t imagine having all these memories floating around with no throughline to connect them together. It must hurt.”

Roland shrugged. “What hurts most is knowing that it should hurt more. I don’t remember enough to give the pain its proper due.”

They were quiet for a bit. Roland finished the blunt and put it out on his right index finger. Sardar pulled a bronze flask out from his jacket pocket, took a belt and then offered it to Roland. It was Laphroaig whiskey. Even if he hadn’t been chromed to the gills Roland would’ve recognized that smell from three feet away. He took a gulp from the flask and passed it back. Sardar broke the silence again.

“Look, maybe I’m reading things wrong but…we’ve got some tents set up near the APC. You up for a fuck?”

Roland looked the man up and down again. Sardar was a good looking guy. Short, broad with muscular arms and a comfortable belly paunch. He had a neat-trimmed beard and curly black hair.

“Yeah, alright.”

It was pretty good sex. Nothing to blow Roland’s mind but the release provided a quantum of chill to calm the pangs of memory. Afterwards, Sardar fell asleep nuzzled into his shoulder. Roland didn’t particularly feel like cuddling but he sensed the other man needed the human contact. So he laid there with him for a couple of hours, rolled and smoked two more blunts and tried not to think about the lives he’d ended that morning.

A little after noon, Bigsby came by and knocked on the tent flap.

“Sar’, Roland, el jefe’s here. Clean up your fuckstink and meet us by the APC.”

They did. Five minutes later, the whole squad had assembled around the Mattis. Ryan looked more or less recovered from his injuries. Azime also seemed good as new. Nadine was still pretty bandaged, and her eyes were lidded and unfocused from blood loss and opiates. Will had brewed up a large French press of coffee. He busied himself pouring measures of it out into hemp-foam cups. Roland took one and drained it in a single mighty gulp. It was proper post-human strength coffee. The caffeine rush mingled with the opiates and THC already flooding his synapses and brought him to a lovely half-lucid state of quasiwareness.

“Did you guys fuck?” Pedro finally asked, after about a minute of staring at Roland and Sardar and asking the same question with his eyes.