Barely breathing, he lay on the abandoned shore, only dimly aware, now, of the muffled sound of fogbound breakers. As his consciousness ebbed, the expiring light of late afternoon gave way to the inky blackness of a cloud-heavy night. At last there remained only a single memory, of the warmth of a hand that had been in his. He lay motionless in the sand, the hand that had held Gina’s clutching and unclutching, but filling only with the cold bits of glass that the tide was bringing in.

Had he not been designed biology, Mark would never have survived the exposure of that rainy night, let alone the trauma of being blown out of the shaft he had been descending. He could not know that the bomb had detonated not in his arms, but more than twenty miles farther down. However, he could also not know the extent of his injuries, the burns, the fearsome radiation poisoning, the breaks he had endured, the blows he had taken, all far worse than his all-too-hopeful self-diagnosis had revealed.

He lay like that all night, not moving, not even when the tide came around him, almost lifting him and drawing him with it into the sea and memory. But when dawn came, he was still breathing, and his pain was what finally returned him to consciousness.

Opening his eyes brought only glaring whiteness, and the first thought that passed through his mind was that he was blind. This was not the case, however, as he found when he sat up and the wet sand that had covered his face fell away.

Bright sun washed him, its warmth welcome. Then a wave came in, bubbling around him, and he struggled a short distance up the beach. Far across the water, he could just see San Francisco, faint beneath a haze of smoke. He sucked air and smelled spent fire.

Shoreward stood the woodland where he had awakened. As he came up from the sea, he heard birds singing among the trees.

Pushing aside branches glittering with rain, he saw a wren perched ahead. Stopping, he looked at it. Looked carefully. He saw feathers, a beak, and normal bird eyes.

As he moved deeper into the woods, he noticed that the birds did not fly away from him. One of them, totally unafraid, landed on his arm.

This had happened before, and as a child he had found it wonderful. Now, it shamed him because it reminded him that he was not fully human. To be touched by the blessing of normal humanity, he would gladly have accepted the curse of its fundamental isolation from the animal world.

Birds landed on machines—cars, air conditioners … him.

Usually, he would brush them away. This time, though, he looked at it carefully, in part because its fragility brought to mind his losses, in part because he wanted to be absolutely sure that it was not artificial.