They had a cheap stove in every cubicle. The New Men ate a kind of noodle soup. (Sometimes there were objects in it that resembled ice cubes, only lukewarm and bluish.) Ed was in their warren four weeks. He slept on the mattress on the floor, like everyone else. In the day, when Tig Vesicle was out in the city—moving some AbH here, a little bumped-up speed there, trying to avoid the Cray sisters—Ed watched the holograms and ate the food that Neena cooked. Most of that time passed slowly. He was in withdrawal. It was painful: also, real things were very distant a lot of the time and the simple weirdness of being among New Men made that worse. He kept trying to remember who he really was. He could only remember the fictional Ed, an assembly of diamond-clear events that never happened. The afternoon of the third day he was there, Neena Vesicle knelt down next to him where he sat on the mattress.

“Is there any way I can help?” she said.

Ed looked up at her.

“You know, I think there is.”

He reached up and put his hands either side of her ribs, and with a little sideways pressure tried to get her to kneel over him. It took her a moment to understand what he was suggesting. Then, awkward and serious, she tried to comply. “I’m all arms and legs,” she said. She hardly smelled at all until he touched her. Then a kind of thick sweetness rolled out from her. Every time he touched her somewhere new, one of her legs would jerk, or she would catch her breath and exclaim at the same time, or shiver and half curl up. She looked down at Ed’s hands, raising the cotton dress to her waist.

“Oh,” she said. “Look at you.” She laughed. “I mean me.”

Her ribs articulated in a way he couldn’t quite understand.

Later she said, “Is that all right? We go the wrong way for you. A bit the wrong way.” She hissed. She wiped one hand upwards, over her face, across her skull. “Is that all right?” Tank withdrawal was in the bone. It was cellular, organic. But it was also a kind of separation anxiety. It was the sustained scream of wanting to be back in a lost world you had loved. Nothing was a cure, but sex helped. Twinks on withdrawal were desperate for sex. It was like morphine to them.

“That’s good,” Ed said. “Ah, yes. That’s fine.”