My heart beats like a drumroll, torturing my earlobe.

But, incredibly, the words that come out of my mouth aren’t of apology. They approximate: “Well, you should have listened to me.”

Which isn’t what I mean at all.

What I mean is, “I fear for my career. I am terrified that I have endangered your life. I am humiliated by my on-job performance and am regularly mocked by my colleagues. I feel emasculated by all of the above, and by the fact that I am too cowardly to propose to you. The source of all this, ultimately, is the Rat Burglar, whose work, by a cruel irony, you happen to champion. These stressors have joined in a perfect storm of personal anguish that made me assert myself in some bull-headed way, for which I’m sorry. I need you to forgive me, and to listen, for I am going to tell you everything, the whole truth of my life, so that you can understand. That is what I need, I now realize. I need you to understand. I need you to hear the truth of my life, understand it, and love me anyway.”

While I am trying to formulate a facsimile of these sentiments Charlie dresses,⁴² regards me and my deflating erection one final time with an air of inscrutable electricity, panthers down the hall, and disappears from sight.

When she’s gone I don’t have any feeling of victory or justified indignation. I don’t consider my views on theft or ownership as solidified or vindicated. I don’t congratulate myself for having the courage to endorse Herk’s idea that someone should kill the Rat Burglar, even if I didn’t one hundred percent mean it. Instead, as I sit on the corner of my ravaged bed, alone in my room with the sense-memory of Charlie’s body heat fading from my skin, her fragrance dissipating, I feel only that the Rat Burglar has stolen something else from me.

I’m the Mang?

The next day I ace the comps. They don’t post scores until the end of the day, after everyone has tested, but I can feel it. I nail the plastoperceptivity module. I correctly deduce the tell-tales of all the various talent and muscle. I identify the odor signature of every toxin.⁴³ I’m totally up-to-date on who’s who in mobland.⁴⁴ My visual is both sharp on the detail segment and instantaneous in the kinetic samples, and I record few, if any, saccades. Taste is solid, haptic strong, olfactory rocks. In fact, I am so jazzed I do this great thing on auditory. When I’ve got the headphones on and we’re down to decibel fractions, I spy on the attendant in the booth behind me by focusing hard on a metal joint in the wall molding that gives just enough reflection to make out which button he’s going for. Before the guy even presses it, I stick up a left hand and say, “Left!” When I see him go for the other one I shoot up a right and say, “Right!” For a few tries he obviously thinks I’m horsing around, or just playing the odds or something, but when I get it right every time, before he lays a finger on the button, he freaks.