Edison frowned down at her. She leaned close and wrapped her arms around his waist, resting her head against his tunic. “I think we need to test your theory, and that scares me,” she said.

Edison lightly stroked her back with his massive paws. They both looked to the side, out through the glass to the quiet cosmos beyond.

“I’m unable to deduce a reason for your frightened state,” Edison said. He smiled at Anlyn’s reflection. “Calculate the statistical likelihood of my incorrectness.”

29

“Hello? Son, can you hear me?”

Cole cracked his eyes. There were no goggles, no bright, searing light from everywhere, just the soft warmth of arti-ficial bulbs. Two men leaned over him. One of them he recognized but couldn’t place. He had short hair and a generic-looking face. Very generic, like Cole had seen a hundred people who looked just like him.

The other man seemed slightly familiar as well. Cole blinked and attempted to bring them into focus. The second figure had wavy brown hair and a neatly trimmed beard, both laced with gray. Cole felt he should know their names.

“Can you hear me?” the man with the beard asked.

Cole nodded.

He looked around and saw the same room from his last dream: beds and curtains and white walls.

“Can you move your arm?”

Cole watched the lips move, forming the words. It all seemed to be happening at a normal pace. Very un-dream-like. He smiled up at the men.

“Your arm, son, can you move it?”

Cole raised his left arm. He tried to make a fist, but it felt weak and tingly, like he’d been asleep a long time.

The generic-looking man smiled. “The other one,” he said.

Cole continued to admire his own hand while the other arm came up. He lifted his head and stared at it in disbelief. It wasn’t his. Flaps of skin hung open like fleshy shutters. Inside, small pistons, bundles of wiring, metal plates—they moved at his command. He traced the mechanics down past a hinged elbow until it met his own flesh, the two slightly different colors of dark skin adjoining in a neat line.

“Very good,” someone said.

But it wasn’t good. It wasn’t good at all. Cole tried to sit up, but several hands forced him down. He tried to complain, but a mask was placed over his face. He took a deep breath to protect himself from whatever was about to happen. He looked up at the man holding the mask and tried to remember where he knew the guy.

Dakura! The guy was a Stanley! Cole gasped in disbelief—then he found himself hoping and praying that all his nightmares had been dreams, some simulated hell—

All he got for the sudden intake of air, however, was a heaping lungful of the stuff from the mask . . .

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