She cocks her helmet at us, looks around at the dust. “Uh, sure.”

The Juno and I move as fast as we can.

We wake the body in the saddle, priming it with drugs and warmth and IV-administered calorie-mix. It’s been asleep for nearly the whole journey from the Stepping-Stone, nearly fifty hours now, if ‘asleep’ is the right thing to call it. Comatose, maybe. Dormant. Dead.

Lost, while my mind wandered between the storms.

Anywhere else and this would be easy. I’d trim the pilot-sync and think about closing my eyes, spend a moment remembering which set of limbs was which. But the body in the saddle is all dead weight.

It isn’t responding. I can’t tell whether or not the thought belongs to me.

Then we give it another.

We drop a second measure of stim and antiflam in through the body’s tubes, watching the minor earthquake that follows and counting off the little sparks of nerve-activity.

There. It can feel us.

Try again.

We try to throttle the connection, drop it by increments, but there’s a skip; we drop from high-functionality to dull fifties in a flash, and the world goes dark and formless.

51.12

“Rook?” comes the call from somewhere outside. Somewhere far away. Hail’s voice is thin, stretched out by the distance.

I’m fine, is what I mean to say, but I can’t find sounds to match the thought.

“I’m fine,” says the Juno on my behalf. “I stood up too quickly. Think I’ve pulled something.”

Hail snorts. “You and Salt need to start a club. Want me to come up?”

No.

No, no, no.

But the thoughts don’t find any more shape than that.

The Juno adds a tremble to my voice. “I need a minute.”

“Understood.”

Somewhere, I find a way out of the panic.

Thank you, old bird. I try to swallow, but it takes more control than I can manage right away. I force my swollen tongue around in my mouth, but it’s numb and heavy, enough to make me feel like I’m choking on it. I need another one.

58.14

There’s a voice somewhere out ahead, a thought formed around familiar shapes, but I can’t quite hear it. A window dawns across my private stretch of darkness. Are you sure? it asks, shapes cobbled together by a wetware bridge and projected across the visual centres of my brain. My whole world is in those words.

I almost manage a nod, but it comes out in spasms.

The Juno watches me for a moment more, but when it opens the taps, I can feel more from the machinery around me than from my own dumb muscle.