But it’s only half the solution. What happens when you can’t quite feel your feet? When you’re wearing thick shoes, or you’ve got pins and needles? You hit your toes on everything, that’s what. You trip over yourself, catch your feet. So they cut you open, give you an extra set of nerves. So you can feel.

The floor of the hangar comes in cold and pitted, rumbled with the passage of distant trains. I can feel our weight, but it isn’t spread evenly. We have one foot forward of the other, balanced where one of Avery’s crew was changing the bearings in our ankle.

Transference complete, says my visor.

After that, the counter climbs quickly.

40.13

65.92

97.00

It holds, and the limiters keep it there. I feel like I could make a hundred if I tried.

But I might not come back.

I breathe in, let it out slowly. “Carry me,” I tell the shell.

Merging with operator systems...

Shadows gather in the corners of my eyes, inching across until they swallow everything I can see. The Juno’s body wraps itself around me, melts me down and casts me back in steel. Hydraulics flex like muscle. We feel each other.

The shell stretches out and relaxes back, to fit my posture. Our reactor shudders like the heartbeat in my chest, turbines cycle, fuel rushes like blood.

My pulse slows, and the machine cools around me. My vision shifts in time with the lenses in our head, finding focus on the ugly hangar outside. We adjust our feet and work out fingers. Our wings stretch out behind us, phantom limbs tied to muscles in my shoulders.

Merging complete.

I am alive again.

WE STEP INTO our starting blocks, left foot first. The block closes to our ankle, shackling us in place. One of Avery’s ground crew steps up and does a manual check on the bolts and rails. The shell has its own sensors, but some habits die harder than others, and some will live forever.

The knuckledragger gives my Signal Officer an A-OK. The SO is wearing a void-suit, fireproof and armoured, with a full helmet over the top. He should be able to speak right into my ears, but he does something else instead—something older than this ship. Older than NorCol, if you’re in the mood for counting.

He clears the deck on our left side and spells out a message with a pair of orange lamps.

Port side locked.

The shell and I lean forward, rest ourselves on knees and knuckles as we fit our right foot into the other block. Folau is on it, and he pats our hull on the way past.

“Clear!” he shouts to the officer up head.

The SO waves our right side clear, signals us again: Starboard locked. You are set.

“Understood,” I send. “Thank you.”