“It’s part of the song.”

“Seems incongruent, but whatever you say,” said Aptat. “Anyhow, I’ve got what I need.”

“What the hell did one minute of free-association tell you?”

“It showed me who you are, Ben. It’s how I know that you’re Flyguy and your friend is not. Also, I told him this thing is a lie detector and he readily came clean. Can’t say I didn’t suspect it already. He’s an awful liar.”

“Uh...” I groaned.

Aptat gave me a chummy pat on the shoulder. “Don’t worry, Ben. I won’t be throwing him out of an airlock.”

Oddly, I felt they were telling the truth.

“After all, you have great affinity for him. The Scythin might be able to use that.”

“What–?”

But Aptat swiped at the air, shutting the glass and pinching my voice to silence.

47 It meant “Warrior”! You got a tattoo that means “warrior” in a language you don’t even speak! Ohmygod. Let me repeat: you got – ENOUGH!

48 Still not you, dick-knuckle.

49 For vertebrates, the sense of balance, acceleration, and gravity comes from tiny fluid-filled pockets in the inner ear called the saccule and the utricle, which contain tiny hairs that sense the movement of little crystals that float around as we move. The message from the hairs travels through the vestibular nerve to the brain.

CHAPTER NINE

I couldn’t look at Patton. He would read the guilt on my face and know immediately that something was wrong. He was perceptive like that. Not a lot of book learning in him, but a very high emotional IQ. I couldn’t tell him that his poorly conceived attempt to conceal the true identity of Flyguy had lasted a grand total of a day and a half. And what good would it have done if we could talk, anyway? To be able to tell him that he’s “leverage”?

Then, nothing happened. Days passed. Day-night cycles as dictated by lights on, lights off, lasted a little over thirty hours. I wondered where the timing of it originated. Another rotating planet that wasn’t Earth, most likely. This overlapped my own twenty-four-hour cycle, which had an unsettling, and surreal, effect. Sometimes I slept under lights. Other times I woke and sat in the dark for hours, flashing the Indiglo® on my Timex for entertainment. My grasp on the passing of time was slipping even if the watch gave me the numbers. What were readings for date and time if they weren’t anchored to something perceptible? Absent the rising or setting sun, the temperature changes that signaled the passing of night or the end of the day, or driving down and opening Jim’s shop, the concept of days decohered. Days. Days. I thought the word and spoke it again and again until it sounded foreign. What were “days” anymore but a reference point for the rotation of a newly irrelevant planet? Time, undefinable and fluid, passed. I slept. Woke. Ate the pemmican. Daydreamed of microwave empanadas and playing Simon.