“You know. Them.” Tom raised his eyebrows significantly. “Your gnome minions, man! They saved me. I was dying in the cold, and they came walking out on those tiny little feet and carried me with their tiny little hands all the way back into this tiny little cave they had. I thought you were messing with me before. I realize now—you truly do have gnome minions. Glorious, brave, miniony gnomes.” Tom was very careful to keep that fake innocent expression on his face, the one that used to serve him so well in VR parlors.

He must’ve pulled it off, because Walton settled with, “I think you might’ve hallucinated that.”

“Right.” Tom gave him a thumbs-up. “I know the official story. I ‘hallucinated.’” He made air quotes.

“No, Tom, I mean it. You really did hallucinate.”

“Yeah, yeah. I get it. Look: give this to them.” He unscrewed a finger. “Take it.”

Walton winced at the sight. “Ugh, Raines. I didn’t need to see you do that.”

“Take it.” Tom thrust the finger right in his face. “Give it to them. As payment.”

“I don’t think they’d want your finger.”

“But it’s a token of my esteem!”

“And you need to put that token of esteem back on your hand.”

Walton spent the rest of the elevator ride backing away from him while Tom persistently tried to shove the finger at him. Then he scuttled out quickly when the door slid open and Tom cackled gleefully for the first time in days. He looked down so he could screw the finger back on . . . and went very still, arrested by the sight of his hand, the way his finger ended in a stub where the joint had been.

His skin crawled.

Back in his bunk, Tom dropped onto his bed, and unscrewed cybernetic finger after finger until he was left with a stubby mess of a right hand. His hand. It looked so strange.

Freakish.

Tom stared at it with morbid fascination. Then he replaced the fingers and did the same thing with the other hand. It was even more disgusting, some of the fingers ending above the knuckle. By the time Tom shoved them back on, his whole body was shaking. He felt like he was going to throw up, a terrible sense of wrongness spreading through him, like he’d made some awful mistake he could never rectify.

TOM COULDN’T SHAKE the dreadful self-consciousness in the days that followed. The cybernetic fingers were slightly off, the tone too pink somehow. Even when they were on, he tried keeping his hands in his pockets. He kept turning suspiciously at every burst of laughter he heard, wondering with a sudden clenching of his stomach if people were laughing at him. He swore a couple of the other trainees looked at his hands, but he wasn’t sure. Maybe he was imagining it.