This wasn’t even the hard part, and I was already sweating. Not from effort, but the way my body responded to the sudden pain. I toweled off, careful of my headphone cords. The music that didn’t match my patient progress and slow, measured stretches was some ‘Goodbye Rock’ that Weld had picked up while touring worlds with Sveta.

I sat on the edge of my bed, and I worked my way through the stretches. Fingers laced together, the fingers of my left hand feeling where the skin at my right hand had a faintly different texture where it had been burned. I stretched my arms out, leaning forward until my abdomen muscles were as tight as they could be. I gently extended the stretch right, because that was easier, and I felt the knot of the bullet wound in my left arm. I extended the stretch even more gingerly to the left, until I could feel the stabbing pain again. I pushed through it, paying very careful attention to the pain and the shape it took. This was where the acid centipedes had sliced into me, and a tearing pain was worse than a ‘nervous system doesn’t know what to report’ kind of pain.

Five repetitions of that, straight forward, right, then left. Then I stopped. I wrapped the towel around my bare shoulders for warmth while I took notes in the notebook I’d laid on the other corner of the bed.

The notes accounted for one minute of rest.

I had another centipede gouge in my leg, and a scar on the bottom of the foot on that same leg. I shifted to squats, five reps of regular squats, testing what my leg could handle, then five reps of one-legged squats, leaning forward so I rested in a tiptoe position. Again, I had to remind myself not to fly to assist myself.

Notes while resting. Wrist flexes and arm rotations that involved shoulder and bicep movements.

More notes. My physiotherapist didn’t care about them, but filling out the book was something of a satisfaction thing. Like filing, or collecting all of my now gasoline-scented case files.

As nice as the apartment was, the cold had a way of leaking in. It had a way of leaking in everywhere. I was sweating from head to toe now, more from hitting limits set by the old injuries than from the limits of muscles, and it made me clammy. With my less injured arm, I toweled off again, more roughly than necessary for the sake of warming up and trying to jar my system from the ‘cold sweat’ response.