The first thing Taric became aware of was the smell — antiseptic and biological at the same time, like a hospital that had grown from the ground rather than been built. He lay on a bed that was too clean and too white, and when he opened his eyes, the ceiling above him hummed with a faint luminescence that seemed organic, like bioluminescent coral stretched taut across the roof.

  He sat up slowly. His body felt wrong — not painful, exactly, but unfamiliar, as though he had borrowed it from someone slightly different.

  Taric was a lean, angular man in his late twenties — the kind of face that looked composed rather than handsome, with deep-set blue eyes, dark and almost grey in certain lights, that moved with the constant, quiet calibration of someone who had learned to read rooms before entering them. His jaw carried three days of dark stubble, his dark hair was overgrown and disheveled from sleep, and along his left jaw there ran an old scar, thin and pale, that traced the line of the bone from below the ear to the chin. He wore the grey clothing that had been folded at the foot of his bed — plain, functional, sized accurately enough that someone had measured him while he was unconscious, which was either efficient or unsettling depending on how you thought about it. He decided it was both.

  The room was small and ordered. Beside his bed sat a table with a glass of water and a sealed envelope. Around him, separated by thin partition walls, he could hear other people stirring.

  He wasn't the only one waking.

  Three beds down, a man was already on his feet — or trying to be. He was heavyset, with a shaved head, a thick neck, and the kind of build that suggested a history of using his body as the primary argument in most conversations. He had a tattoo of a cresting wave across the back of his right hand. He was currently gripping the partition wall and shaking it, and the words coming out of him were not quite coherent but were very clearly composed of fury.

  "Where — what is — this isn't — I was supposed to — they told me—" He stopped. The partition swayed. He looked at his hands as though they had betrayed him. "No. No, no, no. This isn't—"

  "Hey," said the woman in the bed next to his. She was younger than her voice sounded, with close-cropped natural hair and a face that had the tight, controlled expression of someone suppressing a lot through deliberate effort. Her arms were crossed. "You're scaring people."

  "I'm scaring—" The man laughed, short and ugly. "I'm in a room I don't recognize wearing clothes I didn't put on and you're telling me I'm—" He stopped again. His breathing had become audible. "This is wrong. This is wrong. I signed a form. There was supposed to be an appeal. My lawyer—"

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  "Shut up," said someone else, from further down the row. A flat, tired voice. "Just shut up and read the envelope. There's an envelope."

  The heavyset man looked at the envelope on his own side table as though it might bite him.

  Taric read his own envelope. He set it down and drank the water, which tasted like nothing, and listened to the sounds of the room around him.

  The dream was still with him. He tried to hold onto it the way you hold water in cupped hands — knowing it would drain away regardless. In it, he had stood in a place without walls, and in front of him was a person he didn't recognize. Someone with grey eyes and an expression of absolute calm. And then his own hands had moved, and the person had fallen, and Taric had woken up.

  He didn't know if it was a memory. That was the worst part.

  He had been convicted of homicide. He knew that much. The trial had been brief, the evidence clear, and the verdict unanimous. He remembered the judge's voice but not the face. He remembered the silence of the courtroom but not who had been watching. He remembered signing something — or being made to sign something — and then nothing until this ceiling and this smell and this too-white bed.

  From further down the ward, a sound that was not quite crying and not quite screaming — something between the two, the specific register of a person whose certainty about reality had developed a crack. Then footsteps — rapid, soft, belonging to someone who knew how to move quickly without appearing to hurry — and a voice, low and practiced, speaking words Taric couldn't make out but whose rhythm was the rhythm of someone managing a situation they had managed before.

  He stood, looked through the gap in the partition, and saw what he had half-expected: two attendants in pale cream, helping a woman back to her bed. She was perhaps forty, with long red hair now tangled and loose, and she was saying, over and over, in a voice that had gone strange and high: "I have children. I have — you need to understand — I have children and they — someone needs to — I can't be here, I can't be—"

  She wasn't being restrained. The attendants were simply present, calm, absorbing the words without returning anything except steadiness, and that steadiness was its own kind of wall.

  Taric turned away. He was not unmoved by it. But there was nothing to do, and looking for too long felt like taking something that wasn't his.

  He read the envelope again: Welcome to Cosmulo. Your orientation begins in thirty minutes. Report to Reception Hall B.

  On the other side: 47 Drenn.

  He put on his clothes, folded at the foot of the bed. Someone had accounted for every inch of him.

  He walked toward the door and didn't look at the woman with the red hair, who was still talking, still asking, and receiving nothing back.

  ________________________________________________________

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