Its taller companion… well. A six-foot-tall butterbug was definitely a creature out of his own nightmares, and not anyone else’s. Looking rather like a giant cockroach, with a pale pulsing abdomen, folded brown wing carapaces, and bobbing head, it nonetheless strode along on two sticklike hind legs and also swung cloth sacks from its front claws. Its middle legs wavered in and out of existence uncertainly, as if Miles’s brain could not decide exactly how to scale up the repulsive thing.

As the pair approached him and slowed, staring, Miles took a firmer grip on the nearest supporting wall, and essayed cautiously, “Hello?”

The butterbug turned its insectile head and studied him in turn. “Stay back, Jin,” it advised its shorter companion. “He looks like some sort of druggie, stumbled in here. Lookkit his eyes.” Its mandibles and questing palps wiggled as it spoke, its male voice sounding aged and querulous.

Miles wanted to explain that while he was certainly drugged, he was no addict, but getting the distinction across seemed too much of a challenge. He tried a big reassuring smile, instead. His hallucinations recoiled.

“Hey,” said Miles, annoyed. “I can’t look nearly as bad to you as you look to me. Deal with it.” Perhaps he had wandered into some talking animal story like the ones he’d read, over and over, in the nursery to Sasha and little Hellion. Except the creatures encountered in such tales were normally furrier, he thought. Why couldn’t his chemically-enchanted neurons have spat out giant kittens?

He put on his most austere diplomat’s tones, and said, “I beg your pardon, but I seem to have lost my way.” Also my wallet, my wristcom, half my clothes, my bodyguard, and my mind.