“I was working in a burnt-out cathedral,” I said. “And I must get back there. The—”

She popped a temp into my mouth and stuck a monitor on my wrist.

“How many drops have you made in the last two weeks?” she said.

I watched her punch the reads into her handheld, trying to remember what the legal limit on drops was. Eight? Five?

“Four,” I said. “The person you should be examining is Carruthers. He’s even dirtier than I am, and you should have heard him, going on about the stars and the ‘future ye ken not.’ ”

“What symptoms are you experiencing? Disorientation?”

“No.”

“Drowsiness?”

That was more difficult. Everyone under Lady Schrapnell’s lash was automatically sleep deprived, but I doubted that the nurse would take that into consideration, and at any rate it didn’t manifest itself so much as drowsiness as a sort of “walking dead” numbness, like people bombarded night after night in the Blitz had suffered from.

“No,” I said finally.

“Slowness in Answering,” she said into the handheld. “When’s the last time you slept?”

“1940,” I said promptly, which is the problem with Quickness in Answering.

She typed some more. “Have you been experiencing any difficulty in distinguishing sounds?”

“No,” I said, smiling at her. Infirmary nurses usually resemble something out of the Spanish Inquisition, but this one had an almost kindly face, the sort an assistant torturer, the one who straps you to the rack or holds the door to the Iron Maiden open for you, might have.

“Blurring of vision?” she asked.

“No,” I said, trying not to squint.

“How many fingers am I holding up?”

Slowness in Answering or not, this question required some thought. Two was the most likely number, being easily confused with both three and one, but she might have chosen five to confuse me, and if that was the case, should I answer four, since the thumb isn’t technically a finger? Or might she be holding her hand behind her back?