Her heart surges sluggishly in her chest as she meets his eyes.

“Is it—” With the words, an awful understanding is welling up inside her now, a monstrous recognition that her conscious mind is still sprinting hard ahead to evade. “Is it my knee? My leg?”

Out of somewhere, abruptly, she finds strength, she props herself up on her elbows, she forces herself to look.

Sight collides with recollection.

The scream shrills up out of her, rips momentarily through the cobwebby drapery of the drugs in her system. She can’t know how weak it sounds in the cold dimensions of the surgery, inside her it seems to splinter in her ears, and the knowledge that comes with it is a blackening of vision that threatens to suck her away. She is not, she knows, screaming at what she can see;

Not at the neatly bandaged stump where her right thigh ends twenty centimeters below her hip; not that.

Not at the stabbed-home comprehension that the ache in her knee is a phantom pain in a limb she no longer owns; not that.

She’s screaming at memory.

The memory of the gurney ride along the quiet corridor, the soft bump and turn into the surgery, and then, veiled in the drug haze, the rising whine of the saw blade, the grating slip in tone as it bites, and the small, suckling sizzle of the cauterizing laser that comes after. The memory of the last time, and the sickening, down-plunging understanding that it’s all about to happen again.

“No,” she husks. “Please.”

A long-fingered hand presses warmly down on her forehead. The Turin shroud countenance looms above her.

“Shshshsh…the cormorant knows why…”

Past the face, she sees movement. Knows it from memory for what it is. The stealthy, unflexing spider-leg motions of the autosurgeon as it wakes.

Gleaming steel…