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the blood vessels dilated and prevent clotting after my “hand replantation.”
    Now more than a week had elapsed. The room was cooler, but I still found it stiffling. I had a new scar on another part of my body, as well, where they’d cut a vertical seam starting just below my breast bone through which they had reached in to remove my ruined spleen. That one hurt, too, and itched. Inside. Which was strange, according to the doctor.
    I was heavily drugged and drifting in and out of soft-focus reality. During one drift cycle the room was empty and then it was not. Over by the moon-glazed window something loomed like a tree with twisted branch arms and legs. I lifted my head off the pillow, blinked slowly, and the tree was a gnarly man. One more slow shutter blink and watery morning light was flooding the room and rain was tick-ticking on the window.
    A doctor I’d never seen before came in. She was tall and thin with a narrow blade of a nose and black framed glasses.
    “I’m Dr. Jane,” she said, and proceeded to read my chart and examine my war wounds. My brain slogged around in a swoony bath of nausea juice. I focused on her lapel pin, blue enamel with the stylized letters: UI in silver.
    Dr. Jane partially unwrapped my hand, snipping first with a small pair of scissors. She breathed mostly through her nose, a quiet rasping. The rasping halted for a beat when she revealed my wrist and forearm scars, which had already faded, making the stitches stand out like an unnecessary violation of flesh. Her breathing resumed until she got to the “bud.” The bud shouldn’t have been there. Even I knew that. The surgeon had amputated the ragged stump that had once been my pinky finger. But instead of a blunt termination of flesh and bone and a sutured sneer there was now a one-knuckle-high node of pink regenerated finger. It had torn the sutures and their ends stuck out like black bristles. Dr. Jane actually gasped. I wanted to hear her do it again, so I pulled my shirt up to show her my splenectomy scar, which was nothing more than a dim pink line. I’d pulled the stitches out myself in my spare time. She stared, touched it with her index finger. Then she wrapped me up again and went away. She should have seen my face a week ago, right after the Nova’s windshield had tried to turn it into a Picasso portrait. Not one scar remained.
    The pain continually expanded beyond my drug protocol’s ability to cancel it. No one knew it at the time but my body was metabolizing the pain killers at a super accelerated rate. It would be years before I discovered on my own that smoking drugs was the only effective way of vectoring the effects into my pain centers—physical and emotional. And forget about Zing, that was fifty years or so off in my endless future.
    So I was awake, writhing after a comfortable arrangement of limbs and torso, when “they” came for me. The sheets were damp. I felt a little desperate. But past experience had taught me there was no point in buzzing the nurse. Nothing would persuade them to administer any more percodan ahead of the appointed hour.
    The two men who entered my room wore tailored suits and didn’t look like hospital staff. Little blue and silver pins winked on their lapels. UI.
    “Good,” one of them said. “You’re awake.”
    “It hurts,” I said. I felt reduced. A child.
    One suit turned to the open doorway. “Nurse,” he said, and a young woman I recognized as part of the overnight staff came in.
    “Morphine,” the suit said. He said other things, too, regarding dosage and whatnot, but I latched onto the one word like a life-preserver in a sea of pain.
    The other suit was taking down the side of my bed and disconnecting me from a saline drip. I worked up some spit and asked, “What’s going on?”
    “You’re being transferred to a private facility.”
    That made no sense, but then the nurse appeared with a hypodermic needle brimming with sweet if temporary relief, and I ceased to