Chapter 4: Mapping Day

I went back to Peter's lab on the third night.

Tobias had a dinner with the Halcyon lawyers, and Geneva went with him, and nobody asked where the deaf wife wanted to be.

I took the stairs two at a time.

The lab was dark except for one lamp over the bench, and Peter stood beside it with a laptop open and a pair of cheap speakers.

"Sit," he said. "Shoes off if you want. It's going to be long."

I sat.

He took off the processor from behind my ear with two careful fingers, plugged it into the laptop, and I felt the cable's small tug.

His hand rested a second against the side of my neck.

It was a nurse's hand, practical and warm.

My pulse jumped anyway, and I looked at the wall.

"Your heart rate's up," he said without turning around.

"It's your cold fingers."

"They're not cold."

"Then I have no explanation."

His mouth moved, and for the first time in two years I heard a man try not to laugh.

It was low, and short, and it did something to the back of my knees.

"All right," he said. "I'm going to play you sentences with noise under them. Tell me what you hear."

The speaker gave me a woman's voice over a roar of traffic.

"The blue boat slid past the dock."

"Blue boat, slid past the dock."

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