I was sentenced on Tuesday. By Friday I'd already died twice.

The chair in staging was warm. I assumed the previous occupant had sat in it recently, until I remembered the previous occupant had been cremated in a state facility on Friday, three sentences after she lost level four. The chair was still warm. I sat down anyway. The choice between sitting and standing was the last decision they were going to let me make for ten months.The pre-trial evaluation had killed me twice. Level one: a fall I had not anticipated. Level two: a drowning the Shield had not prevented in time. Both had cost me. The medical literature called the cost "minor cognitive impairment, reversible within seventy-two hours." The cost had felt like being scooped out of my own head with a melon baller. The reversible part had been correct. The minor part had not.

The dress they put me in was the dress I had worn the night they arrested me. I had not asked for it. The paperwork I had signed at intake referred to it as "trigger-state attire" and explained, in the cool font of public policy, that baseline neural arousal correlated with sim-readiness, and that subjects who entered the simulation in their arrest-context clothing demonstrated 11% lower initial mortality. They did not return the underwear. I assumed it was a sizing issue.

The cuff was still stiff at the wrist. Solene's blood had dried four days ago. I had washed it once before they took it from me. It had not come out.

The hum in the staging room was not new to me. They had let me sit in here twice during my pre-trial evaluation, and I had named the hum "Building Tinnitus" because it never stopped and because I had a long history of naming things I could not control. The lights were the kind that go yellow at the edge of your peripheral vision. The walls were the color of teeth that had been brushed.

The cuff at my wrist held the absence of a person who had been alive on Friday in a way that did not need a verb.

The cyborg was in the doorway.

I had not heard the door. His shoulder registered first, then the slope of his throat, then the line of his jaw. I was already running out of people I wanted to remember, and I had decided in the holding cell, on Monday, that I was not going to lose another one without keeping the trace.

He was tall. He was olive-warm. His hair was dark and his eyes were brown with something coppery in them that the sim-suite would later tell me was a tactical sub-routine. I did not know that yet. I knew only that he looked exactly like a man, which the contractor had advertised, which I had not believed until that second, and which, in person, I found more disturbing than reassuring.

He did not introduce himself.

He said, "Don't bleed in front of me. I'll have to log it."

His voice was tactical-flat. Subject, verb, object. The second sentence was a courtesy disguised as a regulation. Both registered before I had decided whether they should.

"Noted," I said.

He looked at my wrist. He did not look at my face. His attention tracked, specifically, to the inside of my left forearm, where there is a hairline scar I do not remember getting. I had been twelve. I had fallen against a window mullion. My mother had been furious at the window. The scar was three centimeters long and the color of nothing in particular.

His look at the scar lasted half a second. Then his eyes moved, professionally, to my face. He had not registered the scar consciously. I knew it the way I know weather coming through a window. There, without anyone naming it.

I kept his face.

"Ninety seconds," he said. "Move when I move. Don't speak in the level unless I speak first. If you bleed, tell me before you tell the level."

"Why?"

He looked at me for the first time. It was not a long look. It was the kind of look a person who is being polite to a stranger gives when the stranger asks the question that the person was hoping not to be asked. The look carried something I would need later.

"Because if you tell the level first," he said, "the level adjusts. And then I can't help you."

I memorized the line. The second half-second, which had not been part of the procedure, which he had given me anyway, I kept separately.

The countdown started on the monitor wall. A white-blue progress bar. Eighty-eight seconds.

The person in front of me was the only person I was going to see for two years and seven months. I used the seconds on his face.

I looked at him. He let me. He did not move. He did not look uncomfortable. He stood the way a person stands when he has been trained to stand and has not yet decided whether to stop.

I was about to do something I had not done since the night Solene was killed, which was breathe deeply on purpose. I didn't. The cuff against my wrist was still stiff with her blood and breathing would have made it move. I held it where it was.

The bar crossed thirty.

He said, "Hand."

I held it out.

He fitted the sim-rig over my temples. His fingers carried warmth that the room did not. The crown clicked into the bone behind my ears, two specific points, and the room went pale at the edges in the way it always had during evaluation. The hum changed pitch.

His hand stayed at my temple.

He said, almost to himself, "Eighteen seconds."

I did not ask what he was counting. I assumed he was counting the seconds for me, which he was, and I assumed he was also counting something else, which he was. I had not yet learned to read his routing-delay. I would later. He held his hand at my temple for those eighteen seconds and then, just before the load triggered, he removed it.

"Move when I move," he said.

The white light came.

I had been told what it would feel like. The literature on subject experience reported a "mild disorientation, comparable to standing up too quickly." I had read it in the holding cell. I had read it the way you read a brochure for the funeral home where you are going to be buried.

It felt like every thought I had ever had was being pushed through the eye of a needle. I do not remember the rest of the load.

When the level finished rendering, I was standing in dust. Orange smoke. The sound of a building that had been hit by something larger than itself.

The cyborg was beside me. Charcoal soft-armor. A gun on his right thigh. A comm at his left collar.

He moved.

I moved.