Clouds seem pasted to it like construction-paper cutouts. The returning gravity presses on Sarah’s chest. She swallows hard and feels Weasel lying like a rock in her throat. In Roon’s house she hadn’t dared relax–– she was either watching Roon the whole time or riding Cowboy to make sure he didn’t flip. The time in Roon’s house had felt like a century, and she’s surprised it was only five days. Before the shuttle left she mixed rightsnap and alcohol in the port bar, the first relief she’d allowed herself, and walked onto the shuttle in a blaze of warm internal light. Now the drugs move sluggishly through her veins, softening the razor edge of reality. She looks at Cowboy and frowns. He’s been faced into his computer for most of the trip, and even when he’s had his head out of the crystal his eyes have still had that far-off look, as if he was trying to make sense out of something...like maybe the latticework of his three-dimensional holo construct of the Tempel bloc, the way Roon was worked into it, the girders and networks of its architecture studding into his sockets, the way Cowboy and Sarah are now extensions of those networks, a tunnel through which Roon communicates with all the lattices and powers outside of the Tempel organization.
