Wyatt told him a couple days later. Tom was sitting on the edge of his bed in the Pentagonal Spire’s infirmary, watching Vik inspect the new, cybernetic fingers. It was strange. They didn’t have any true touch receptors, not like real fingers, but whenever they came in contact with something—whether screwed into the stumps on his hand or not—Tom felt this prickling sensation. He hadn’t yet learned to sort out different electronic signals, even though Dr. Gonzales had assured him his brain would learn to identify them, associate them with heat, cold, soft, sharp, and so on. Vik turned the finger over and Tom felt the nagging prickle in his hand. He felt like his head was going to burst. “I looked up pictures of people with frostbite online,” Wyatt went on, from where she was sitting on the edge of his mattress, her dark hair drawn up in a high ponytail today, “and a lot of people’s noses fell off. So it’s really great that yours didn’t.” Vik laughed. “Enslow, come on.”
