THERE WAS NO coming awake but a gradual reassembly of consciousness from parts that, while still functioning, had come unlinked. She was looking down on snow-spackled mountains as though seeing them in the opening screen of T’Rain and, at the same time, having a dream of walking barefoot through them. For it was barefoot that she and her group had walked most of the way from Eritrea to Sudan, and her dreams often took her back to that journey, as though the nerves in the soles of the feet were connected more tightly to the brain than any others. In her dream, the snow on the mountains was warm between her toes, which she knew made no sense; but it was explained as some magic that had been dreamed up by Devin Skraelin based on an oblique reference by Donald Cameron. And then she and Pluto had been given the job of making it real, rendering it from bits, and she was walking across it with a caravan of Eritrean refugees to make sure that it all held together.