For a long time she’d wondered if maybe the fever hadn’t burned it out, hadn’t accidentally fried whatever circuit in her it fed back on. But as she’d gotten used to the bridge, to Skinner, to messing at Allied, it had just come to seem like the emptiness was filled with ordinary things, a whole new world grown up in the socket of the old, one day rolling into the next—whether she danced in Dissidents, or sat up all night talking with her friends, or slept curled in her bag up in Skinner’s room, where wind scoured the plywood walls and the cables thrummed down into rock that drifted (Skinner said) like the slowest sea of all.