The shakes and the nausea and the chills went away eventually the way they always do. After ten or fifteen minutes, I was almost back to normal except for the dull, thudding headache and queasy stomach of adrenaline hangover. I'm getting too old for this drek, I told myself. I wasn't a young lion anymore. Frag, I was thirty-five going on thirty-six ... and feeling half a century older than that, at the moment. I was losing the edge. Losing? Frag me, I'd lost it. How long had it taken me, back there in Tokudaiji's library, to register the fact that Scott wasn't going to geek me, too?