The lassitude is not quite familiar. For a moment, Cheris is tempted to drift off again, though such crowded transports are not common in the colony; it's small enough that everyone walks or borrows a private flitter. A tour of one of the successfully terraformed areas, where familiar oxygen-breathing trees have replaced the stubby, thorned growths outside the dome? How did she end up on a tour without her class, though? A fuzzy spike of anxiety -- no, the children in her math class (how many? she should know this) are nowhere in sight.

Actually, nobody she knows in sight. And it's... hard, somehow, to wonder why.

That sensation is familiar indeed.

Her augment isn't working, either. What time is it? What day? Has she missed a required meditation? One lapse wouldn't be fatal to the dome's exotic technology, but if too many people miss their observances, calendrical rot could set in. There's something in her hands -- a backpack, unfamiliar or unremembered, with an air mask. Enough to filter the toxics in the air outside the dome. Is that why everything is so muzzy -- why the inside of her mind feels scoured? Some injury during an evacuation? But that wouldn't explain--

Then, everything upends.

When the car stops moving, she's jammed between two off-kilter seats. The smoke stings; she pulls her air mask on immediately and works her way free, bruised all over and unsure of several of her ribs. There are voices nearby, sounds of pain. The side of the car is flanged outward, warped wide with dangerous sharp edges not impeding freedom. The backpack looks like it might contain useful first-aid supplies; Cheris swings it over her shoulder, surprised at its light weight, and looks for the nearest person who might need medical care.

She's not used to handheld phones. Why carry around an extra device when most communications can be transmitted to the local grid through one's augment? But her augment isn't working, and some field effect is allowing her to understand how the unfamiliar thing works, and a compulsion -- formation instinct? -- has her signing up as luckstone and making a very, very important post.

1. My kill count is classified.

2. I'm not fond of alcohol.

3. I helped to execute my best friend.

Some distant part of her is horrified, while another, wearily noting the old well-recognized feeling of being controlled by something she cannot resist, files the anger for another time and proceeds to hit send. Fire and ash, what is this, a trust exercise? It had better let me delete this later.