3

Not long after my sixtieth birthday I developed some heart trouble, the kind of thing that could have been easily fixed in my own century but was dangerous in this time and place, and I was transferred to the prison hospital. I couldn’t see the moon from my bed, so there was nothing for it now but to close my eyes and play old movies:

walking to school in the Night City, past Olive Llewellyn’s childhood home

with its boarded-up front window and plaque;

standing in the church in Caiette in 1912 in my priest costume,

waiting for Edwin St. Andrew to stagger in;

chasing squirrels when I was five in the strip of wilderness

between the Night City dome and the Periphery Road;

drinking with Ephrem behind the school on an afternoon without sunlight when we were fifteen or so, one of those afternoons that felt a little dangerous,

even though all we were doing was getting slightly drunk and trading dumb jokes;

holding hands and laughing with my mother on a sunlit day in the Night City when I was six or seven, stopping to look down at the river from a

pedestrian bridge, the river dark and sparkling below—

“Gaspery.”

I felt a sharp pain in my arm. I gasped and almost cried out, but a hand was over my mouth.

“Shh,” Zoey whispered. She looked like she was in her early forties, she was wearing a nurse’s uniform, and she had just cut the tracker out of my arm. I stared at her, uncomprehending.

“I’m going to place this under your tongue,” she said. She held it up for me to see: a new tracker, to correspond with the new device that she was pressing into my hand. She had drawn the curtain around my bed. She held her device against mine for a second or two, until the devices flashed in a quick coordinated pattern. I stared at those lights—