I have pretended to everyone that I do not remember what was done to me, after my cousins abducted me. It is another lie. I remember everything: the details of my false life as Niles Straton, the dreams I shared with Kyrie, my own memories that were uncovered by living an imaginary life strapped to a bed. I was strapped to a bed, once before. They had to reinforce the straps with steel mesh to keep me there. But they did keep me there, for more than two months.

I was twenty-nine. I had been a pilot for ten years, and my mind finally broke under the strain. Most Slideship pilots last for roughly five years before the accumulated errors between their ears force them out. I had the great good fortune to be possessed of a regenerative nature, and so what I am was enough to clear much of the damage to my cerebral cortex. Eventually, however, even I could not keep up with what was done to me, and I cracked.

Perhaps if my friend Jane were still alive, she might have been able to calm me down, protect me from a stint in hospital. But she?d died six years before, her ship overcome by a forced supernova in the heartbeat before it slid into the gap between my universe and the next. They called her a hero, as I was called a hero for saving Killarney?s colonists, or for my actions in the Hot Zone, or the Grist Cloud minefield disarmament, or a dozen other things I did during my career. They called me Charon, as a joke: I was the one who ferried the certain dead back into life, time after time. We were not heroes, though. We were simply doing our jobs.

When I went ?round the bend, it was in singularly spectacular fashion. I was on leave, but the Dover-London shuttle schedule was such that I was stuck on base in Dover for two hours. I was in the mess hall at the time. No one else I knew was there at the time, so I was eating alone when it happened. It almost certainly saved lives that day. Everyone else was toward the front of the hall; I had sufficient seniority that I could sit wherever I pleased. I?d stuck myself in the corner.

I had just finished my water when I looked up to see one of the younger men staring at me. He looked away as soon as I made eye contact, but unbeknownst to him the damage was done. Paranoia rose in me. Was I doing something wrong? Had I committed some infraction? Were the CPs already on their way? The table creaked under my hands as I gripped it. He must have heard it, because he looked back at me. And then I knew. I knew beyond the shadow of a doubt that though I was in England, and it was mid-afternoon, I was looking at a Setite infiltrator, a vampire come to kill me. Which had to mean, I reasoned, that the entire group of men calmly sitting and eating their lunches were either in collusion with him, or Setites themselves.

There are very strict procedures in place that all ATC pilots, trainers, ground crew and support personnel are trained in from the moment they enlist, to deal with a pilot who is undergoing a psychotic break. It happens with appalling regularity. Pilots are dangerous machines: physically and chemically altered, trained to remove hesitation and doubt, taught to kill, and made to descend with every flight into a controlled madness. It is only a matter of time for each and every one of us that we lose the ability to control our insanity. If procedure is not followed when this happens, lives are lost.

Because of what I am, lives were very nearly lost anyway. I was halfway across the big room before anyone even realized what had happened. By the time someone sounded the alert, I was practically on the man. I read the report six months later: I was screaming the entire time about vampires and conspiracies and murder. In the moment that the break occurred, I forgot about the guns all of us carry, flechette guns full of tranquilizer darts. I was going to tear the man apart with my bare hands. The others in the room with me did not forget. The report said it took six separate rounds of darts to finally bring me down.

I spent fifty-nine days in hospital before they deemed me sufficiently medicated and settled to release me. It was a horror that I cannot truly describe. Every day I fought the medics. Every day I was sure that they were poisoning me, or attempting to gain control of my brain, or that they were all my cousins in disguise come to kill me, or Setites, or worse. That state?it was clarity as if someone shone a million-watt arc lamp directly into my brain. Absolute conviction. Total certainty. And yet, every time I tried to reason against the madness, my every thought was more muddled than the last. The sense of dissociation, of separation from reality is the same. This is otherwise quite different, though.

The false life my cousins trapped me in reinvoked all of those old terrors and furies, with the added fillip that part of me was not sure that I was not in fact Niles Straton, and the whole business of being someone else simply an extra layer of madness. I don?t know whether it was the drugs I was given, or my brain?s own attempt to protect itself by growing a sort of shell around the memories, but until I was brought back to myself I did not remember what had happened to me when I was twenty-nine. My episode took place just before I started visiting Infinity City in earnest and met Liya. What I did remember of the time, prior to my life as Niles?what I clearly remember telling her?was some nonsense about a place called Xiang, a dying Dyson sphere: aliens and colonists, a sun that had gone out, a crown that when bolted onto one?s head could produce endless perfect clones. I don?t understand, now, how I could ever have believed that was real.

My father, with whom I had had only the most terse and cursory of communications prior to that point, came to visit me once a week. I only remember it toward the end, when the fog lifted and the pieces of myself came back together. I had to have raged at and fought with him, just as I had with everyone else who entered my cell, yet he never spoke of it. He told me the week that he died that he?d been simply doing his job. At the time, I didn?t understand what he was even talking about.

He was, I think, a greater hero than I could ever hope to be.

Fionna,

This is one of several letters to be given to you upon my death. This particular letter concerns our child and his future with the tribe. (You are all so certain that it will be a Raza and not an Isabella. I confess I cannot decide which would be better)

?Ismat al-Misri is the head of one of the six Houses to which we all belong, the head of my House were we to reside in Egypt. She is the final arbiter, the last resort. I have no doubt that it was on her explicit orders that my cousins came to Rhydin. I spoke to her at length earlier today.

Should my blood breed true and our son prove himself to be one of my kind, he must spend a year between the ages of sixteen and eighteen in Cairo, at her House. If you like, you may live there with him, or elsewhere as you choose. He needs the training that only my family can provide for him. She has assured me that whatever he chooses to do afterward shall be permitted, with her blessing. Of course, it would be to her (and the tribe?s) benefit for him to choose to remain there, and I expect there will be no end of persuasion to that effect, but you must ensure that he is sufficiently strong-willed that it is his choice and not something he has been coerced into.

There is to be a contingent of the tribe present in Rhydin; they will contact you when the time comes. Do not be afraid to demand that they wait if you feel it is too early for our son, still, so long as it is within the timeframe I mentioned above. If he proves not to be one of us, there is no need for a stay in Cairo, and all of this will be moot. My cousins will monitor this situation and determine which it shall be. Do not deny them access, but do not hesitate to be involved.

I have no doubt that you will be everything he needs.

I love you.
--a.

I spoke to her, finally.

It was worse than I could have imagined.