Something was biting Rama's ankle before he was fully conscious of having a body at all.
He came back into himself in stages. First the itch, sharp and insistent, then the smell, wet earth and crushed leaves and something green and bitter underneath it, then the sound of a thousand insects going at once, a wall of noise he hadn't heard anywhere in Singapore in seven years. His eyes opened onto dark. Not the managed dark of a facility with its power grid down. Actual dark, the kind with texture to it, broken only by a canopy so dense the stars came through in fragments, faint and scattered, like light leaking through a roof full of small holes.
His daughter's weight was still against his chest.
