The clinic was two levels above the well, in a row of rooms the Compact had kept for its engineers and never quite finished. Mara sat on the cot in the last room, with her boots still on, while the doctor put an image on the wall.
It was a scan. Taken an hour before, when Mara could walk again. The doctor had led her up the stair herself, one hand on her elbow, and laid her under a machine like a long white hood, and told her to be still, and Mara had been still.
On the wall: the inside of her own head. Grey on black. The curve of her skull. And behind her left ear, set into the bone, a small bright shape. The graft’s housing. The disc of shaped bone and unknown metal fitted after a fall when she was six, her mother’s fitting, with its lining that took heat without changing. The thing that had let her hear metal as tone.
“There,” the doctor said.
She touched the screen with a stylus. A marker appeared: a thin red line, along the edge of the housing where it met the bone. Then another. Then a third.
