The agent in the gift basket carried the same architecture the Directorate had put into Yenna's core three years earlier. She named it before any healer in Orison could have found it, since she had spent thirty months learning the order in which her body stopped belonging to her.
"It goes to the shoulders first, then the diaphragm," she said, with both sleeves pushed back on the bench, "and after the diaphragm it reaches the command channels, where somebody else decides what my hands do."
"How long," Vell asked.
"Six hours if I lie still," Yenna answered, "four if I do anything at all, and I am not going to lie still while you withdraw from a bout over a basket of preserved fruit."
He had already reached for the withdrawal form, which she had watched him do without saying a word about it. She let him get as far as the pen before she put her hand flat across the paper.
"Say the reason out loud," she said.
