Jin Xueli drifted in that murky half-world between sleep and waking, dimly aware that she was lying in her own bed, the bedroom dark around her.
Every time she came back from the Nest, she slept like the dead.
It wasn't just the sleep debt she'd racked up in there. It was the kind of exhaustion that ordinary people had no frame of reference for — how to even describe it?
Like dying, and then having your soul wander the earth without rest for a hundred years — crossing mountains, fording rivers — only to be resurrected in a body that remembered every single one of those years.
Her body seemed to know, on some instinctual level, that a trip to the Nest wasn't a normal human experience. Like deep-sea diving — technically possible, but not what the human body was built for. To fight off the Nest's lingering effects, the brain demanded sleep in obscene quantities.
