ANK RAN—HIS WOUNDS from the terror birds throbbing and protesting, his tourniquet of blankets having long since fallen off. He wanted to get there before nightfall—before the light receded from the sky and his eyes began to fail, before he possibly even changed his mind. He ran as he had never run previously, testing his new body and its limits under duress, pushing it in ways he had never pushed before, tasking it with what seemed an impossible end: crossing a 30-mile stretch of badlands to reach the town of Paradise by the close of a day almost three-quarters over.
And as he ran, he remembered (or thought he did) the details of a life prior—a life which had been full and interesting and robust, in which he had found his work and his love ... but which he had outlived long before he had
