The Salt & Vice had never felt like home to Deji Okonkwo.
He had been free for less than twelve hours, and already the diner's walls seemed to press in on him like the walls of the containment cell he'd spent nine years in. The smell of old grease and coffee, which should have been comforting, made his stomach turn. The fluorescent lights buzzed with the same frequency as the lights in the white room where they'd held him before the implant. The voices of the people around him—kind, worried, full of questions he didn't know how to answer—blurred into a single, overwhelming hum.
He sat in the back room, his hands wrapped around a cup of tea that Una had pressed into them, and tried to remember how to be a person. Nine years. Nine years of isolation and testing and the slow, methodical era
