Mikel awakened wingless.
He shivered, standing naked in the early morning chill of the bedroom in their cliffapt, feeling numb and distant, staring down incredulously at the pair of dried, withered, brown husks on the bed. Tentatively, he reached out and touched them, brushing the wrinkled, dead things with the tips of his fingers, the texture like old, dry parchment; and he remembered long ago, when he was a boy and finding the shed skin of a dragonette up on the canyon rim--it too had been wrinkled, dry, paperlike, dead.
Still feeling as if he were partially tranquilized, he called out hoarsely, "Aylin, please come see this."
His wife entered their bedroom, the bright Medtech Guild caduceus tat on her right cheek contrasting sharply with her pale features, her storm-gray eyes almost matching the color of her folded wings.
"Yes, Mikel," Aylin answered, the questioning frown turning to momentary surprise, as she stared where he pointed at his wing remnants. She recovered her poise, quickly taking charge of the situation and ordering in a calm, measured voice, "Sit back down and take a few deep breaths. I'll be right back."
She disappeared for a moment, returning from the bathroom with her medkit in hand. Withdrawing a small laser scalpel, she said, "I'm going to trim away some dead skin. It won't hurt..."
Then, with gentle hands, she carefully inspected his back, coming to rest on the wing nubs. "Sore or tender at all?" she asked.
Mikel shook his head.
"Turn around," Aylin said, kneeling and running her hands over his bare thighs and down his legs. Finally, she stood and shrugged slightly, still maintaining her professional voice. "It's like the computer summary suggested might happen," she explained, "only much sooner than we expected." She worked in the village medcenter and had taken Mikel in for a complete workup about a month ago, when they first noticed the strange changes in both his wings and legs.
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