There was no time – that was perhaps the strangest thing.

Not that time didn’t exist, exactly, but it ran in fits and spurts so erratic that he couldn’t always tell if a moment had passed or a year.

Then, of course, there were the impossibilities. Tonight, he glided along the inside of the dome, staring down at the identical white boxes with their strictly aligned roads set out in geometric perfection. When the panel opened and he began to float toward the opening, he panicked, flapping his wings in imitation of the birds he had watched on videos of the primitive world. Somewhere birds still soared in the blue sky, but nowhere near his parish.

The motion accomplished nothing. No, because the experience had to deliver maximum terror. When he passed through the panel, though, he did not soar off into outer space. Nor did he suddenly lose the ability to breathe – either from lack of air or from exposure to sickness. But the Cure inside the dome was the only thing that protected him, so he knew he must be having another fit. Maybe some sort of withdrawal from the chemical. The amount he received just from the atmosphere should have taken the edge off, yet here he was – flying.

I’m definitely insane.

Once he returned to earth, assuming he did so, he would contact Channer and inform him that the new recruit needed to be retired, as he was subject to fits of madness and couldn’t survive without a full daily dose of the Cure.

He passed over the Dregs, and the mystery of it distracted him. In reality, he held no concept of the Dregs. Benevolence showed pictures, but they mostly consisted of deformed and agonized Deplorables surrounded by the worst squalor imaginable.

Somehow, he didn’t believe that told the whole story. Certainly, the Deps who came into the city every morning to trade didn’t seem too damaged or disfigured. Some seemed significantly taller or shorter than the average person inside, and there were a few who walked with a limp or bore a crooked countenance. They didn’t smell bad or anything, though, and their fingernails were generally clean – with the exception of the ones who brought in produce. No one really wanted the produce, as a rule, as it was assumed to carry contamination, but a few people used it for art props or pigment.

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Flying over the Dregs, the entire settlement blurred into a grey miasma of obscurity, likely because Kaĉjo really couldn’t begin to guess at its layout or structure. He wanted so badly to dive into that cloud and see what waited on the other side, but apparently his insanity wouldn’t let him cross that threshold for some reason. Instead, he found himself floating back to the city without wishing to.

He was almost back when he noticed it – another, smaller village on the southwest edge of the gate. More directly south, though he could discern it from the western gate, so it was either very wide or slightly off-center. Was it a village? He couldn’t really tell. Like the other village, it was cloaked in an impenetrable fog, but this one brought all of his new anxiety to a keening pitch inside his mind. He could discern no gate, but Kaĉjo recognized the anomaly in the wall, the distortion of the white dwellings in such a way to obscure the oddity. He had seen it before, that brick outcropping from the wall where houses should be. Why had his mind supplied that sensation of dread and apprehension just because he couldn’t discern the village on the southwest edge of town? If there was no gate, there would be no village, would there?

Unlike the other village, when he began to dive toward the smaller cloud, he found he could direct himself at it. What he couldn’t do, though, was control his descent. Suddenly, he began to pick up speed, and soon, he was plummeting toward the cloud. As he neared it, it grew in perspective, and soon it swallowed his vision of the rest of the city. He tried to pull himself back up, glancing down repeatedly in terror at his speed and at the unknown. Finally, his feet plunged into the darkness, followed by the rest of him, and he lurched upright on his mat, back in his regular quarters in his regular dwelling. His heartbeat like the madman he was, and he would be shocked if an ANGEL didn’t show up soon to discern the reason.

After a few deep breaths, his heart had calmed, and he placed his feet on the floor. If those visions and voyages had taken the place of his sleep, he would never lie down again.