[Dejah's room]

Time passes. Asleep, half-dazed by the Voice of Barsoom, Curtis has even less sense of how long he stays in Dejah's bed.

(In his dreams, everything's warm and bright, even the smallest spaces of the train; nothing aches, and voices ring all around him.)

When he finally wakes up, utter disorientation smacks into him headlong -- where am I? what the fuck am I sleeping on? -- before he feels the warm body next to him and, like a compass swinging north, reorients around the soft sound of Dejah's breath. Sleep took care of the last side effects: he feels completely steady, awake, his calm returning as he looks over at Dejah.