Life returned to me with a shrill brightness.
Weakly but with increasing desperation, I pulled out the tubes choking my airway.
I was drowning in viscous plasma, and then a lid opened so that I fell from my metal cocoon, blinded in the unaccustomed glare.
A diamond protruded from the flesh of my forearm.
I didn't understand-a moment ago I'd been in an afterworld populated by monsters.
Now I was in some metal nursery of cocoons like my own.
I wiped at the glass of one after another, to see people suspended in fluid and shot through with tubes and wires.
What was this place, and how did I come to be here?
Then there was a voice in my head, guiding me to a suit of supernatural armor.
I put it on, and the voice said, "Go now and find her."