"The soul is the prison of the body."
-Michel Foucault

NOBODY REMEMBERS NANJING, BUT I REMEMBER THE SUNRISE

There was pain. That was the first thing he was aware of. Well, wasn't that a depressing thought? And normally he was such a happy-go-lucky guy. He wanted to ask what had happened - a late night drinking binge and illicit time in the flight simulator? Sacked in football again? Another alien bug perhaps? All he managed was a groan, hands coming up to his neck almost automatically.

"Shhh . . .shhh, John, calm down." There were hands on him, big and warm and comforting, rough, but gentle, stroking through his hair. The voice was tinged with a familiar panic, high and almost angry.

Rodney.

His head was pillowed on something soft, also warm, and it shifted just slightly. The pain was narrowing, sharp, stabbing - a throb, a pulse, a heartbeat. His eyes flew open and he tried to push up off the ground, only to have those hands gently hold him down.

"John, please, you'll hurt yourself."

And it did hurt. His entire back was on fire. His skin stretched, wrong. He felt like an elephant, like one of those dogs with folds of skin falling into its eyes . . . what were they called? His skin was too big, but it was too tight, and all he could see was grey, a grey wall, dank and rusted, metal, the taste of iron in the air, but that could just be blood.

"What . . ." was all he could manage.

Rodney only needed to say one word: "Kolya."

The night was inky black and even that was fading fast into the damp void of the tree line in the distance. Elizabeth stumbled for what must have been the thousandth time. Her knees were raw, pants and shirt and skin all ripped from branches and brambles and fear.

She remembered the cool woods of New England, the smell of moss and rain and the crisp crunch of leaves and ice and nature beneath her feet. It had been a long time since she'd been out camping with her brothers. She remembered James' smile as he'd catch her from falling, the gentle teasing Will and Tommy dumped on their baby sister, who tried so hard to just be one of the boys. Here there was no one to catch her, except the naked edge of the night.

"A little farther, Dr. Weir." Teyla's words were soft in the darkness, practically drowned out by the unfamiliar sounds of this world - hoots like honking horns, howling like that unfortunate night at the Chinese opera where she got food poisoning, scratching, and rustling, and the trees swaying in the breeze sounding like cellophane but not nearly as quaint.

Teyla didn't stumble - Elizabeth had almost forgotten she was there. In this dark, Teyla's encouraging words, her strength, could very well be an illusion of her frightened mind, a phantasm.

She thought she could see it in the distance, an odd congruence in the shadows, too geometric to be natural, like the warm modernity of Atlantis. She thought about her childhood, touring MOMA with her father, pointing out all the twentieth-century greats, asking her to find herself in the cubes and circles and colors beyond a rainbow.

A hand clamped down on hers, and she flinched, for a second truly believing that Teyla too was one of those strange figures, half-formed copper rising up from the darkness like some prehistoric beast struggling out of a swamp of thick tar.

But the hand was warm and gently insistent. It squeezed Elizabeth's sweating palm, and it was only a few more steps until she felt the cool metal of the DHD beneath her hand, even more comforting than Teyla's confident grip.

Then the tree line exploded around them, lights bright and blinding, a wave of sound washing over her, stunning. 'We disabled them with three flash-bangs strategically triggered after Major Sheppard had retrieved the ZPM.' Lieutenant Ford's report, fragments of red-hot memory drowned by light and deafness now, spots crawling across her vision as she reached out wildly and dialed, praying to a god long-forgotten for the tell-tale whoosh of the gate.

That noise had been so many things, a threat, a worry, a nightmare haunting her dreams, wonder, hope, desire, but it had never before been salvation.

A hand took hers and she melted through liquid comfort, the world she still couldn't see disintegrating and swirling around her.

She didn't hear the bomb explode.

"Lieutenant, you will wear hole in very ancient floor, split up city, cause us all to sink into depths of the ocean and have the national historical society chasing after our hair."

"Very funny, Zelenka. I'm sorry if my pacing is distracting you from your nail biting."

Radek frowned, looking down at his hands. Surprisingly, his fingers were slicked with saliva and the index finger nail on his right hand was a bit shorter than he remembered it. He hadn't done this since he was twelve.

But then again, he supposed the situation warranted it.

"I need to be out there," Ford said, turning and doing another length of the control room. Even the idiotic gate techs had finally succumbed and moved their coffee cups far away from Ford's frantic motion, all afraid to move and break the tension. Radek didn't blame them.

"Yes, because charging off with trigger finger still ensconced in cast is brilliant idea. Perhaps you will club them to death, yes?" Radek rolled his eyes. He genuinely liked Lieutenant Ford. He was enthusiastic and mild-mannered and so much fun to tease, but right now he wanted to strangle the kid.

"I don't even know who them is!" Ford fumed petulantly.

"Maybe is Big Bird and the Cookie Monster, maybe they are simply delayed by some, what did you say last time Dr. Weir and I sat here thumb-twiddling for more than twenty-four hours? Oh, yes, 'Sorry, we hit a little snag.'"

"That was the major, not me, and it was better than saying we got trapped in a bog of gopher snot that wouldn't budge until the Mirilians had to come dig us out. Besides, if it's just a little snag, then why are you biting your nails?"

"Usually, Dr. Weir is here to . . . keep me focused."

Ford rolled his eyes, whispering something under his breath that sounded disturbingly like, 'yeah, on her breasts.' Radek decided to ignore it, though Dr. Weir's breasts really were a marvel, second wonder of Atlantis after the city itself. So perky, and rounded, yet not too big for such a thin frame.

Radek was finally occupied imagining Dr. Weir in a blood-red teddy when the wormhole engaged, sending Ford whirling around, just barely missing Wu's coffee cup.

Wu clasped the cup to his chest protectively. "Sorry, Lieutenant, I just thought you'd like to dial-up for the scheduled check-in."

Ford leaned back against the biometric sensors . . . these consoles really weren't meant as furniture - thousands of years old and . . . Radek winced, but his distress was soon forgotten as Bates' tired, but still somehow gung-ho voice barked over the radio - Marines, still such strange creatures, like water buffalo, only possibly dumber.

"This is Bates. No sign of them, Sir. The Rejekens were in a panic when they didn't show up and have searched the path from the Gate and its surroundings thoroughly. We're still investigating, but everything checks out."

It must have really checked out for a chronic paranoiac like Bates to say so. So what now?

"There's evidence of a struggle around the gate. I found a few slugs buried in a nearby tree. Not all of them appear to be our ordinance, Sir."

"Damnit." That was the first time Radek had ever heard the young lieutenant curse, and he looked almost apologetic for it now. But then again, this was ridiculous. Murphy’s law in action: the happy circumstance of sending all senior personnel off-world except himself and Ford would of course end in disaster. After the movie companies neglected to make KGB Agents Gone Wild IV, Radek had stopped believing in good luck. In fact, his luck, especially since meeting one Rodney McKay, had been decidedly bad.

Bates continued. "The Rejekens are pretty thorough, Sir. The only place they could've gone was back through the Gate, which is what their tracks seem to indicate. I'd count maybe seven attackers at most and there doesn't appear to be any blood spilled. There's a chance that if the attackers didn't have company waiting on the other side, someone could've gotten away."

That was optimistic, especially for Bates. Radek swore the man had some sort of emotional black hole inside him that would suck away any positive thought that dared look at that scowl of his. There must've been absolutely no hope if Bates was offering platitudes.

He let his head fall down on the desk, narrowly missing a coffee cup and really not giving a damn.

He and Lieutenant Ford were in charge. Radek was not meant for command. He was happy with bureaucracy; in fact he loved it, loved being second up on the ladder. He got to do what he wanted, rarely had to get his hands dirty running away from angry natives, only had to drop in on the occasional briefing, fill out the occasional form, blame Kavanagh if anything went wrong, and all he had to do for it was let McKay's ego do what McKay's ego did best, which was be loud, obnoxious and domineering.

He and Ford! Radek watched the lieutenant resume his pacing, removing his hat and wringing it in his hands. He missed Major Sheppard already. Though the man was far from conventional, he was bright and got along well with the scientists. They respected the fact that he had more than a few brain cells to rub together. Ford . . . Ford was a kid - barely old enough to drink (and held his liquor like it too). He certainly didn't inspire confidence, and he was a statistical anomaly in how bad he was at prime-not-prime. That was amusing for a day-trek, but not for the man whose strategic faculties were supposed to save you from soul-sucking blue vampires. At least Sheppard could play chess. Ford would probably try to load the pawns into his machine gun.

And Dr. Weir, lovely Dr. Weir, with the perfectly perky breasts and the intense understanding eyes and the voice like a sexy secret agent cornering him in some dark alleyway. And she wasn't a bad boss either.

"Dr. Zelenka."

They were all going to die. Ford would lead them off the edge of a cliff and Radek . . . Radek would try to put the pieces back together. Because that's what he was, a put-pieces-back-together guy, not a pull-something-out-of-ass-to-save-the-day kind of guy. Radek was smart, he did his job well, but he wasn't so big on the whole responsibility thing. He didn't want to be the one they blamed when he got them all killed.

"Dr. Zelenka," there was a voice, more deliberate now.

"Hmmmm?"

"Is there any way you can determine where the Gate last dialed? Something . . ." Ford seemed to wince. ". . . technical?"

"Rodney and I had been discussing a way of freezing the crystals with one of the chemicals we recently found in that lab, but there is possibility of blowing up DHD." Radek responded absently, thinking about the thousand and one ways that he and Ford could get them all killed. Poor Elizabeth, all her hard work for nothing.

"Do it."

"What?"

"I said, 'do it.'"

"No, no, Lieutenant, I think you misunderstand me. When I say, 'might possibly blow up DHD,' I mean big explosion, people stranded, chaos and anarchy and all things bad and undesirable."

"Trust me, Doc, I know what 'blow up' means." Ford's voice was hard, but Radek could sense the fear lurking just beneath. That was all anger was, according to the psychologists, right?

Radek thought about the masses of paperwork in McKay's messy scrawl, strange language and figures and notes that would make sense only to someone as crazy as the man himself. He thought about soil analysis and biological hazards and public health procedure. He thought about holding a gun, facing down a Wraith like McKay had described. He thought about not being able to strangle Kavanagh when he came to him with yet another complaint. He thought about Ford: 'the Wraith are coming. Quick, Zelenka, do something . . . technical.'

He didn't argue.