Rodrigo’s new car has new leather seats.
Adam can smell the leather: real, cured animal skins, imported via climate-controlled freight from Earth-1. He is aware, in a fuzzy, forgotten kind of way, that he would probably not have been able to smell the disinfected, processed-for-spaceflight leather before his senses sharpened, before Assimilation. But today, it smells like—
Alien fruit trees—burning. Particle cannons—humming. Projectile weapons—hammering. Adam lay facedown, nose pressed into a fallen log. He couldn’t move his limbs because he did not know how to. His pain centers weren’t firing yet, despite the holes carved into his torso by enemy guns. He was a newborn. His freshly Assimilated brain did not yet know how to work the striated muscles of this human body.
—it smells like that.
