He came back to existence the way a thing came back that had been somewhere it was not supposed to survive, which was slowly and with significant disagreement from his body about the process.
The smell arrived first. Not because smell was the first sense to return but because the smell was the kind that bypassed the usual processing and went directly to the part of the brain responsible for immediate biological decisions. Organic matter. Decomposition in its various stages. The specific layered quality of a space that had been receiving things and not releasing them for a long time.
He did not open his eyes immediately. He ran the assessment with his other senses first, the way he always ran it, the way he had been running it since the cell — but the assessment from the cell was gone, replaced by something that required completely new information.
