He handed me the container, then headed for the small kitchen tucked into the corner of the room. He retrieved a weird-looking syringe-type device from a drawer and then came back.
"You keep syringes with your knives?" I asked, eyeing the massive thing dubiously. "I really don’t want to know where you’re going to insert that."
"Nowhere interesting, unfortunately," he said wryly. "One microcell goes into your right heel, the other into your left ear."
"You are not shoving something that large into my ear!"
"Don’t be a baby. Both Ilianna and Tao lived through it. You will, too."
"Well, I hope you’ve at least sterilized the needle," I muttered, almost mutinously. I hated needles nearly as much as I hated spiders.
"Of course. Now take your right shoe off and give me your foot."
I blew out a breath and did as he asked. He took a tube of cream out of his sweater pocket and rubbed some of it on my heel, then pulled on some gloves. After a minute, he hit a button on the syringe and plucked out one of the microcells; a second later the thing was in my heel. I didn’t even feel it.
"See," he said, grinning up at me. "All that worry for nothing."
"You haven’t gotten to my ear yet," I grouched, more for the sake of it than anything else.
He repeated the process on my ear, then said, "That’s it."
I put my shoe back on. "So how is it supposed to work?"
He held up his hand and looked at his watch. After a couple of minutes, he dropped his hand. "Okay," he said. "The microcells have now been warmed by your body and will have started doing their job. However, it’ll take twenty-four hours before they’re working at full capacity."
I frowned. "But how are they supposed to work when they’re not even connected?"
I knew the basics of nanowires—like cells, they were powered by the heat of the body. But for the wires to be active, both ends had to be connected, so that a circuit was formed. They also gave off an extremely faint electronic tingle when in use, whereas these things didn’t.