keep my body from the fire

Polly was falling.Falling, falling, endlessly through the infinite black, and then suddenly the air around him changed from the hot and sulfuric miasma of the Industry to cold and sharp, and then the ground was rushing up to meet him. He plummeted to the ground with the velocity of a crashing satellite, bone cracking and earth shattering under the impact, and he was gone.He wasn’t dead, somehow, not entirely. Not yet. (Or, Polly's return to the Industry after his defeat at the hands of the Instrumentalist goes poorly, and he ends up back on Earth, broken and battered but alive.)