She lifts her arms at her husband, her fingers splayed, and wills his utter destruction. Gouts of white hot flame shoot out, lancing from her fingertips to his chest, his face, his thighs. Lightning strikes from the clouds overhead, twice, three times, four times, a dozen times, converging on the point where he stands. The ground below his feet explodes upwards in a surge of searing heat and light and force. His body is incinerated, pulverized, reduced to ash, obscured by a radiance so bright that nothing can be seen.

Su-Yong Shu falls to her knees, the buzzing in her head gone, released with the destruction of the traitorous part of her represented by her husband Chen, even as superheated bits of earth and rock and ash rain down around her.

She lets her head fall into her hands. Tears are falling from her eyes now. It was because they’d tortured her. It was because they’d driven her mad. That was why she’d hurt Ling. That was why.

How long? How long until she was sane again? How long until the input from this biological brain brought her back? How long had it taken last time?

“Do you like me better now, Su-Yong?”

The voice comes from behind her. It’s Chen’s, but different, kinder…

She turns, still on her knees, and he’s there. Not the Chen of nearly fifty who’d tortured her, who’d refused to touch her for a decade, but the Chen of thirty who she’d first met. Lean, a simple white button down shirt tucked into his black trousers, a wry smile on his smooth face, a telltale of the keen intense mind she’d fallen in love with.

He’s an illusion, a fabrication of her own mind, a man who no longer exists, but still, to see him takes her breath away.

“Chen…” she whispers.

He steps towards her, drops to his knees in the tall grass, and takes her face in his hands.

“Su-Yong.”

His voice is gentle. His smile is kind. His fingers are warm on her skin.

“You’re not real,” she tells him.

He smiles wider. “I’m as real as any of this,” he says, gesturing slowly with his eyes and a small movement of his head, taking in the sky, the grass, the plain, the mountains.

Her hands rise, to touch him, to feel his own hands on her face. “You’re here because I’m mad, because I’m still crazy.”

“I’m here because you’re growing more sane.”

More sane.

She remembers now. She has metrics she’d built in her isolation. Monitors. Crude psychological and neurophysiological exams to measure her sanity, to project the time she had left.

She launches them, feels them take stock of her, compares the output to the last she has on record.