This game does not excise fantasies about Sarah. It just occupies me with a menial task while my subconscious does the bigger job of building possible worlds around her, where she’s okay without me when I die. Or I relish the impossible alternatives to my current situation. Her body, and her voice, and the sound of ocean waves as I brush the hair off her face… they are wishes for a man manufacturing hope.

I hear footsteps in the hall on the other side of the glass. In a split second, I regret the families of rectangles and the happy lives I spent hours weaving. I should have been planning for the inevitable unfriendly visit, or at least mentally preparing for the moment it came. But I’m loose, and empty, and simple as a babe when I stand shirtless before the glass, waiting as the steps get louder, closer, distinct enough to determine that there are only two feet, and they step lightly.

My skin prickles and my thoughts narrow to the width of a knife blade.

It’s a woman.

There are a dozen women it could be, promising outcomes ranging from neutral to really fucking bad. I can try to figure out who she is, but there’s only one I truly fear.

“No.” I deny it—closing my eyes before I even see her, as if she’ll transform into someone else and all my stupid fantasies can remain possible.

“Dario.” Her voice is in front of me now. But with my eyes closed, she’s not there.

“No!” I am weak and moronic and childish.

“Please.” She’s closer, clearer. “I keep having to say ‘please’ and I’m tired of begging you.”

With my eyes closed, I hear the haughty self-regard she brought to her first hours in the greenhouse. It’s her shield against panic.

I put my hands on the glass, over the air slit, head down, and open my eyes. I see the floor and her shadow across my bare feet. “You shouldn’t be here.”

“I know where I belong.”

She’s telling me she wasn’t captured or taken. She came back because she wanted to. This is what I did when I taught her how to exist outside the Colonia. She got trapped inside with them. Her ignorance may be swept away, but her agency is a permanent stain.

She’s open and vulnerable, curious and fearless, and the ways she and I are the same are the most dangerous. If she chose to be here, there’s a reason.

“I’m going to look at you,” I warn. “I’m going to pick my head up and, prima… I know my weaknesses… I’m not made of stone, no matter what you think… when I see you here in this place… it’s going to break me.”

“We all wish it was that easy.”

We all… what?

The rubble in my mind parts like the Red Sea, making a way through, but with forks and switchbacks and no clear path to the promised land. I don’t have to bend, hunched like a man carrying tonnage of his own pathetic sorrows.