Memories fire at me, without warning, without prompting. I’m six, eating roasted butternut squash, laughing with Tila as Mom tells us a story over dinner. I’m ten, reading as Tila sleeps beside me. I’m seven, and we’ve fallen by the lake. I’ve scraped my hip, the pain blooming as though it’s just happened. We’re trying to drag ourselves upright but we keep slipping in the mud. Tila’s panting next to me, and above the birds call. She looks at me, and her eyes are deep and as familiar as my own.

“It’ll be OK,” she says.

“You can’t promise that,” I say, and I’m out of the memory, back in the Technicolor of my mind. A weird, fractured bit of a memory floats to me. That first moment I saw Tila after the surgery. Standing, unattached. Her own person. Yet as soon as she could, she’d come back to me. She’s threaded through my mind. Everywhere I turn, there she is. Tila. My Tila. I see her and I realize: neither of us is the good twin. Not anymore. We never were. Tila is simply my other half. Not my better half. Not my worse half.

Then everything goes dark.

It’s quiet, and warm.

I wonder if I’m dead. The same thing, perhaps, has happened to me as happened to Nazarin. Maybe I’m flatlining on that chair in the lab. I can’t feel my body.

I float there, not thinking, just existing. It’s … nice. I don’t feel afraid. I don’t worry about anyone. Not Nazarin. Not Ensi. Not my sister. Not myself.

Being dead isn’t so bad.

During our binge on religious texts once we were free of the Hearth, I remember reading a paper that argued we don’t have souls. We’re nothing but neural pathways and electric pulses, fatty white and gray matter. Once the organ that houses thought dies, there’s nothing left. Nothing drifts up to heaven or down to hell. Floating there, in the dim dark, I’m not sure if the author’s right or not.

I felt something similar to this when our heart failed at the Hearth. I remember darkness coming, but I was too afraid to embrace it. I ran away. I never saw that light at the end of the tunnel, like they say. Tila said she saw it, in Confession with Mana-ma. At the time I thought she was lying, but maybe she wasn’t as afraid as I was. Maybe she spent some time in this quiet place.