“Oh, you’ve sat there not-reading that book whenever you wanted to not-talk with me. When you and Danny brought me here, I should have been baffled because there was no gate. But I already knew that you hadn’t made any gates in all your moving around back on the island. So when Danny took me—I know it was Danny and not you, because you followed an instant later—I didn’t look for a gate. I’m not a cat, constantly trying to catch the laser pointer. I didn’t look for anything outside myself at all. The things you had told me—you led me to look inside myself. To see if I could sense, could grasp, whatever it was that Danny grabbed hold of in order to drag me here to Florida.”

Pat had to admit that this sounded far more sensible than anything else Hermia might have done.

“And I think I did sense it. Not the way you sense something outside yourself, like a smell or a sound. And not even the way you see yourself in a dream, in the third person, as if you were hovering just over your own shoulder, watching what you do. No, what I sensed was the part of me that Danny tugged on. Only it wasn’t a tug. It was more like an invitation that was so powerful that I fell into it. Like gravity. I fell here. That’s what it felt like.”

And now that Hermia had put it into those words, Pat realized that it was true, or at least truish. She thought of the headlong rush to Duat and yes, it was like falling. As inevitable as gravity. And so was coming back to her body.

“So I thought, ‘That’s who “I” am,’ and yes, I’m putting air quotes around ‘I’ because it’s not the thing I’ve thought of as myself for my whole life. It’s not this face or these hands or this body that eats and pees and walks and reads, it’s not my eyes or any of my senses. But when Danny tugged on it and I fell here, it was me doing the falling, and all those other things came along with. So it’s me. It’s who I am. But there isn’t much of it, is there? If I were really stripped down to that tuggable thing that fell, it wouldn’t really be me, would it. Just a fragment.”

“The fragment that makes all the decisions,” said Pat.

“Ah. Yes. That’s what it comes down to, doesn’t it. Whatever part of us decides, that’s our true self.”

“Ka,” said Pat.