That she had still been in the world then. That if only I had been smarter, more savvy, more observant, I would have come up those steps into her secret place to find her alive.

That if I had been alone, not chained to a sociopath, she would have revealed herself to me.

Physically ill at the thought. So ill, I bent over and would have retched, but suppressed the impulse. Blasphemous. To do it in that space. I took a breath instead. Another. Stood up straight and let the cavern air, withered but pure, fill my lungs. Felt better. Felt clear. Did not want to be empty.

When I really looked at Silvina’s face. When I looked clear and unflinching. It wasn’t ecstasy I found there. Not like Ronnie. No, not ecstasy and not terror, either. More a sense of … completion.

Of coming to rest. Finally.

I was conditioned to look for clues from Silvina. To look for messages. It took long moments before I realized she had left no message. That the letter was the last of it. That her body was the last of it.

A huge, black three-ring binder sat on a desk nearby. Inside, a two-thousand-page manuscript in Spanish. Titled “Unitopia.” My college Spanish was rusty, but even a glance, a skim, told me that this was her real manifesto. Not the one meant for me and people like me. Not the middle-class, watered-down version. In English. But the unadulterated vision. It would be harsh, uncompromising. It would not budge on how the physical laws of the universe worked. Of how the laws of cause and effect worked. It would not try to give false hope, but give the hope of a real way forward. No matter how uncomfortable.

I wept, reading what I could of it. I wept because I knew that she had not believed anyone would implement her ideas. That was why it existed here and not out in the world. Delusional. Naïve. Unworkable. Dangerous. That is what the enemy called the necessities for survival. For flourishing.

So she’d left it here and found another way.

And it had killed her. Hadn’t worked.

Clear to me there, in that moment.

In front of her like an altar, that odd medical station, which had three tubes for syringes held within a clear polymer container, radiated the cool hum of climate-control. Two were missing. One of the two lay cracked on the floor beneath Silvina’s dangling hand. It took no imagination to guess that Ronnie had taken the second.

Whatever it was, Silvina had thought it would change the world. Each was a different “approach,” according to the documentation. Each promised radical transformation. Each promised contamination until you would see the world so differently. And as you walked out into the world, what had captured you would capture others and they, too, would be transformed. “We must change to see the world change.”