I slowed the pace of my steps, not saying anything as I looked at her expectantly. She smiled, leaving her hand resting against my elbow. The light was low enough that she almost looked normal. That was a nice thing. The sight of her—and Jeff, and myself—in heavy foundation had been jarring. We weren’t supposed to look like that anymore. We had never really been meant to look like that in the first place.

“You seem troubled,” she said. “What’s bothering you?”

“I don’t…” The words seemed suddenly complicated. I wasn’t sure how to pin them down. Finally, wanly, I said, “I don’t feel right.”

“Your thoughts are taking turns you don’t expect. It’s almost like someone else is thinking them for you, and you’re trying, very hard, not to wonder whether that pollen the scouts mentioned has been rewriting your mind.”

This time, I was silent not because I didn’t know what to say, but because I couldn’t do anything but stare at her.

Tahlia’s smile was small and tight. “It’s no mystery. I think we’re all asking ourselves the same thing. I don’t … I have never been a big fan of people. I was a forestry worker before this began to accelerate. I watched over the trees in Newfoundland, and I told myself that it was normal for me to feel more akin to them than to the man who signed my paycheck. I worked very hard at playing human, even as I made sure everyone I met knew I was no such thing. The nice ones thought I was eccentric. The rest thought I was crazy.”

None of this was anything new. Her story mirrored mine, and Jeff’s, and every other one of us that I’d met. We were a people united by our isolation.

“I went to therapy.”

That, now … that was new. None of the rest of us had voluntarily sought professional help. The aversion to it seemed to be almost as deeply ingrained as the desire to remind everyone we met that we weren’t from around here.

Tahlia nodded, clearly seeing my surprise. “I knew a few people who’d been helped, and forestry is a lonely profession to begin with. If there was something I could do to make myself a bit less isolated, I was going to try. I had to try. I thought I was going to lose my mind if I didn’t. Would you like to know what my therapist said?”

“If you think it will help, sure.”

“She said the compulsion was just that: a compulsion. It was irrational, I couldn’t suppress it no matter how hard I tried, no matter how much damage I was doing to myself. And it was external to the rest of me. The person I was, the things I wanted, they weren’t the compulsion; the compulsion was getting in the way of them.”

“She cured you?”