Fareed stood over me, testing the syringe in some way, making it spurt in silvery little droplets. When he bent down to put the needle into my chest, I shut my eyes.

The most remarkable thing happened. I wasn’t there in the vault at all. I was someplace else entirely.

It was midday and the sun was pouring down through the dome. The light was so bright and pure and equatorial that it was almost impossible to see that the dome was there.

“This is your office?” I asked.

He sat behind the desk. His red hair was very much like my hair, but it was a real true red, not coppery or auburn, but deep red with golden highlights to it, and his eyebrows were darker and distinct and his eyes were most certainly green.

He had a longer nose than I had, and a long full mouth, the lower lip bigger than the upper lip, but the upper lip was perfectly shaped, and his jaw was square. And having said all that, what can I say about the brilliance of his smile and the boyish look to him overall? He’d been finished, like I had, on the very verge of manhood, with the requisite shoulders, but the face had the stamp of a boy’s curiosity and optimism.

“Yes, it’s my office,” he said. “I’m so glad you’ve come.”

“Oh, you’re not going to start crying on me, are you?” I asked.

“Not if you don’t want me to. But look outside. Just look. This is Atalantaya! This is all mine!”

It was quite impossible to describe. Imagine you’re stranded on the sixty-third floor of a building in Midtown Manhattan and all you can see around you are other buildings like it, but everything is made of glass. Imagine the light skittering on all those glass surfaces, and then imagine that you can see into the buildings and see all the living beings at work in them, at desks, tables, machines, or just stranded on balconies in groups of two or three or more, talking to one another, all the busy life of the city all around you, and some of the towers climbing so high you can’t quite see the top from where you’re sitting and others below you have verdant gardens on their roofs, and you see fruit trees, and flowers, and vines spilling down over the balustrades, vines with purple blossoms, purple as wisteria, and you see in one garden, just one particular garden, a group of children in a circle with their arms out embracing one another as they skip and dance—Lock arms and detonate—and as they pull the circle this way and that. But it holds as a circle. Because circles don’t have to be round.

“But I thought this was the tallest building. Oh, I see, the buildings are changing shape, the buildings are moving.”