The rest of the Sane Zone is spent in an epic chase through space. We travel at near light speed, warping time around us. We fight off attack ships, and use our cloaking device to infiltrate the mother ship.

For a while I had been waiting for Happy to turn against me and try to manipulate information out of me, but sometimes the Sane Zone is just the Sane Zone, used to keep our minds rational so that the Harvest can feed off our fear.

Too soon, Happy’s voice sounds and tells me that I have five minutes remaining in the Sane Zone. My heart sinks at this, knowing that I have to return once again to the vacuity of the Block.

Molly defeats the final alien, a nine-foot-high insectile monster with advanced weaponry.

I tell her that I love her and that I miss her and she tells me she misses me too.

And then she’s gone.

I’m glad that this was one of the occasions that Happy did not try to gather information from me; I’m glad this was simply a preservation of sanity, an illusion of freedom to keep me sane.

The world fades to white and then the white fades back into my cell. Once again I’m motionless and numb, lying on my bed with nothing but six hours of maddening loneliness and boredom ahead of me, and following that, the energy harvest.

It’s gotten harder to deal with since the escape attempt, since seeing Kina, since kissing her. Somehow that little spark of hope has left me broken. It hurts to accept that there is nothing as cruel as hope, and I should just let go of it altogether.

Day 34

Today’s offering from the Sane Zone begins with a memory from the Loop.

It’s a Wednesday night, or technically 2 a.m. on a Thursday morning. Every week at this time Happy would shut the safety features down to run diagnostics and upgrades for three hours, during which time we were illegally released from our cells by Warden Wren Salter, the Alt girl I had been infatuated with since almost the first day I met her.

I count from one hundred down to zero with my head against the wall, allowing Harvey—my friend and fellow inmate—to hide. I know where he has hidden because it’s my memory: He is in Malachai’s cell, and in reality Malachai had found him first and yelled at him for knocking over his pile of comic books, but in the Sane Zone, when I enter Malachai’s cell, it shifts slowly into a jungle in which Harvey is hiding high in the trees, no longer needing the crutches that he relied on in life.