It makes me sad to see Harvey again. He was one of the first, maybe even the first, to be infected by Happy’s killer virus. He was turned into a Smiler, and he died falling from the dividing walls of the Loop’s outdoor yard while trying to attack Kina in his altered mental state.

After an adventure in the imagined jungle, running from enormous wildcats, avoiding poachers, and freeing trapped rhinos, I’m returned to the cell I never left and suffer six more hours of paralysis. After that I’m put into the energy harvest. And so it goes, on and on.

Day 36

I don’t sleep in the Block; instead I go into a sort of fugue state where reality slips away. I think of it as sleep mode.

I’m wrenched out of sleep mode every day by the guards who drag me to the center of the room.

For twelve hours I fight against the hell of the harvest, feeling the sweat pour off me, feeling unparalleled terror, certain that I’m dying, that I’m falling, that I’m burning, choking, drowning.

And then, finally, it ends, and I’m put back into paralysis.

The Sane Zone begins. Today, a memory of my mother. Singing along with our favorite songs, neither of us able to carry a tune at all but not caring one bit. This memory turns into an enormous rock concert with a crowd of thousands.

And then it ends, and I enter sleep mode again.

Day 38

Twelve hours of the harvest.

Six hours inside the Sane Zone: a memory of school friends jumping into the river on a summer day turns into a scuba diving adventure, exploring ancient shipwrecks and underwater caves.

Six hours of sleep mode.

Day 39

The same routine …

Day 41

Day after day …

Day 43

It never ends.

Day 45

The six hours after the Sane Zone ends, as I wait for the energy harvest to begin … those are the loneliest. If I can’t slip into sleep mode, if—for some reason—my cruel brain won’t switch off, I find myself in a world where time refuses to pass, where my fracturing mind replays the greatest horrors of my life: the boy falling from the roof of the Black Road Vertical; being dragged to the Loop; being almost eaten alive by rats in a train tunnel; being chased through the homeless villages by Smilers; the barbaric stays of execution known as Delays; the war in Midway Park.

The memories run on repeat in my mind. The more I beg them to stop, the more vivid they become, the more I begin to feel the teeth of the rats sinking into my skin, the panic in my heart as the Smilers closed in, the heartbreak as my friend Blue died in the mud.