“I don’t put it in my bios. That’s the great thing about biographies and authors’ profiles: you can start and stop them wherever you like. Mine usually begins with my scholarship to Oxford, continues through my studies at Cambridge, and moves on from there. Nobody needs to know where I came from. Nobody needs to know that I slept in a dormitory with twenty other girls for most of my childhood, or that I spent my days on Con Dao so madly in love with a boy who did not see me that it drove me crazy.”

“Crazy?”

“Not that I thought I could fly when the wind blew. Not that kind of crazy. But it started here. What I call my ‘crazy year.’ It started right here, in fact, in this building. I looked down into one of these cages, and I saw myself looking back up at me.”

“You saw yourself?”

“I saw myself, yes. As clearly as I see you now. I saw myself in a prisoner’s rags, with blood on my face, staring back up at me from the darkness of one of those holes. I had never hallucinated before, and I don’t think I have since, but I can still see it as clearly as I could that day. I saw myself there, and it burned into me. Later that night, lying in our hotel room, I tried to dismiss it, tell myself it had been a trick of the light. But it wouldn’t go away.”

“Dr. Mínervudóttir-Chan says trauma is ‘etched into our physical being.’”

“Yes,” Ha said. “I think I was just in such a state of emotional distress—the boy I loved who did not even know I existed, the long years of loneliness, my obsessive studying and the exhaustion it caused—all of it came together, and in that moment something just … shifted inside my mind. And it stayed shifted. When I walked out of the building, the colors were not as bright as they should have been. It was as if the sun had gone behind a cloud—but the sun was right there in the sky. Right there, where it had been when we walked into the prison. Only now it was dim enough for me to look right at it. And sound was muted, as if…”

“As if,” Evrim said, “everything had moved a bit farther away.”

“Yes,” Ha said. “That is exactly what I was going to say. How did you know?”

“Because that is exactly how I began to feel six months ago. What did you do to make the feeling go away?”