Ben doesn’t follow me down the stairs. I hear no movement behind me—nothing, just a widening empty space. I am completely alone, I think to myself; I can never be a human, I can never grow old with a human; I can never sleep with a human and have it mean more than just that. I feel like for the first time in my life, I can sense time and understand properly my place in it. I can feel time like it is space, extending ahead of me, stretching vastly, madly, awfully, out in front of me. I can feel time groping out ahead of my body, its fingers outstretched, connecting to the end of the world, connecting to strange, colorful fires right at the end of everything, all the elements burning, everything charring, the Sun unbearably close as it had been in my dream, my skin burning up, my heart still relentlessly beating. While I grew up, I changed every year. Now, there’s no change, no sense of erosion or weathering, I’m just a thing that reacts in no way to the things around it. And yet, still, hours are the same. Minutes are the same. And seconds. All the same length to me as they are to humans. But my life is different; my life is a completely different thing from a human life.

At the bottom of the stairs, I stop and look down at myself, surprised to see that I still have a human body, surprised to see that my legs are moving like normal legs, surprised to see that I’m still putting one foot in front of the other. Upstairs, Ben is still in The Place. I can sense him again; I can sense everything about him. While I couldn’t hear his speech earlier, now I can hear his heart beating fast, his thumbs darting across his phone screen, sending a message. I think, also, amid the throbbing and beating, I can hear fragments of his thoughts. My name, and Maria’s—he’s texting Maria—and random words, help, and hospital, and sick, and teeth; and milk too—the milk from my hands is on his hands and he’s smelled it and recognized the smell. I can feel his body trembling. It’s shock, maybe. I can feel him shaking, and trying to control it, taking deep breaths, sitting down on a chair. He seems frightened, of me, maybe, or of the situation; either way, I realize that a part of me enjoys it and that realization, in turn, frightens me.