“Francisca recognized that she was decoding an entire process, detail by detail. She was learning a certain alphabet, a geography, a language which would become a revelation. This compelled her to stay. There were artifacts everywhere. She was assembling a lost civilization. When she viewed it in its entirety, she would become someone else.”

“Whenever she felt like crying, she would instead become angry—at someone else or at herself—which meant that it was rare for her to shed tears.”

“She was also, by the standards of other people, lost. She would not see it like that. She knew where she was, it was just that everywhere else didn't.”

“A strange thing happened then. The Speaker agreed with her that she had made a mistake that night, and she knew when he said the words that it was true, that his judgment was correct. And yet she felt strangely healed, as if simply saying her mistake were enough to purge some of the pain of it. For the first time, then, she caught a glimpse of what the power of speaking might be. It wasn’t a matter of confession, penance, and absolution, like the priests offered. It was something else entirely. Telling the story of who she was, and then realizing that she was no longer the same person. That she had made a mistake, and the mistake had changed her, and now she would not make the mistake again because she had become someone else, someone less afraid, someone more compassionate.”

“Staring at him theway she might stare at a beloved place shewas not sure she would ever see again, tryingto commit the details to memory, to paintthem on the backs of her eyelids that shemight see it when she shut her eyes to sleep.”

“Her neural pattern must remain intact for the time being, as it was still necessary that she stay herself. Changes to her identity would eventually become inevitable, but those would have to wait until she no longer needed the cloak of who she was.”