Chapter 17

# Chapter 17

She came back to herself in pieces.

Not the way a dreamer surfaces from sleep—not a gradual lightening, not a slow reassembly of the familiar. This was geological. Layers of perception settling into place one stratum at a time, each one compressing the one beneath it, each one altering the shape of everything below by the sheer fact of its weight. She had been expanded. She was being returned. But the container she was being returned to was not the same container she had left, and the self that was returning was not the same self that had departed, and the word *return* was already a lie told in the grammar of the old cognition—the linear, sequential, before-and-after grammar that her mind still spoke but no longer believed.