ONE

The narrator has been locked in an asylum cell for 264 days, isolated with only a small notebook, a broken pen, and her habit of counting everything around her. She has not spoken or touched another human being in that time, and she understands her confinement as punishment for something she did not know she was capable of and could not control.

She explains that The Reestablishment, the ruling initiative that claimed it would save a dying society, took her from her parents' home and transported her to an unknown facility. Her parents did not say goodbye, and the outside world she can see through her small window is depleted and decaying, with soldiers stationed below and the natural world reduced to a faint echo of what it once was.

When she is told she will be given a cellmate, the narrator tries to imagine that speaking to another person might help her survive. She practices using her voice after months of silence, waits anxiously, and eventually falls asleep before the new arrival appears.

She wakes to find that her new cellmate is a boy, which terrifies her. The narrator believes the authorities have done this deliberately to torture or kill her. The boy is physically imposing, tattooed, and unsettlingly confident; he laughs at her fear, takes control of the room, pushes the beds together, and claims her bed, blanket, and pillow for himself.

The boy asks whether she is insane and says he is not going to hurt her, but the narrator does not trust him. She refuses to answer when he asks for her name and spends the night awake on the floor, curled in the corner, afraid of him and afraid of the screams she associates with sleep.