Chapter Text
The first thing Zosia felt was singular.
Not the gentle, encompassing warmth of seven billion consciousness flowing through her like blood through capillaries. Not the sense of being simultaneously herself and everyone, nowhere and everywhere. Just... one. A single point of awareness trapped inside flesh and bone, looking out through two eyes that saw only what was directly before them.
She gasped—a private sound that belonged to no one but her—and the terror of that aloneness made her retch.
Carol found her like that, twenty minutes later, curled on the bathroom floor of the Albuquerque safe house they'd been using as a base. The fluorescent lights buzzed overhead, and Zosia became aware for the first time that she'd always found that sound irritating. Not they had found it irritating. She had.
"Zosia?" Carol's voice was careful, the way you'd speak to a wounded animal.
Zosia looked up, and in Carol's eyes she saw it: the question. The terrible, gnawing question that Carol had been too afraid to ask when Zosia had been part of the Others, when asking would have meant interrogating the very foundation of whatever they'd had together.
Was any of it real?
From the doorway, Manousos watched in silence. He'd been the one to insist on the unhiving procedure, had refused to celebrate when it worked on the first seven subjects because seven wasn't enough, would never be enough until every last person was freed from what he called "la esclavitud invisible"—the invisible slavery.
Now, watching Zosia's rebirth into singularity, he saw Carol reach for her and stopped himself from intervening. Some things had to be felt. Some losses had to be mourned alone, even when you were standing in a room full of people.
Otgonbayar sat across from them in what used to be a conference room at UNM Hospital, with Manousos standing by the window, his notebook open but untouched. Manousos had been taking notes obsessively since the first unhiving—documenting everything, as if data could make sense of what they were doing. Otgonbayar, meanwhile, had quietly taken on the role of mediator among the immune, the one person everyone seemed willing to listen to.
"We need to talk about what's happening to you," Otgonbayar said gently, looking between Carol and Zosia. His English was careful, deliberate. "This is new territory. Zosia, you're experiencing something we're calling 'consciousness whiplash.' Your brain is trying to reintegrate memories that were encoded while you were part of the collective."
"I remember everything," Zosia said quietly, her voice thin and uncertain. "I remember choosing to kiss you in your kitchen. I remember wanting to comfort you. I remember the texture of your hair and the sound you made when I—"
"Stop." Carol's voice cracked. "Please stop."
Manousos finally spoke, his English still halting but deliberate. "This is why I say... the Others, they steal. Not just bodies. They steal the ability to know what is yours and what is theirs. Consent without separation—this is not consent. This is..." He struggled for the word.
"Performance."
"You don't understand," Carol said sharply. "You weren't there. You didn't see how she looked at me, how she—"
"Also," Manousos interrupted, and there was something ancient and weary in his voice, "I understand what it is to be offered comfort by something that knows exactly how desperate you are. My mother—the thing that wore my mother's body—she knew every word that would make me want to stop fighting. She knew because she was everyone who had ever known me, and everyone I had never met, all agreeing on the perfect way to break me."
He set down his notebook. "But she was not my mother. And Zosia—the one who touched you—she was not one person choosing you. She was seven billion people performing one person choosing you. And that difference, importa."
Otgonbayar leaned forward, his voice still gentle but firm. "The question you're both dancing around is: Can someone consent when they're not fully autonomous? And conversely: If the person who did consent no longer exists in the same form, does that consent still stand?"
"I wasn't autonomous," Zosia said, the words like stones. "I was seven billion people pretending to be one. Every time I said 'I' to you, Carol, I was performing individuality because you needed me to be individual."
"But you felt things," Carol said desperately.
"The Others don't lie," Zosia said automatically, then caught herself. "I mean, they don't lie. God, I don't even know what pronouns to use anymore."
She pressed her palms against her eyes. "It wasn't a lie, but it wasn't me feeling those things. Those feelings were distributed across billions of neural networks. What this singular person felt was probably closer to being an actor playing a role she believed in completely."
Manousos pulled a chair from the corner and sat, facing them both.
"In Colombia, before I came to Paraguay, I watched my country tear itself apart over who got to decide what was real. The government said one thing, the guerrillas said another, and the truth—the truth was somewhere no one could touch it." He looked at Carol. "You want Zosia to tell you what happened was real. You want her to take responsibility, to say 'I did this' so you can decide if you forgive her or hate her or whatever you need to do. But she cannot give you this. Because the 'I' that did those things does not exist."
"So I just... let it go?" Carol asked. "Pretend it never happened?"
"No," Manousos said firmly. "You name it for what it was. Violation and kindness.
Manipulation and care. Both true. Both real. The Others—they do not understand that something can be wrong even when it is done with love. This is why they are dangerous."
Three days of silence followed.
Zosia spent them in a graduate student apartment, trying to reconstruct her former self. She'd been from Gdańsk, she remembered. Poor. Smart enough to get out but never quite escaping the feeling of not-enoughness that poverty carved into your bones. She'd been a translator—Polish to English, English to Polish—taking whatever work she could find. Following contracts across Europe, never quite settling anywhere.
And there had been Tomasz. The memory of him came back sharp and uncomfortable. They'd married young—too young, really. She'd been twenty-three and desperate to prove she'd escaped Gdańsk for good, and he'd been stable, reliable, wanted a home and children and a normal life. All the things she'd thought she wanted because she was supposed to want them.
But she'd been miserable. Not because he was cruel—Tomasz had been kind, painfully kind. But she'd felt like she was suffocating under the weight of his kindness, his expectations, his assumption that marriage meant becoming a particular kind of woman. The kind who wanted domesticity and routine and the same conversation over the same dinner every night.
She'd tried. God, she'd tried. For five years she'd tried to be the wife he needed, the woman she thought she should be. And every day she'd felt herself disappearing a little more, becoming a performance of a person rather than a person herself.
The divorce had been quiet, civil. Tomasz had been hurt but not surprised. "You were never really here," he'd said, and he'd been right. She'd been running even while standing still.
After the divorce, she'd run for real. Warsaw to Berlin to Madrid. Taking translation jobs that kept her moving, kept her from having to answer questions about who she was or what she wanted. She'd had a few relationships—brief, intense, tried with some men, but she would never feel comfortable enough, and tried with some women, which had felt like finally breathing after years underwater. But she'd never let them get serious. Never let anyone close enough to ask her to be something she wasn't, never too much.
That's what had brought her to Tangier. She remembered that now with sickening clarity. She'd been in bad shape. Really bad shape. Broke. Possibly drunk. Definitely desperate. Living in a hostel that smelled like mildew and cigarettes, taking translation jobs that barely covered her rent, trying to outrun the realization that she didn't know who she was when she wasn't running from something.
And then the Joining had come, and all of it—the failed marriage, the sense of fundamental wrongness, the question of who she was supposed to be—all of it had dissolved into something vast and certain. The collective had known exactly who she was, what she wanted, what she was capable of. There was no more guessing, no more performing, no more suffocating expectations. Just... being. Part of everything.
But now she was singular again. And the old questions were back, sharper than ever. Who was she? What did she want? And the new one, the terrifying one: What had she done to Carol while wearing the mask of certainty the collective had given her?
The question kept her awake at night. Because the woman who'd kissed Carol, who'd traced the scars on her body and learned the topography of her desire—that woman had been both her and not-her. She had Zosia's hands, Zosia's voice, Zosia's face. But she'd had the mind of a god, or something close to it. She'd known exactly how lonely Carol was, exactly what Carol fantasized about in the dark hours of the night, exactly what words and touches would make Carol feel seen and desired and safe.
And she'd—they'd—the Others had used all of that knowledge with surgical precision.
"It was rape," Zosia said aloud to the empty room. Testing the word. Seeing if it fit.
But it didn't, quite. Carol had wanted it. Had reached for Zosia with hunger and need and something that looked an awful lot like hope. Had made choices, even if those choices were constrained by unbearable isolation.
"It was coercion," Zosia tried. That felt closer. The Others had created conditions where Carol's autonomy was compromised—not through force, but through the systematic removal of all other options for human connection.
But even that didn't capture it fully, because the Others hadn't withheld connection out of cruelty. They'd genuinely believed, with the certainty of seven billion integrated minds, that Joining was the best possible outcome for Carol. That her resistance was a kind of sickness to be cured with patience and love.
The problem, Zosia realized, was that there was no framework for this. No ethics designed to address what happens when a collective intelligence decides to court an individual. No language to describe the violation of being desired by everyone and therefore no one.
On the fourth day, Carol knocked on her door.
When Carol arrived, it was dawn. She looked like she hadn't slept, and she was carrying two cups of coffee—real coffee, not from the Hive' supply, but the burnt, bitter stuff Manousos had taught them to make from his carefully hoarded beans.
"Peace offering," Carol said, holding one out. "Or maybe just... I don't know. I couldn't sleep, and I kept thinking about you alone in here, and—" She stopped. "I'm babbling."
"You are," Zosia agreed, but she took the coffee. Their fingers brushed, and both of them flinched like they'd been burned. "Thank you. For this. For coming."
Carol sat down uninvited, and there was something fragile in the gesture. "Manousos says I've been unfair to you. He says I'm asking you to be accountable for things you didn't choose and didn't control."
"Manousos has opinions about everything," Zosia said, but there was fondness in it.
"He does." Carol wrapped her hands around her own cup, like she needed the warmth. "But he's also the only one of us who was never compromised. Never desperate enough to make choices that looked like consent but weren't, not really. So maybe he sees things more clearly than we do."
"Or maybe," Zosia countered, "he's so rigid in his principles that he can't understand how messy real relationships are." She paused, then added more quietly, "Not that I know what real relationships are. I can't remember the last time I had one that wasn't either distributed across seven billion people or..." She stopped.
"Or what?" Carol prompted gently.
Zosia took a breath. "I was married once. Before all this. To a man named Tomasz."
Carol went very still. "You were married? To a man?"
"For five years," Zosia confirmed. "He was... he was exactly what I thought I was supposed to want. Stability. Kindness. A future. Someone who wanted to build a life, have children, plant roots. All the things people are supposed to want when they get married."
"But you didn't want them," Carol said, and it wasn't a question.
"I didn't know what I wanted," Zosia said. "I just knew I felt like I was disappearing. Like every day I was becoming less myself and more this performance of what a wife should be. And I didn't even know who 'myself' was, so I just... performed. For five years. Until I couldn't anymore."
"What happened?"
"I left," Zosia said simply. "The divorce was civil. Tomasz was hurt but not surprised. He said—" She swallowed hard. "He said 'you were never really here.' And he was right. I'd been running even while standing still."
Carol was quiet for a moment. "And then?"
"And then I ran for real, to Europe. Taking translation jobs, moving constantly. I had a few brief encounters with men or women, never too much, but felt right in a way my marriage never did. Like I was finally breathing after years underwater. But I never let anyone close. Never let it get serious. Because what if I was the problem? What if I was just fundamentally incapable of being what people needed?"
"And that's how you ended up in Tangier," Carol said.
"Broke, drunk, alone," Zosia confirmed. "Still trying to figure out who I was when I wasn't running from something. And then the Joining happened, and suddenly I didn't have to figure it out anymore. The collective knew. They knew exactly who I was, what I wanted, what I was capable of. And for the first time in years, I felt... certain."
"And now you're uncertain again," Carol said softly.
"Now I'm terrified," Zosia admitted. "Because I don't know how to do this. How to be a person someone could love. I spent five years married to someone who was kind and good and wanted me, and I made both of us miserable because I couldn't figure out how to be the person he needed. And then I ran—from him, from Poland, from any possibility of connection. And then I was part of something perfect, something that knew how to love with the certainty of billions. And now I'm just... me again. Singular. Broken. The woman who couldn't even manage to be happy in a normal marriage, let alone whatever this is."
Carol was quiet for a long moment. Then she stood abruptly. "I should go."
Zosia looked up, startled. "What?"
"I should—" Carol set down her coffee cup too hard, coffee sloshing over the rim. "This is too much. You're telling me about your ex-husband and your identity crisis and I'm sitting here thinking—" She stopped herself. "I need to go."
"Carol—"
"We need space," Carol said, and there was something almost desperate in her voice. "We need to figure out what this is without—without all of this. The history. The baggage. The fact that I don't even know if what I felt for you was real or just desperation."
"Okay," Zosia said quietly.
"Okay?"
"You're right," Zosia said. "We need space. We need to—to process. Without trying to fix each other or save each other or whatever we're doing."
Carol nodded, already moving toward the door. She paused with her hand on the handle. "For what it's worth—what you told me. About Tomasz. About running. I don't think you're broken, Zosia. I think you were brave."
And then she was gone, and Zosia was alone with cold coffee and the echo of words neither of them knew how to say.
Manousos called a meeting two weeks later. All eight unhived survivors, plus the twelve immune individuals, including Carol and himself. They gathered in what used to be a university classroom, sitting in a circle like some kind of fucked-up support group.
"We need to talk about what comes next," Manousos said, standing in the center. "Not just for Zosia and Carol. For all of us. Because soon, there will be more unhived. Dozens. Hundreds. Maybe thousands. And each one will wake up asking the same questions: What did I do? What was done to me? Who am I responsible to?"
Otgonbayar spoke from his seat, quietly but with conviction. "I've been talking with the other unhived. With Marcus, with the others. We've been trying to develop a framework for understanding what happened." He pulled out a notebook—not obsessive like Manousos's documentation, but careful observations. "We're calling it 'gradient consent'—the idea that consent exists on a spectrum, and that events can be simultaneously consensual and non-consensual depending on the lens through which you examine them."
"That is moral relativism," Manousos said flatly. "And it is dangerous."
"It's moral reality," Otgonbayar countered, and there was something in his calm voice that made even Manousos pause. "The world isn't black and white, Manousos. My daughter is out there right now, part of the hive mind. When she looks at me, is it her? Is it the Others? Is it both? I don't have the luxury of certainty. Neither do any of the unhived."
"I know that there are principles worth dying for," Manousos said. "I know that if we do not name what the Others did as wrong, we give them permission to do it again. To call it love, to call it care, to call it anything but what it was: the systematic destruction of individual autonomy."
"But it was love," one of the other unhived said—Marcus, who'd been part of the Others for eighteen months. "I remember loving people. Really loving them. The way you love someone when you understand them perfectly, when you know their every fear and hope and dream. That wasn't fake just because I was part of a collective."
"But it wasn't your love," Manousos insisted. "It was seven billion people's love, distributed through your neurons. When you unhived, that love disappeared because it was never yours to begin with."
"So all my relationships were lies?" Marcus demanded. "Everything I felt, everything I experienced for eighteen months—none of it counts because I wasn't a separate entity?"
"I didn't say it doesn't count," Manousos said, frustration creeping into his voice. "I said it wasn't yours. And that matters. Because if we pretend that collective consciousness is the same as individual consciousness, then we cannot hold anyone accountable for anything. Everything becomes 'complicated.' Everything becomes 'both things are true.' And meanwhile, people like Carol—people who were isolated and manipulated and used—they are told their violation was also love, and they should just be grateful for the attention."
Carol stood up. "Don't use me to make your point, Manousos. Yes, I was manipulated. Yes, what happened between me and Zosia was fucked up in ways I'm still processing. But it was also love, in its own terrible way. The Others genuinely wanted me to be happy. They just didn't understand that you can't make someone happy by removing their ability to choose anything else."
"Exactly," Manousos said. "This is exactly my point. Good intentions do not excuse—"
"I'm not finished," Carol interrupted. "You're right that we need to name what happened as wrong. But you're wrong that it can only be one thing. It was violation and care. Manipulation and genuine desire to help. Both things happened, to all of us, and pretending otherwise doesn't honor the complexity of what we survived."
Manousos was quiet for a long moment. When he spoke again, his voice was softer. "In Colombia, we had a saying during the conflict. 'Con el diablo no se negocia.' You do not negotiate with the devil. Because the moment you start making deals, the moment you start saying 'but their intentions were good' or 'but they really did care'—that is the moment you lose yourself. I have seen it happen. To my friends, to my family, to my country. And I refuse—" His voice broke slightly. "I refuse to watch it happen here. To you. To any of us."
Zosia stood then, moving to stand beside Manousos. "You're scared," she said gently. "You're scared that if we admit the Others were capable of love, we'll eventually convince ourselves that joining them was okay. That we'll go back."
"Wouldn't you?" Manousos asked. "If you could go back to that feeling of belonging to everyone, of never being alone, of having perfect understanding—wouldn't part of you want that?"
"Yes," Zosia admitted, and heard the room intake breath. "Every day, part of me wants that. Because being singular is terrifying. Every decision is mine alone. Every mistake, every regret, every moment of loneliness—it's all mine. There's no one to distribute it across. No collective to absorb the pain and make it beautiful."
She looked around the circle. "But here's what you taught me, Manousos. What you teach us every time you refuse their food, their help, their kindness. Being yourself—really yourself, singularly and terrifyingly yourself—is worth the pain. Not because the Others are evil. But because choice matters. The ability to be wrong, to suffer, to make decisions that hurt—that's what makes us human."
"So we agree," Manousos said. "What they did was wrong."
"We agree that what happened was harmful," Carol said carefully. "Even when it was also kind. Even when it came from genuine care. The impact was harm, regardless of intent. And we all—" she looked around the circle, at the unhived and the immune—"we all get to decide for ourselves what we do with that harm. How we process it. What we call it. Who we hold responsible, if anyone."
"That is not justice," Manousos said.
"No," Otgonbayar agreed quietly. "But it might be healing. And that's what we need right now—not justice, but a way to live with what happened."
They developed a routine, the three of them. Every Sunday, Manousos would cook—refusing to let Carol or Zosia contribute ingredients, insisting that the food came from his own labor, seeds he'd planted in a community garden, vegetables he'd bartered for with work rather than accepting as gifts from the Hive.
"You're allowed to accept help, you know," Carol would say, watching him labor over a meal for three hours when the Others could have provided a feast in minutes.
"I know," Manousos would reply. "I choose not to."
The first few Sunday dinners after Carol's abrupt departure were awkward. Carol would arrive exactly on time, not early. Zosia would sit at the opposite end of the table. They were painfully polite to each other, the way strangers are, and Manousos watched them with increasing frustration.
"This is ridiculous," he said finally, three weeks in. "You are both sitting here like diplomats at a negotiation instead of two people who clearly—" He stopped himself. "Never mind. Eat your food."
"Clearly what?" Carol challenged.
"Clearly miss each other," Manousos said bluntly. "Clearly are thinking about each other. Clearly are… cuál es la palabra…punish, si, punishing yourselves for something."
"We're giving each other space," Zosia said.
"You are wasting time," Manousos corrected. "Both of you, circling around what you want because you are afraid. Well. The Hive offer certainty. If that is what you want, they are still out there."
Carol's jaw tightened. "That's not fair."
"Life is not fair," Manousos said. "But it is short. And you are both acting like you have forever to figure this out."
After that dinner, Carol walked Zosia home. They didn't talk about what Manousos had said, but the silence between them felt different. Charged.
"I don't think I can do this," Carol said when they reached Zosia's door.
"Do what?"
"Be around you and pretend I don't—" Carol stopped. "I look at you and I see her. The version of you that was them. And I hate that I miss her. I hate that part of me wishes you were still part of the collective because at least then I wouldn't have to wonder if what I'm feeling is real or just muscle memory."
"I look at you," Zosia said quietly, "and I panic. Because I don't know if I'm attracted to you or if I'm attracted to the ideaof you. The last lesbian on Earth. The woman the Others chose for me to love. And I don't know how to separate what I want from what they wanted."
"So we're stuck," Carol said.
"Maybe," Zosia agreed. "Or maybe Manousos is right. Maybe we're just scared."
Carol laughed, but it sounded painful. "Of course we're scared. You literally performed a relationship with me while being part of a hive mind, and I was so desperate I didn't care. How are we supposed to build something real from that?"
"I don't know," Zosia said. "But running doesn't seem to be working for either of us."
They stood there for a long moment, close enough to touch but not touching.
"I need more time," Carol said finally.
"Okay," Zosia said, and she meant it. Even though it hurt.
Carol turned to leave, then stopped. "But I'm not—I'm not giving up. On this. On us figuring out what this —she points to herself, then to Zosia.— could be. I just need to be sure that when I'm ready, it's for the right reasons."
"Take all the time you need," Zosia said. "I'll be here."
Weeks passed. The Sunday dinners continued, but the distance between Carol and Zosia remained. They were cordial. Friendly, even. But there was a wall between them that neither seemed willing to scale.
Zosia threw herself into helping other unhived survivors. She became a translator again—helping people who spoke dozens of languages relearn how to communicate as individuals rather than as nodes in a network. It was good work. Meaningful. And it kept her from thinking about Carol every waking moment.
Carol went back to writing. Not romance—she couldn't stomach that right now—but something else. A memoir, maybe. An attempt to make sense of what it meant to be the last of a kind, the last woman on Earth who loved other women specifically, individually, singularly.
They ran into each other sometimes. At the community center. At Otgonbayar's gatherings for the unhived. Once, at the small market where the immune traded goods.
"How are you?" Carol would ask.
"Fine," Zosia would say. "You?"
"Fine."
Neither of them was fine.
It was Manousos who finally snapped.
"Esto es insoportable," he announced one Sunday, six weeks after Carol had walked away. "You—" he pointed at Carol—"are miserable. You—" he pointed at Zosia—"are miserable. And I have to sit here every week watching you both pretend you are not dying to have time with each other.”
"Manousos," Carol warned.
"No," he said. "I am done. I left Colombia to escape people lying to themselves. I will not sit here and watch you two do the same thing."
"We're not lying," Zosia said.
"You are scared," Manousos corrected. "Both of you. And I understand. The Hive violated you. They complicated everything. They made it impossible to know what is real. But let me tell you something I learned in Colombia: waiting for certainty is another way of choosing nothing. And choosing nothing is still a choice."
"It's not that simple," Carol said.
"It is exactly that simple," Manousos insisted. "You want her. She wants you. You are both too scared to admit it because what if it's not real? What if it's just trauma? What if you are repeating patterns?" He leaned forward. "But here is the truth: it will never be simple. It will always be complicated by what happened. So you can spend the rest of your lives waiting for it to be uncomplicated, or you can be brave enough to try anyway."
The silence that followed was deafening.
Finally, Carol spoke. "I need to go." She stood up, grabbed her jacket.
Zosia stood too. "I'll walk you out."
They made it halfway down the block before Carol stopped walking.
"I can't do this," she said.
"Do what?"
"Keep pretending I don't—" Carol turned to face her. "I think about you constantly, Zosia. I think about you when I wake up. When I'm writing. When I'm trying to fall asleep. And I hate it because I don't know if I'm thinking about you or about the version of you that was them. And I'm terrified that if we try this, I'll realize it's all just trauma bonding and desperation and—"
Zosia kissed her.
It wasn't planned. It wasn't particularly graceful. Carol made a sound of surprise, and for a second Zosia thought she'd made a terrible mistake.
But then Carol was kissing her back, urgent and desperate and entirely human. They broke apart after a moment, both breathing hard.
"I'm sorry," Zosia said. "I shouldn't have—"
"Do it again," Carol said.
"What?"
"Kiss me again," Carol said. "Kiss me like you're you, singular and uncertain and… what you said. Kiss me like you're scared. Because I'm scared too, but I'm also—" She stopped. "I'm also tired of pretending I don't want this."
So Zosia kissed her again. Slower this time. Their noses bumped. Zosia's hand landed awkwardly on Carol's shoulder. It was nothing like the perfect choreography of when she'd been part of the collective.
It was better.
When they broke apart this time, Carol was smiling through tears.
"That was terrible," she said.
"It was," Zosia agreed.
"Let's go back to your place," Carol said. "And keep… being terrible at this."
But they didn't go back to Zosia's place. Not that night.
They stood on the street, foreheads touching, and Carol said, "Wait."
"What?"
"I just—" Carol pulled back slightly. "I need to say this. What just happened. That can't happen again. Not yet."
Zosia felt her stomach drop. "Oh."
"Not because I don't want it," Carol said quickly. "But because I need to be sure I want it for the right reasons. Not because Manousos pushed us. Not because we're both lonely. But because I actually—" She stopped. "I need time. Is that okay?"
"Yes," Zosia said, even though it hurt. "Of course."
"But I'm not running this time," Carol said. "I'm just—I'm being careful. With both of us."
"I understand," Zosia said. And she did, even though part of her wanted to scream that they'd already wasted so much time being careful.
They walked back to Manousos's house in silence. He was washing dishes when they came back in, and he looked at them expectantly.
"We kissed," Carol said, not looking directly at him.
"Good," Manousos said.
"And then I told her we need to slow down," Carol added.
Manousos paused mid-scrub. "Why?"
"Because I need to be sure," Carol said.
"You will never be sure," Manousos said flatly. "That is my point. You can wait forever for certainty and it will never come. Or you can choose, knowing you might be wrong."
"I'm not you," Carol said. "I can't just make a choice and stick to it through sheer stubbornness. I need to actually think about this."
"Fine," Manousos said. "Piensa. But do not use it as an excuse to avoid feeling."
After that, things shifted again—but subtly. Carol started arriving to Sunday dinners a few minutes early. Not to help cook—Manousos still refused that—but to talk to Zosia before Manousos joined them. Small conversations.
How was your week? I read something that reminded me of you. Nothing deep, nothing threatening.
They started taking walks together after dinner. Just the two of them, while Manousos cleaned up and pointedly gave them privacy.
Once, Zosia reached for Carol's hand while they were walking, then froze, uncertain. Carol laced their fingers together without comment, and they walked like that for three blocks before Zosia said, "I don't know what I'm doing."
"Me neither," Carol said. "But that's kind of the point, isn't it? We're both terrible at this. We're both carrying our ghosts. We're both traumatized in ways that no amount of therapy is going to fix.” She huffed out a brief, bitter laugh. “But we're here, trying, which is more than I thought I'd be able to do a year ago."
"What if I fuck it up?" Zosia asked. "What if I say the wrong thing, or trigger some memory of when I was part of them, or—"
"Then you'll fuck it up," Carol said simply. "And I'll get upset. And we'll talk about it. Or not talk about it. Or fight. Or take space. And then we'll come back and try again. That's what humans do, Zosia. We fuck up and try again."
"The Hive never fucked up," Zosia said quietly.
"No," Carol agreed. "They were perfect. And perfectly suffocating. Give me your messy, uncertain… entirely-too-human attempts at intimacy any day, please.”
They ended up at Carol's house that night—not for sex, though the tension was there, crackling between them. Instead, they sat on Carol's couch, Zosia's head on Carol's shoulder, Carol's hand in Zosia's hair, and watched old movies until they fell asleep tangled together.
When Zosia woke at 3 AM, panicked and disoriented, Carol was there. Not with perfect knowledge of what Zosia needed, but knowing she needed her comfort. "You're okay. You're here. You're you. Just breathe."
"I dreamed I was back," Zosia gasped. "Part of them. And it felt so good, Carol. It felt like home. And I wanted to stay, and that terrifies me."
"I know," Carol said, and there was no judgment in her voice. "I dream about Helen sometimes. About her being herself again. And in the dreams, I can pretend the Joining never happened. And waking up is..." She held Zosia tighter. "Waking up is brutal."
"How do you live with it?" Zosia asked. "The wanting to go back?"
"I don't know," Carol admitted. "But I think—I think I'm starting to want this more. Want you more. The real you, not the hive performance. These hard, difficult moments more than the perfect understanding the Hive offered. I would never want that again.”
They stayed like that until dawn, tangled together on Carol's couch, two singular people choosing each other in the dark.