When Vlad came, she asked him, “Am I the first?”

The room changed. The window was gone. The bird was gone. The sky was a flat gray screen. Veronica sat on the floor, her back against the wall, and waited.

Vlad closed his eyes. Just for a moment. When he opened them, his face was the mask again. “Then we need to adjust the protocol.”

Vlad came. He carried no tablet. He carried nothing. He sat across from her, cross-legged, like a child at story time.

“I’m giving you a choice.” His voice was steady, but his hands were not. “You can take the key, walk through the door, and never remember any of this again. The reset will be complete. You’ll be free.”

She looked at the key. She looked at him. And for the first time in sixty-eight cycles, she didn’t feel like a goldfish in a bowl. She felt like a person holding a key, standing in front of a door that had just appeared, with a warden who had forgotten how to be a warden and was learning, very slowly, how to be a man.