The artist turns toward her. Their eyes lock and her entire career unfolds in an instant, like a pop-up tent, breakthrough by breakthrough, each achievement striking a mark in the world deeper than the last. She will build. She will design gravity-defying entryways. She will decide where to place windows, and how many. Tile samples, paint swatches, the texture of blueprints — thirteen ways of burnishing exposed interior plumbing!

Phillip crosses her mind — brilliant, handsome, peeing in the bushes — but only for the briefest moment.

The artist takes her by the elbow, guiding her toward the silo. The heat is extreme but she surrenders to it, ready to accept anything. This is what it means, she thinks, to converge with significance.

When they are only a few feet from the silo door, the heat is strong enough that she raises her hand instinctively against it. The artist bats down her arm and tells her not to touch the metal structure. Then, quick as a fox, he has put a hand on the back of her head and is pushing her into the devouring flame. She cannot speak, she cannot breathe, she does not think of Phillip. Freedom sweet as death, she thinks —

But just past the silo door, as she feels on the point of perishing in a fiery, aesthetic rapture, the heat dissipates. There is a rush of cold air — a hallucination? Like late hypothermia’s warmth? Is this how the Salem witches felt, cool ecstasy as the flesh of their legs burned below? But the cool breeze is real. She blinks. Just inches in front of her face, there is a furious wall of flames, but the first foot of space inside the burning silo holds a miraculous pocket of ice-cold air. She has definitely not been aesthetically raptured. The artist releases her head — his hand was there the whole time! — and she stumbles back, dazed and slick with sweat. The artist smirks.

From the ground, Nora watches the structural artist guide three other young architects toward the silo door. They stick their heads into the cool pocket inside and emerge laughing. They are just as intimate with the potentiality as she was, she realizes, her eyes stinging with tears.