Perhaps at some point, she had unknowingly gone mad. Here, in the Nest's grotesque reality, she was burning with one delirious, hallucinatory fever after another—otherwise, why would Mai Mingle feel as if something deep inside her skull had "fallen out"?
How could the depths of one's skull, of one's consciousness, "fall out" of the body?
Mai Mingle couldn't explain it.
If a person could be divided into a "surface" and a "depth," then the moment she saw the face in the mirror, her "depth" was like a passenger sucked out of a plane when the cabin door was suddenly torn away, vanishing without a trace in an instant.
It was as if her entire self was now just a "surface," but even this "surface" had become a flimsy sheet of plastic, rustling and trembling, on the verge of collapse. And the transparent face, hurtling forward at high speed, was about to smash right into it.
Mai Mingle turned and ran.
