It is a particular kind of horror that has no sound to it, a scream with no way out.

And he had endured it, alone, for weeks, without breaking.

When that one dark eye opened and found me, I was not only seeing a sick man wake.

I was seeing a prisoner, buried alive inside himself, look up and realize that someone had finally noticed he was still there.

Chapter 5 — One Blink, Two Blinks

I spent the rest of that long night learning to speak with a man who could not speak back.

It was slow, painstaking work, built out of the only movement he could reliably make, which was the trembling of his own eyelids.