The girl began to learn of many things. She liked the moon, and she thought the sun was okay. She liked crunchy foods, but hated sour fruits. She liked small, enclosed spaces, but she didn't like the smell of rot.

As she did so, slowly, her soul began to ooze back out, lengthening a little every day, until finally it enclosed both her and the boy in a thin, flickering flame. And as it did so the emptiness around her begin to relax and blades of grass poked through the white sand beneath her feet. Small creatures began to approach her without fear.

Nobody came for the girl. This was because in the time that she had walked the earth, nobody could figure out how to get past the invisible barrier surrounding her that turned everything to nothing, the barrier that she had accidentally ensnared herself within, the space that the boy referred to as silence.

In the time she spent with the boy, the world had split into two factions. Those that thought she was a monster, and those that thought she was a victim. They were the same factions that built the cages, and those that had smashed them. But even within them there were murmurs of disagreement, for some cage-smashers had been friends with the redheaded man, and some cage-builders remembered how sweet and obedient the girl had been, and how she had loved them, when they did not deserve love.

Of course, the girl and the boy knew none of this. They were caught up with other things.

"Do you still hear the chaos?" said the girl.

"What do you mean?" said the boy.

"Well," said the girl. She paused. "You came here for the silence, didn't you?"

"Oh," said the boy.

There had been a time when the world around him was filled with the sound of glass breaking and metal clashing, laced intermittently with the slow screech of a train scraping against its tracks. At times the noise was so bad that he clutched his head and rolled on the floor and cried, because there was no way to make it stop. Now it sounded like wind with the occasional howl of sirens and the ticking of a clock, along with a regular tapping of plastic cups on wood regimented boom of drums. But he didn't know how to tell the girl this.

"It's not... just the silence," he said.

"What do you mean?" said the girl.

The boy tilted his head, thinking.

“Everyone I meet... I hear their sounds,” he said. “But their sounds stay within them. You’re different. Your sounds spill out from you like a river, and contaminates everything that it touches. Even now.”

He was not lying. It may not have been silent, but there was the beautiful melody of a violin. Sweet and warm and mixing like water with the bell chimes of grass, threading itself into the sad moan of an abandoned building.

The girl was curious.

"It spills out?" she said. "How far does it go?"

The boy thought of the moment he had first heard it. When the silence hit like a sonic boom, and he sat bolt upright with shock, listening, with disbelief, to the suddenly muffled noise.

"Oh, I don't know," he said. "I think you could infect the whole world if you wanted to. A whole side of it, at least."

“Oh!” said the girl. “Do you think that means I can create an ocean?”

“Maybe!" said the boy.

They were both excited by the idea.