“Excuse me?” Nicole said.

Sybil’s expression flickered. For a moment, she looked genuinely afraid. “You don’t ask to meet a hurricane. You just hope it doesn’t tear your house down.”

They talked for three hours. Or rather, Sybil talked, and Nicole listened. Sybil spoke in fragments. One moment she was a child in Ohio, hiding from a father who threw clocks. The next, she was a medical student in London, cutting into a cadaver and realizing she felt nothing. Then a painter in Mexico City, then a taxi driver in Cairo. Not past lives. Parallel lives. All of them happening now.

“You play lost very well,” a voice said. “But you don’t know what lost is.”

“I have nine selves,” Sybil said calmly. “They don’t get along. But they all live in here.” She tapped her temple. “You act like different people. I am different people. The difference is, you get to go home afterward.”

But Nicole had never met anyone like Sybil.