On Such a Full Sea by Chang-rae Lee Page A

cramped, head-high huts had been erected and added on to exterior wall by exterior wall, and were connected via internal cutouts to form a continuous warren of rooms. You could start from the top and work your way downward through various people’s lairs and end up at the bottom and peer back to see the boxy assemblage of corrugated plastic and plywood and asphalt shingle and tarp, a miniature, junked version of some ancient hillside town in Europe or South America one can search in the archives.
    You can imagine this is the sight Fan beheld after Sewey guided her through the huts the first time. It was a couple of weeks since leaving B-Mor and her leg was almost right, the injury in fact probably just a deep bone bruise and no doubt healing faster because of Fan’s superior physical fitness. We sometimes forget that even compared with the most experienced tank divers in the prime of their careers she had a chance to be the finest diver B-Mor had ever known. Kilo for kilo she was stronger than anyone, squat-lifting a record factor of her mass, and as noted, she could hold her breath to that point when it seems certain every cell in your body is going to burst and then in a miracle push past it to the other side, to what must be an altered state of seamless quiet, as if you just broke past the speed of sound. It is a matter of singular will. The very will, we know, that Fan drew upon in the storeroom as she worked her legs in deep bends and stretches at night, often while Sewey jawed on, or when she forced herself to down an extra soy drink or braid of chicken jerky to build up her strength. Or most of all, not flinching and trembling whenever Quig unexpectedly appeared to examine her, his cool, rough fingertips testing her exposed thigh, knowing she was likely safest if he and everyone else in the compound considered her to be still a child, a situation that could not endure long.
    It appears her plan was to wait until she was certain her leg was strong enough to set off again on her own. This seems amazing, given what we know, for we have to ask ourselves once more: what was she thinking, when she set out from B-Mor in the first place, and in so headlong a fashion? It is either outrageous fortune or destiny that Quig’s car struck and injured her that first night and thus brought her to a place with shelter and food and that served as a crossroads of sorts in that part of the counties, where people naturally shared word of other settlements, villages, facilities. And although we can debate forever whether cruel fate or good fortune is Fan’s predicating sign, it must be noted that when she left us there was no hope or consciousness of either in her mind, nothing but a furious purpose and the capacity to disregard the usual rational considerations of her own well-being and the chances of reuniting with Reg, which were meager at best. Her endeavor was misguided and wrong and maybe plain crazy, akin to someone waking up one day and deciding he’s going to scale Kilimanjaro because he can’t stop imagining the view from the top, the picture so arresting and beautiful that it too soon delivers him to a precarious ledge, where he can no longer turn back. And while it’s easy to say this is a situation to be avoided, isn’t this what we also fear and crave simultaneously, that some internal force which defies understanding might remake us into the people we dream we are?
    When Fan was able, Sewey took her around the main house and huts, as well as the land around the compound. It was mid-September, still the heart of summer, the foliage of white oak and black cherry and hemlock and countless other species of trees distressed and washed out by the fierceness of the light. The trees were bristling in the dry wind but they were full, crowding all around them, covering the tops of the hills right down the steeply pitched slopes to the banks of the slow-running rivers and streams. From the moment she hiked down the hillside from