- Deborah notices that the staff members are being nicer to her. One new attendant, named Quentin Dobshansky, reminds Deborah of McPherson.
- The volcano continues to erupt violently as Deborah works on breaking down her defenses to the outside world. These continual eruptions leave in her two cold-sheet packs a day sometimes, and sometimes they send her running down hallways into doors.
- Despite the eruptions, Deborah's also becoming more authentic with people in the ward, including the staff members. Dr. Fried points this out to her: "[W]hen this volcano of yours broke, something else broke, too: your stoniness of expression. One sees you now reacting and living by looking at your face" (22.10).
- Deborah responds that before, her face and insides never matched up, and it made others misunderstand her. She never understood her own facial expressions, and they still frighten her.
- It's winter now, and Deborah notices that she feels both physical and psychological cold. Deborah comments to an attendant that she's lucky she doesn't have to deal with the cold that Deborah herself deals with, which is the kind of cold that coats can't help. The attendant responds, "Don't you believe it." The attendant launches into a description of her own life and talks about how hard it is to raise kids and do the kind of difficult work she does taking care of patients in the ward.
- Instead of taking it personally, as she would have in the past, Deborah sees that the woman is venting and sharing.
- Deborah looks out the ward window at a grassy area on the hospital grounds that she calls "The Preserve." She notices that she hears nothing in the ward or in Yr.
- Then Deborah starts to see colors in the world slowly, where before she was seeing only gray. With the colors, Deborah also realizes that she's starting to really feel alive, and it makes her happy.
- Deborah then worries that this good feeling might just be part of "The Game" she feels the world plays with her—making her feel something good only to take it away and watch her suffer. She talks to the gods of Yr about it. They tell her the good feeling might be gone by morning. Deborah wonders if the good feeling is just another symptom of her sickness.
- The next morning, Deborah asks for permission to walk down to her session with Dr. Fried by herself, without an escort.
- At the session, Deborah tells Dr. Fried about being able to see colors and feel a sense of hope.
- Deborah realizes that she invented herself as a Japanese enemy because of the self-hatred she felt—mostly because of the incidents at the anti-Semitic summer camp. She also admits that she played the martyr role and glorified her own anger about it. She realizes she adopted that persona because it so closely matched her grandfather's personality. She learned it from him.
- Dr. Fried comforts Deborah by saying that these realizations hurt, but the symptoms she displayed over the years did meet her needs, in a way. Squashing those symptoms chips away at the false world Deborah built to protect herself from the hurts of the real world. There will be some pain as Deborah lets go of her symptoms.
- Back in the ward, Dr. Venner, a ward doctor Deborah doesn't like because he always seems to look off into the distance, roughly treats her burn wounds while Quentin assists. Deborah even makes a joke about her fake tumor making up for her missing skin. Quentin laughs, but Dr. Venner tells them to be quiet.
- A few days later, the newer doctor Deborah likes is back and looks at the wounds. Deborah makes a comment on how rough Dr. Venner was, and the new doctor looks very concerned for a moment.
- When the new doctor says he hopes his own dressing of her wounds didn't hurt too much, Deborah smiles and says, "Someday, maybe it will" (22.78).