"I can take care of myself, Townsend." the young woman said firmly. "It's what I've always done. What I'm trying to show you is that the grove is just another piece in the same game.”
Lamont's eyes widened. He scrambled past her, his lighter skittering across the smooth floor of the lift as he pressed his back against the opposite wall. "What's gotten into you, Constance?" He demanded.
Constance stood up and turned to face him, placing her cigarette between her lips. "I'm just playing a game. A thought experiment."
"Why?" A drop of water fell into his eye from a loose strand of hair on his brow. "What are you getting at?"
Constance folded one arm over her stomach, using the hand to support her elbow as she toyed with her cigarette. "You and I both know that in that kind of situation, you'd take your ring off. That's what any man would do. It's human nature."
"Yeah," Lamont said, his voice lowering into something of a hiss as a dull pain formed around his heart. "I suppose I would."
"Well, that's something that they don't know," Constance clarified, tilting her eyes up toward the ceiling as she blew a puff of smoke from her nose. "Or maybe something they didn't know until just now. So they don't know everything. They can see inside our heads, but they can't understand everything perfectly."
"Are you saying that they—they appeared to you as me?" Lamont sputtered.
Constance nodded.
"What happened?" Lamont whispered.
Constance smiled.
A hint of menace crept into the newspaperman's voice as he took a step toward the young woman. "Constance…" He growled.
Constance lifted her chin defiantly. "Like I said, Monty: I knew it wasn't you. And I told them so. See, they were playing games too. Going through my head and trying to figure what I wanted. What I want."
"You went back to the grove," Lamont concluded, slumping back against the wall again.
"Sure," Constance confirmed. "I've been spending a lot of time there."
"Damn it," Lamont whispered. "No wonder you're acting so strangely. Bloody hell."
"I can take care of myself, Townsend." the young woman said firmly. "It's what I've always done. What I'm trying to show you is that the grove is just another piece in the same game. That garden only exists for one reason."
"All the more reason to get you lot out of it as soon as possible," Lamont concluded. "It might already be too late."
Constance shook her head. Her hair, starting to dry, had come loose in wild ringlets around her freckled face. "That's where you're wrong. You're frightened by what this tower can do because you don't understand it. But this part of the tower, at any rate, is trying to win us over to its cause by giving us what it thinks we want, get it?"
The newspaperman stared at her numbly. The combination of heat, fear, desire, panic and regret had overwhelmed him. His thoughts were a useless jumble.
Constance stepped gingerly closer to him. "My point, Monty, is that the game goes both ways. At the same time it's playing us, we're playing it. Your problem is that you don't think it's possible for us to win."
"Why the hell should we?" Lamont demanded.
Constance smiled. "Because I'm here. And I never quit until I get what I'm after."