“Okay. I’ll tell her.” Mirela slid her last tray onto the cart and headed for the door. While the guard on duty reminded her that she’d be shocked and paralyzed if she wasn’t back in half an hour, I slipped an extra cookie onto my own cart, beneath one of the trays.
* * *
The infirmary was the last building on my route, and as Pagano led me through the front door, my gaze homed in on the “unnoticeable” hallway. It was suddenly perfectly noticeable, probably because I knew what to look for, since my memory of it hadn’t been erased. But my route didn’t take me in that direction.
The third room on my list was Sandrine’s. In the hall, I took a tray from the cart, but as I was giving it to the handler, I tripped over my own feet and made sure her lunch hit her square in the chest.
The handler gasped and stood frozen with her arms out at her sides. Beef stroganoff, Italian dressing and bits of lettuce clung to her uniform.
“You bitch!” She pulled back one hand to slap me, but Pagano rushed in to grab her wrist.
“Don’t touch her! It’s not safe for the guards.” He held up his gloved hands for emphasis, while the woman glared at me. “Come on.” He slid one arm around her waist, and I remembered their conversation in the “forget things” room the night before. “I’ll help you clean up.” Pagano was a player.
The female handler nodded, still angry, and he pressed a button on his remote, restricting me to Sandrine’s room until he got back. “Be good, Delilah,” he said as he escorted the other handler from the room.
The second the door closed behind them, I retrieved the cookie I’d hidden beneath a tray and headed for the pen where Sandrine was kept locked up with one other girl a couple of years older. “Sandrine. Thanks again,” I whispered as I handed it to her through the bars. “Eat quickly.”
She devoured a third of the treat in one bite.
The girl next to her watched with quiet, passive envy, blinking yellowish eyes similar to Sandrine’s. She too had smooth palms and fingertips.
“What’s your name?” I asked the girl.
“Laure.” The word seemed to echo from within my head, as if I’d spoken it myself, with my ears plugged.
“Laure, have you ever...” I mimed touching my own forehead. “Have you ever made me forget something?”
She nodded.
“Did you make me forget a long period of time? Like, several weeks?”
Laure nodded again, and relief washed over me as I gripped the bars between us. Answers were seconds away.
“Do you know what you made me forget?”
She shook her head. “I used a starting point and an ending point, but I didn’t see what fell between.”
“So, you can’t tell me what I’m missing?” I asked, and she shook her head again. “Can you...put it back?”
Sandrine laughed, a timid tinkling sound in my head. “We don’t take memories. We...” she mimed digging with an invisible shovel “...bury them.”
My hands tightened around the bars. “Can you dig them back up?”Please, please let that be possible...
“No,” Laure said. “But you might be able to uncover them yourself.”
“How?”
“You have to find the right tool.” Again, she mimed shoveling. “A sight. A sound. Sometimes reexperiencing an element of the memory can help you dig up what’s buried.”
I swallowed a groan. The only things I knew for sure had been buried were private engagements—yet last night’s hadn’t triggered any memory—and the conception of my child.
“Okay. Thanks.” Footsteps from the hallway made my pulse trip faster, and I turned back to the girls, speaking in an urgent whisper. “Laure, who asked you to take my memories? Was it the boss? Vandekamp?”
She shook her head and gave me a very strange look. “You did. And you brought me a chocolate chip cookie.”
Delilah
You did.
