“Are you a believer yet?”

She turned at Dr. Monnet’s voice. He stood behind her, looking as if he hadn’t slept last night.

She swallowed. “Tell me this is a trick. Please?”

“I wish it were.” He sighed. “You have no idea how much I wish this were some sort of hoax. But it is not.”

“It has to be. If you were simply asking me to believe that this molecule alters its structure during the course of some ‘celestial event,’ I could buy that. I’d want to know how the ‘event’ effected the change, but I could imagine gravitational influence or something equally subtle acting as a catalyst, and I could handle that. But what we’ve got here—if we haven’t been flim-flammed—is a molecule that not only mutates from one form to another but substitutes its new structure for all records of its original structure. In effect, it’s editing reality. And we both know that’s impossible.”

“Knew,” Dr. Monnet said. “That was what we assumed was true. Now we know different.”

“Speak for yourself.”

He smiled wanly. “I know how you feel. You are utterly confused, you are frightened and suspicious, yet you are also exhilarated and challenged. And the tug-of-war between all these conflicting emotions leaves you on the brink of tears. Am I right?”

Nadia felt her eyes begin to brim as a sob built in her throat. She wiped them and nodded, unable to speak.

“But it’s true, Nadia,” he said, his voice dropping to a whisper. “Trust me. We are not being tricked. There’s something here that challenges our most fundamental beliefs about the nature of the physical world, about reality itself.”

And that was what was so upsetting, making her crazy. What if the ability to reorder reality, along with the very memory of reality, were not confined to this one molecule? What if it were happening every day? How many times had she typed or written a word and then stopped and stared at it, thinking it looked wrong, that it was spelled some other way? She’d look it up and find most times that her original spelling had been correct, so she’d move on despite the feeling that it still looked wrong.

“We must know how it works,” Dr. Monnet said. “And the first step toward an answer is to stabilize the molecule.”

“How can you do that if you can’t even remember what it looked like originally?”

He pulled a vial from his pocket and held it out to her. “Because we have a new supply.”

Nadia stared at the tube for a heartbeat, then snatched it from him and with trembling hands began preparing a sample of the pale blue powder for the imager. When it was ready she fed it to the machine and waited.

Finally the molecule appeared and she wanted to cheer when she recognized it. This was what had been erased from her brain. Now the memory was back and, disturbing though its shape might be, she felt whole again.