They had driven for three hours after leaving Thousand Oaks. In the San Fernando Valley Dryden had gotten on I-5 and taken it north into the mountains, finally cutting west and coming out at the Pacific Coast Highway, far north of Los Angeles—far north of his home in El Sedero, too. Three aimless hours, staying mobile, while Danica read aloud the redaction-laced scrub file.

It was almost entirely meaningless. For page after page, the fragmented material told them nothing.

Which was no coincidence. No surprise, even.

Early on, they had stopped in West Hills and bought a notepad on which to jot down the bullet points—any scrap of useful information they found in the scrub file, anything that might help identify Persons 2855 and 2856, the two people who’d had their memories bleached out with narcotics.

That notepad had stayed empty until five minutes ago, when Danica reached the very end of the file: a single short paragraph that dropped like a lead weight in their laps.

She had read it out loud twice, the second time carefully, as if slowed by the drag-force of what the words implied.

Then she’d simply written it down on the notepad, verbatim. The sole bullet point. The one thing they could make sense of in the here and now.

Dryden had pulled into the lot overlooking the beach while she wrote it. He’d buzzed the windows down and killed the engine, and now they were just sitting here, letting it all crash into them like the breakers in the surf, over and over.

-Page 149. Full dosage was contra-indicated for both subjects (Person 2855, Person 2856) due to their age (subjects are 12, one male, one female) but on authority of the C.O. on scene, full dosage was deemed safe and was administered, with emergency personnel ready to intervene in case of adverse reaction.

Dryden read it, then read it again. He felt his own internal voice slowing down on the second pass, as Danica’s real voice had done. Taking it all in. What it said. What it meant.

Finally he just stared through the windshield again.

Two of the college kids were sitting on the beach now. The other was still out in the waves, throwing the Frisbee for the dog to chase.

“I was in a car accident the summer after sixth grade,” Dryden said. “July 1989. I was with my dad, and supposedly we got T-boned by some guy who fled the scene—they never caught him. My dad came through it unharmed, and I spent two weeks in a coma. When I woke up I couldn’t remember the accident, or even the car ride. Actually it was worse than that. My memory going back even weeks and weeks before the accident was pretty much gone. I remember a doctor telling me that was normal, after what I’d been through.”