“I have to go out tonight after dark, take up my cover,” Nazarin says. “But I’ll be back by dawn.”

“What do you do for them?” I ask.

“This and that,” he says. “Mostly I deliver Verve or act as security.”

So he saw my sister when he was picking up or dropping off the wares. He’s about to go into the place I’ll soon join. I close my eyes and hear the whirr as the machine starts. I can hear the low beating of blood through my mechanical heart in my ears.

“I’ll wake you up in two hours. I’ll just be in the next room doing paperwork.”

“All right,” I say, already drifting away as the Chair gives off melatonin.

A calm, robotic female voice is the last thing I hear:

Brainload initializing.

*   *   *

There are two people in the interrogation room.

A man chained to the table looks haggard, like he hasn’t slept in days. He has the same shaved scalp, bisected with scars, as Nazarin. Usually, in these informational dreams in the brainload, the person has no sense of self. But I always remember who I am, and that I’m dreaming. The other man, a detective, I guess, stands tall, but he seems tired. His sandy-colored suit is wrinkled, as though he’s slept in it.

It’s almost like I’m an invisible ghost in the room with them. I can imagine what it looks like to walk around. The scientists who examined Tila and me said that was why we retained so much more—because we could visualize and fit things into patterns more easily than those who couldn’t control the recordings. Other people can learn to do it, but because of Mana-ma’s training we’ve been doing it since we were small, even if we didn’t realize it at the time.

The recording has been doctored, streamlined so the information can reach my brain efficiently. The man looming over the prisoner is yelling at him, and the prisoner glares back. They shout at each other, their staccato movements jerky. There’s a jump, as if something has been cut. The view switches from the standing man leaning toward the prisoner, screaming into his face, to him sitting on the other side of the room, appearing calmer. The prisoner now has a red mark on his cheek. I guess that they’ve fast-forwarded through the intimidation, which I didn’t want to see anyway.