It would need to be a selective wipe. Total amnesia would raise too many questions. But how? Gutenberg was a libriomancer. We couldn’t simply rewrite a human being, erasing whole chapters out of his life.

No, I assumed we couldn’t do it. It was becoming more and more clear how much had been withheld from my training. Had Ray Walker known about this? Did Pallas? “How often do they do it? Lock people?”

De Leon shrugged. “As you know, I’ve not been a member of your little club for many years.”

“Hubert’s injury broke that lock,” Lena said.

“How?” I asked.

“The brain can rewrite itself to some extent, bypassing damaged areas,” she said. “As he healed, his brain could have found a way around those spells. He would have started to remember what had been taken from him. That’s why he was lashing out at Porters. They stole his magic and his memories.”

Anger narrowed my vision as I yanked the wheel and sped past a semi. It was disturbingly easy to imagine myself in Hubert’s place. If things had gone differently two years ago, if Ray hadn’t been there to speak on my behalf, would they have stolen my magic, too? I had given up magic for two years, but to lose even the awareness of magic, to have those memories ripped away . . .

What had it been like for Hubert? First the explosion, then awakening in the hospital. The disorientation, the pain of his injuries, and the memories swelling free and floating to the surface. Had it been a gradual thing, or had his previous life returned to him in a single overwhelming flash?

“If Pallas and the other higher-ups know about this practice,” Lena said slowly, “why haven’t they pieced it together and gone after Hubert?”

“Excellent question.” De Leon sounded like a professor praising a favorite student.

“You couldn’t just erase Hubert’s memories,” I said, my heartbeat growing sharper as I worked through the implications. “They don’t want lowly field agents or catalogers knowing what they’ve done. They’d have to erase Hubert from our memories as well, to make sure we didn’t question the disappearance of a colleague. If Hubert has access to Gutenberg’s knowledge, he could have worked the same spell to hide himself from the memories of the Regional Masters.”

“What about the records?” Lena asked.

“Victor Harrison.” I glanced at the mirror, but de Leon neither confirmed nor denied my guess. “We thought the attack on Harrison was a way to tap into our communications, but that was only part of it. Harrison also had access to our databases. Hubert could have used him to wipe his records.”