“She doesn’t call me anything anymore. It’s been years since she recognized me at all.”

The frog caught, stopping my heart between beats. If I were my victrola with the flower-stenciled horn, it was like the music had ended and all that remained was the sound of the needle skating along inside the groove.

“She’s fractured?”

He pressed his lips together.

“Harvey.”

I closed my eyes, unable to stop the pain that followed—not the very real tightening in my chest or the phantom cold I’d felt upon finding an expiring Dolores. I could only breathe through it and know that it was overwhelming just this moment, but that this moment would pass. I opened my eyes and found Harvey staring at me with a wrinkled brow.

“How many extractions has she had?”

“At least two dozen since you.”

“What about the restriction the dowager spoke of?”

“It was only a ballot then. It passed, of course, but still. It has taken some time to enforce.”

“But it meant she could only extract three memories in a five-year period.”

“No. Even if it had been imposed, it meant she could only create three Mems.”

It seemed at first as though Harvey had repeated my words back to me, but I knew his small distinction mattered by the way his eyes steadied. He was preparing to explain and I couldn’t look away, though I didn’t have the luxury of discarding what memories I couldn’t manage. Whatever he said—of my Source, of what she’d done—I would have to keep.

“The problem is the language of the law,” he said, while I focused on the hand he swept through his hair. “Isn’t it always. The restriction was shortsighted. It focused on safeguarding people from the damage we believed was most a threat when extracting the Mem container, which is something like the memory, and the afterbirth, and maybe even a piece of the mechanism that conceives. It’s matter that makes the Mem robust but leaves the Source stripped, at least when overdone. But Sources are well within their rights to reprint new memories over existing Mems, provided they have one that hasn’t begun to expire, and that procedure is far less taxing. Dolores is no exception. Perhaps even if she’s no longer of sound mind.” He crossed his arms and then detangled them. “Two dozen doesn’t begin to estimate the number of procedures she’s actually had. I’m afraid in her case, overdone is perhaps an understatement.”