He turned the photo in my hand, and there on the back, in lovely script that must’ve been his father’s, were my first words in quotes. There were other words as well. Notes he’d written about me. A mention of my skin, of the way I was no paler than my Source—and beneath that, something more.

She is something new.

She. And elsewhere, her. Never it.

I wiped the tear from my cheek and closed my eyes for a moment to recall the way my first Banker’s awe had slowly blossomed into a smile. Then he’d offered me a blanket. Now, his son went to my pillow and retrieved the handkerchief he’d given me the week before. His handkerchief that now belonged to me. He said nothing about how I’d hidden it half beneath my pillow, folded into the beginnings of a linen airplane.

“Thank you,” I said when he offered it to me, but I did not dab the inner corners of my eyes, only looked at the folded kerchief in my hands and remembered. “There was one other photograph,” I told him. “One of both Dolores and me.”

I didn’t have to close my eyes to see the summer of 1907, though the Vault had neither its blessedly slight humidity nor the day’s endless bright blue sky. I glanced at the low ceiling and saw through it to billowy clouds and a coolness sweeping off the Saint Lawrence River. There on its banks waiting for the air show to begin, I’d stood with the original Banker Parrish, and when Dolores approached, she was holding her father’s hand but looking only at me. While he refused to acknowledge my presence, I was the reason Dolores had come. Had she been braver, perhaps she would have said so, or anything to me.

“My father loved aeronautics,” I told Harvey without turning my attention to him. “Perhaps you know that. He said that it—like science—was not a common man’s hobby. Once I was separated from Dolores I took the statement more seriously. I could see that his delight in things that set him apart explained his love of aviation, at least to some extent. I think he liked the fact that flight—like Mem extraction—is costly. That neither are sports that everyone can enjoy.”

“You thought that once extracted. But not before?”

He was writing something down and it almost made me stop. I breathed in the fragrance of the water, a pleasant piece of the memory from that August day, and laid the handkerchief aside.

“I found him very different once I was on my own. When I was with Dolores, he was everything to me. The sun and moon.”

“And after?”

I watched Harvey’s pen bob and glide across his notepad.

“I’m not sure.”