We looked at each other now, Harvey with his hand poised to continue and I with my mouth closed so that he could not. But the memory held: Dolores standing just behind the man who in my mind was slowly ceasing to be my father; the crowd, humble by comparison to the one that had gathered the year before, when I was still a part of my Source.

Dolores’s father had been partial to the demonstrated elegance of zeppelins and had taken us to watch one such flight the month before my extraction in 1906. He was much less enthusiastic about the gliding talents of a fourteen-year-old boy the following summer, but had been swayed to attend by the fact that the young aviator was being called a prodigy and had shared a mentor with the Wright brothers, who’d successfully flown years before. By that and by the fact that his daughter was gaining some notoriety as the Source of the only cognizant Mem to date. That day she and I were to be another attraction of sorts. Before his flight, Dolores posed with the young Laurence Lesh, and after his flight we were all meant to pose together: Dolores, Laurence, myself, and his glider, Montreal I.

“I didn’t quite understand what had happened until after he was in the water,” I began again. Harvey had taken the photograph from my bed while I was distracted and had been staring down at the image of me: head turned on the gurney, eyes too responsive to simply be a shell, a lifeless repository. By the time he looked at me again, his eyes were more responsive, too. They were something different from what they’d been the night we met: unguarded, the way he’d spoken before he remembered I could hear him.

“Who was in the water?” And he smiled when I did.

“I suppose you’re no better at reading minds than I am. The boy with the glider. He set a record that day. Twenty-four minutes in the air, ten kilometers above our heads, they said, between the river and the sky. Even my father couldn’t pretend not to be impressed.” But my smile waned. “Her father.”

For a moment it was as though Harvey Parrish were a mirror. His lips fell just as mine had, and when his eyes changed from amusement to something darker, it must also have been because of mine.

“Dolores’s father. He whisked her away before she even knew the boy had crashed. Yes, the sky had darkened and heavier clouds had amassed, but the rain was light. No one would have paid it any mind. No one would have needed to be rescued from it. The glide was too eventful, it would seem. Something broke while the Lesh boy was still in the sky, and when they pulled it from the water, his flying machine was destroyed.”

“Was he hurt?” he asked, his notepad folded closed.