“Not seriously. But few of us had ever seen a flying machine land, much less crash. There was a commotion and it all became too much.”

“But not for you.”

“Not for me. Perhaps not for Dolores, if she were ever given the choice.” I let my lips lie together before I went too far. “Anyway. That was when the second Mem was born.”

Harvey didn’t correct my terminology to say that Mems are extracted and not born. He did not wield his pen to transcribe the exchange, and for a moment the room was quiet.

“After that we knew,” he said.

I could only nod, suddenly aware of my own breathing.

“She wasn’t the special one.”

“That’s right,” I said softly. “Not all of her Mems were like me. It was me, not her. And the papers were no longer interested. Which I suppose is why we made no more appearances together after that summer and why they never called on me again. Her family, that is.”

The feeling of loss was something like discomfort; it was a sort of awareness of myself—my breath and my hands—that I did not always possess. But it was more than that as well. Mingled with the unfamiliar self-consciousness was the desire to remain in the moment, to replay it even. To hear him say the words again, despite that they had perhaps only peripherally been about me. The closest facsimile was the experience of watching a romance in the theater, of wishing there were some way to immediately review the most touching moments and title cards.

“But I had a family of my own not long after that. Your father brought me to the Professor’s office when Extract No. 2 shared this room with me, and later I met Camille, who took me there again because she didn’t know that he and I were already acquainted. They convinced Dolores’s father that despite her having less celebrity, I could profit them by mine, if I were free to attend all of the events to which I was invited. They are why I was released from here, my adopted parents and your father, for the time that I was.”

My eyes searched the dormitory again, but this time there was not even the memorized vision of cloud and sky. Now the ceiling was pale and close and it was just the Vault. Now the faux stained-glass windows were even more comforting than they’d been the day I’d returned. They interrupted the bland sterility and glowed with colors as rich as mine.

“But he set a record that day,” I said. “The Lesh boy. And Dolores doesn’t remember.”