Dolores Extract No. 2 was what a Mem is meant to be. She was my first real encounter with what I should have been. There was something missing from her eyes, some light or focus, so that even when she was looking at someone it was clear they weren’t the true object of her gaze. She could walk and rest and eat—or not—and could be trained to do so to a certain distance or in a certain place or at a certain time, depending on instruction. That was one of two ways in which Mems before me amused society, by having routines imprinted on them despite being otherwise disengaged and unaware of the world around them. The other was the way they could be prompted to recall the memories they housed. Outside responding to that prompting, it was customary that Extract No. 2 spoke infrequently and then only according to the script of that August day in 1907.

“I’m pleased to make your acquaintance,” she said to me once, out of the blue.

Little else but Dolores No. 2’s unexpected nicety could have pulled me from the first letter of a needlessly lovelorn Fräulein Schmidt. I’d been standing between the beds reading Camille’s nearly year-old issue of The Delineator aloud. I’d met her only a day or two before and I was still honeymooning over the magazine she’d given me and the stories within. It seemed forever since I’d seen a story acted out—at a party hosted by my mother or one of her friends—and I’d taken to performing them myself. I practiced different accents and affectations, amused by the way the same line could seem to shift meaning depending on my tone.

“What could be more sober?” I’d just asked the otherwise still dormitory, putting effort into making the question seem unanswerable. And then the new Dolores had spoken.

She was not joining my play, though she’d heard it a dozen times in just two days and should’ve been at wit’s end—or would have were she a real person. She was speaking to Laurence Lesh, the boy genius, and for her the Vault was still the riverbank.

I let the magazine close around my finger.

“The pleasure is mine, miss,” I said, because he had. She looked at me then, and while I saw my own reflection, to her eyes, memory made me an impressively pensive boy preparing to fly.