Packed along with the ticket stub and my first issue of The Delineator—the model’s long, slender pencil still lightly tapping her chin all these years later—was a robe. The robe was entirely special. Across the left breast was embroidered the name I’d given myself in thick-threaded cursive, red against ivory silk. To the rest of the world, I might always be Dolores Extract No. 1, named for my Source and the sequence in which I’d been extracted. But during the course of the week I’d spent in the darkened movie theater, watching The Toll of the Sea, I had become Elsie. Not because I so adored the film’s character and certainly not because I resembled her in any way, but because there was so much about her left to know. And perhaps because, even with so much unsaid, her entitlement was assumed. Her place was never questioned.

The robe had been a present to myself, a reminder of who I really was. It had been a secret, even from Camille, but now it would tell everyone, Bankers and visitors alike, that recall or not I was not just any Mem.

“Do you need a guide?” the receptionist asked when she realized I was still there.

My hands twisted around the leather handles, massaging the oils from my palms into the already aged material.

“Not at all.” My mouth closed, and I drew in a breath of air to steady myself. “I know the way.”

It was down the far stairwell, where my heels clicked against the metal steps, lonely echoes failing to fill the space. My mind refused to relinquish my flat, the echo beginning to resemble the porcelain landscape of my en suite washroom. Every night, the violent sounds of my nightly dream had been washed away one teardrop at a time by the leaking faucet and the water pooling in the basin.

Click, click, click. Until despite the lack of windows, I knew I was underground. When I reached the bottom there was just one door, and I held the knob only to find myself drawn back to my own apartment’s door and the hall outside of it. I should have forgotten to return the keys so that now I could hustle back and laugh with the nosy super over my absentmindedness. She would tease me for the time I’d been so excited to catch the trolley to a matinee that I’d left the door wide open. She would ask a thousand questions and, out of politeness, I’d be obliged to answer them all.