When she finally agreed to go, it was without telling me when she would be back or when the Professor intended to visit. It stung to know that though leaving me there was hard, it was also a relief. But I could hardly blame her. There was no reason for us both to suffer simply because I had no choice. To be honest, now that I’d seen her I worried it would be harder living inside the Vault than before she’d come.

Harvey returned after showing Camille out but made no effort to speak with me. Without warning or apparent consideration, he began to dress my wound, his face tense with concentration. Even when I winced, he was undeterred, breaking from his trance only when I physically moved his hand away from me.

“That hurts.”

“Oh.” He drew a breath in through his nose and let his hands fall into his lap with the fresh bandage and ointment. “The skin is broken.”

“Then take care with it.” I said, turning slightly away. “Do other Mems really not feel pain? Not even the Walters or Keepsakes?”

“Not in my experience, no. Unless it’s part of the memory.”

“Well, I do.” When he didn’t cease staring at my injury, I gathered my courage and leaned forward, nevertheless flinching when he resumed. “Gently, please.”

And when he dabbed the splintered skin with ointment, the difference in his touch was startling. Either he was different or I was, and the latter was the only reasonable explanation. He was not the one who seemed to change based on the setting and company. Only I could have been at first something inanimate and then, in the space of a minute, become a girl with whom one must be delicate.

“Would an injunction really stop Dolores from having any more procedures?” I asked when he was beginning to wind the new bandage around my head.

“At least until further considerations were made.”

In my mind, I replaced Harvey’s sterile definition with a more optimistic conclusion: “So it would keep her from reprinting me.”

“Until the court resolved whether or not she is of sound mind to oversee her property.”

Of course outside the Vault, the concern would have to prove more encompassing than the status of a single Mem. By property, they meant everything from Dolores’s family’s estate—whatever else she’d amassed in the nineteen years since we’d been apart.

“Does she have much property?”

Harvey focused his attention on the pad he’d retrieved from the breast pocket of his lab coat, flipping back and forth between pages while he spoke.