But I had not forgotten. The keys had been returned, the woman so uncharacteristically reserved that I wondered whether she knew what it meant to be recalled—that I was not a simple, starstruck girl after all. I withdrew my hand from the knob, parting my lips so that my breath could escape gently, and finally pressed one hand against either side of my head, as if the bell-shaped hat could fit any more snugly. The reprieve was over. On the other side was the Vault, or rather the great circular gate that secured it. I hadn’t thought so before, but now it looked like an immovable stone securing a tomb. Of course, the last time I saw it, I was looking over my shoulder as it closed behind me. I had no reason to think it imposing then.

In the Vault, Banker is a title given to scientists. My first was an older gentleman with kind eyes and coal-black hair that parted down the center and seemed to swim away in glossy waves. There were lines around his mouth, I thought because he talked so much. Whenever he was in my dormitory, he spoke softly—to a gathering of students, to another Banker. Never to me, not at first. Not until we ventured aboveground together at the behest of the family. Once outside the Vault he seemed more able to see me. Underground, he always had the glint in his pale eyes—kind and expressive even when he was quiet, never cold—and the stern pressure above his eyebrows. There was also the slight turn of his head; then I knew he was uncomfortable with my looking at him. Uncomfortable with the fact that I could see him at all. That I, unlike his other wards, was aware of his presence. By the time more Dolores extracts had accumulated in the Vault, it had become clear that not only was I an anomaly, but also that my Banker was unsure how to respond to that fact.

From the outside, there was no question that I belonged belowground with the rest of them. The other Dolores Mems and I shared the same face and body, virtually an identical appearance altogether. Our Source aged well back then, and the three of us who were there before I left—myself, along with Dolores Nos. 2 and 3—were nearly the same age. Nineteen, nineteen, and twenty, there was nothing to distinguish us but an almost imperceptible difference in my skin and the chevron-shaped scar on No. 3’s right index finger where she’d cut herself on the can opener. She hadn’t done anything, of course; the real Dolores had, before extracting her.