I couldn’t reply. The woman stood there, staring at me as though her question had been a challenge, and I could say nothing. If she’d meant to humiliate me, to pretend not to know me while exacting a ruthlessly pointed attack, she’d succeeded. I’d done nothing but exist and she hated me for it.

“Anyway. It isn’t polite to stare,” she told me. “No matter what you are.”

Her companions agreed and the trio turned together, setting out down a hall to escape my presence. I gave them a head start so we wouldn’t meet again, but try as I might I couldn’t quiet my distress. Just like that day outside the train station, my world had been shaken and I’d been wholly unprepared. Sifting through the rubble for survivors had been priority, questions and explanations at first being few. Today, I could not wait for answers. It was me trapped beneath the rubble now, and of all the Sources and saviors taking charge throughout the Vault, none was here to rescue me.

I scanned the many faces in the halls, knowing one had to be a Banker, and finally found Harvey. He was signing a file on the nurses’ station where I’d reported the Dolores’s expiration. Behind him stood an official-looking gentleman I took to be a lawyer, a couple, and the Mem of a child. At first I thought it might be an extraction from the husband’s childhood, but both he and the wife shied away from the Mem as though aware of what it housed. There were too many possibilities to guess, but perhaps they had a son. Then the memory had been extracted either in an attempt at safekeeping, if the son was ill, or for destruction, if the son was not. Deprived of the cinema since returning to the Vault, I would have happily entertained myself exhausting dramatic scenarios for the family. But not today.

When I rushed to his side, resting both my fists next to the file on the counter, Harvey only glanced up but then looked again, this time scrutinizing my forehead while he touched it gently enough not to upset the bruise. When his hand was gone, I could still feel its warmth on my hair and skin.

“I’m a little busy now, Elsie,” he said.

The expression about weakening knees turned out to be rather literal, and I dropped my weight to one side so that the desk could support it.

“Are you all right?”

“Oh, yes,” I said, my recent upset almost mediated by his deliberately gentle touch, the way he lingered, and the way he’d used my chosen name. “I mean, no.” I shook my head, freeing my lips of the smile he’d drawn out of me. “I’m not all right at all.”

“You’ll have to do better than that.”