He didn’t have to nod to confirm what I had thought when he’d phoned to tell me about the meeting: we were going to beg for salvation from the only person who had the power over Dolores to grant it.

The quiet that fell between us persisted. Allowing only the sharp echo of our steps, it accompanied us beyond the reception desk and down the many halls, past laboratories where Mems were extracted and one more where the corpses of the expired were taken for dismemberment—the only room in which we were truly safe from the threat of reprinting. It was the room into which I, like all the others, would someday be carried. Where my organs would be harvested for study or donation. Because loved or not, expiration was inevitable. By nature or by the hand of the one who’d refused to carry it anymore, a Mem had no other destiny. It was a thought upon which I’d never settled before returning to the Vault. It was a fate I might never have believed if Harvey hadn’t reduced me to it.

We crossed the courtyard separating the clinic from the Professor’s office. There, Lyman Shepherd waited. He stood when the Professor held the door open for me.

“Dolores, this is Mr. Shepherd.”

“Lyman,” the man said quickly. “Ly.” And then he smiled and I knew that must be what the real Dolores called him. It was the smile he might have offered if I’d made it from the coach to the restaurant without that fatal accident interrupting. Where the Professor stood now, my father might have been, and the inside of this office would never have existed for me. I stopped myself there, unsure whether I’d ever had this train of thought before and whether it was as harmless as it felt at first. Regardless, Lyman was a stranger to me, with his dapper auburn hair parted far on the right and swept back in a fashion that was certain to hold—but he knew me.