I didn’t speak to the Mem, only proceeded to the farthest bed and deposited my bag. After that I couldn’t decide what to do. If she were anyone else, at least if she were a real person, I could have tried to console her. Even if she’d been a stranger, I would have drawn a handkerchief from the purse I usually carried and offered it without question. I’d insist that she keep it, petting her arm and cooing any number of comforting phrases, whether she kept her burdens to herself or fell into my consoling arms.

But she was a Mem. She would not answer me, or else when she did her words would be noticeably out of context. She was trapped in a single moment, whichever had been too unpleasant for the real Dolores to bear. She and every other memory were, quite literally, single-minded, replaying themselves every minute of every hour of the day and then watching their origins at night.

A coldness pricked me in my midsection then and I tried to ignore it. If I succumbed—if I listened to the small voice inside my head reminding me that the latter of those conditions applied to me as well—I may have slipped headlong into an anxiety from which I feared I could not escape, now that I was back. So I tried also not to notice that the armoire into which I began hanging my clothes had been empty. There was no need for running a warm cloth around the interior, as Camille had done when moving me into my own place in the city. Running my hand along the bottom before setting my bag inside, I felt no mothballs, no wayward string or button. This Dolores would leave nothing, as the ones before had not. It would be as though no one had been here. Only Mems. Only us.

From the doorway, I looked up and down the hall, relieved that I couldn’t see the Vault gate from our dormitory. At either end was another hallway, and for a long time, no one passed to my left or right, not even in the distance. There was little sound, unless I closed my eyes and strained to hear something, and even then the clearest sign of life was Dolores’s abbreviated breathing.

Back at my bed, I first sat leaning against the headboard, facing the open door, until I realized how alike we looked, my knees bent, my legs drawn into my chest, and my arms wrapped around them. The coldness pricked me again and I felt my resolve weaken. This was reality. I was not an honorary Banker, as the joke had gone, or the Professor’s beloved assistant. I was, and had always been, their subject. The Vault was where their subjects lived and expired.