“You must take into account the circumstances of their extraction,” I told the Professor, bursting into his office upstairs in the clinic that evening, my notes in hand. “We never have. We’ve paid so much attention to the nature of the memory that we’ve overlooked how much the Vault shapes them.”

I was speaking quickly, looking from the notepad, rattling off my considerations before my time ran out.

“The Mems born into community, the ones who join a sort of collection, surrounded from the start by their Sources’ memories—aside from those reprinted, they last. And more than that, they exhibit attributes not shared by other Mems, even those born into a tribe of their own.”

The Professor was smiling, and while I fought the distraction of wondering why, he approached.

“Professor, are you listening to me? I am not the only unique Mem. I’ve seen it myself ever since I arrived. The same excessive extraction that makes a Source fragment makes a multitude of Mems who together may thrive.”

“Ma petite,” he said, and took my face in his hands as he was wont to do. The joy in his eyes couldn’t have resulted from fatherly pride in me, in my thesis and conviction, though I detected some of that as well. “You will make a fine scientist. But I think your time is better spent preparing to choose a new home.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean that this nightmare of ours is over. You are the only Dolores left.”

“I’ve long been,” I said, timidly, so that I did not misunderstand.

“I mean that you’re free.”

Around the edges, my eyesight dimmed, the darkness creeping further in until the light was as faint as it had been in her parlor. It did more than mute my vision; the knowledge packed my ears, muffling everything the Professor told me next while it replayed what he’d said before. That it was over for good. How else could he have known that, had not the old attendant smothered Dolores the night before, only hours after my leaving?

She’d carried the pillow taut in the grip of her slender hands, her joints swollen with age and arthritis. The woman had come calmly down the hall and killed Dolores while Lyman slept in the same bed. She rang the authorities herself, then retreated to her room to pack her few belongings. And when the officers arrived, Lyman Shepherd awoke a widower. In a matter of weeks he would return to the Queen Anne estate of his birth and the attendant—who had finally made her own escape from the home—would finish her days in the asylum at Saint-Jean-de-Dieu.

“I didn’t want to tell you until he’d put it down in writing that you are free. Dolores, he’s legally relinquished ownership!”