Avery turned away from them and once again fixed Desmond with a quick, fleeting glance. He thought this one said, Pay attention. Somehow he knew her. They were in sync, understood each other, like two friends who had known each other a very long time. Or lovers.

Avery’s tone was more measured when she spoke to the programmers again. “Look, Byron, you have all the information you’re going to get. Hughes has a Rapture Therapeutics implant in his brain. We think it’s been adapted to release memories. We know he has a substance throughout his hippocampus—in the memory center of his brain. Something sends a signal to the implant to unblock the memories. And somewhere in those memories is the key to finding Rendition. Without Rendition, the Looking Glass will never work. It’s very simple: you figure out how to trigger that implant, he remembers, we interrogate him, recover Rendition, and everyone lives happily ever after. You fail, the entire Looking Glass project goes down the tubes.”

Byron shook his head in disgust and looked over at the guy sitting next to him. “You know, I wish some useless hot chick would tell me a bunch of stuff I already know and pretend like she’s helping me.”

Avery’s tone betrayed no emotion. “I’m trying to help you see the big picture and anything you’ve overlooked. And, I’m trying to impress upon you the stakes of your task.”

“You think I don’t know?”

“I think you lack motivation.”

“Are you kidding? McClain telling me I better get this done or else is all the motivation I need. That guy’s like a walking Nightmare on Elm Street. Actually, Freddy Krueger’s got nothing on him.”

Avery smirked. “You know he’s watching right now.”

Byron went pale. The other two programmers slowly leaned away from him.

Avery broke into a grin. “Kidding.”

“That’s not funny.”

“Sure it is. That’s how scared you ought to be all the time—why you need to be working harder. Now—Hughes would have left himself a way to recover the memories. He may have already found it. Did you read the transcript from his interrogation?”

“Of course. He just found some prepaid credit cards and some dead ends. None of it worked.”

Avery nodded.

“Look, even if it is an app, and even if we could hack it, it might not matter.”

“What do you mean?”

“The implant could be set up to release the memories at certain times or certain locations. If so, until that time, or until he’s at the programmed location, nothing will happen. Or, he could have loaded a set of memories to release no matter what, and reserved whatever he didn’t want us to find for these locations or time points. Or—again, we have no clue how this thing works—memories could be keyed to sensations, images, sounds. Who knows?”