“Of course.” I bobbed my head. “We’ll—um—try again tomorrow. Unless the queen isn’t up for it.”

“I’m fine,” Min Ja said, wincing as she sat back up. “Am knows I’ve survived worse than a headache. But I won’t be trying that again until we’ve seen more memories.” She shook her head, as if clearing a fog. “How many years was that, anyway?”

“About twelve?” I guessed. “Give or take. We skipped around a bit.”

“I’m trying to make sense of it,” Da Seo murmured. “We lived through your entire childhood at Bhekina House. Even your babyhood. Still . . . I don’t remember what it was like to be you as a baby.”

I shrugged. “Neither do I.”

“But you gave me those memories,” she insisted. “I felt them, somehow, because my mind—your mind—was shaped by that period of time. Am’s Story, I sound mad.”

“No,” Ai Ling said. “That makes sense. I’ve heard the mind never truly forgets anything. It only loses its ability to retrieve what it knows.”

I frowned. “So I could pass on memories I don’t even remember?”

“It’s possible. Think of memories as books, and the brain as a library. You can only reach the books on the shelves closest to you. But that doesn’t mean the other ones aren’t there. And the knowledge from each book shapes how you think, even if you don’t remember the books themselves.” She paused, considering. “Maybe that’s why you were able to pass on some parts of your childhood in a matter of minutes, while more recent years took hours. It’s the difference between summarizing a scroll and reading every word.”

I chewed my lip. How many unflattering entries had I unwittingly passed on to Min Ja? Perhaps that was why the Ray hadn’t worked—my unconscious memories might have betrayed my monstrous nature, even if my conscious memories hadn’t. And I couldn’t let that happen. Min Ja’s love depended on her thinking well of me. So next time . . .

I would simply have to take more control.

Nights later, I dreamed Sanjeet.

Not of him, but him directly, appearing in the nebulous ether of our sleeping minds, united across miles through the Ray.

I hadn’t meant to. Dayo, Ai Ling, and I always slept with kuso-kuso under our tongues, hoping to connect with our distant siblings, and alleviate their council sickness from afar. I visited Kirah most often, nudging at the corners of her mind until she recognized my presence. Then we would dream together, suspended in her vivid thoughts for hours. Sometimes she reenacted her adventures for me, conjuring up the golden Blessid Valley dunes, where she currently hunted for riled-up alagbato—or the Great Moving City of Katsephut-Omar, which she had chased for days, hoping to catch her estranged family’s caravan. Tonight, I had dropped eagerly asleep, hoping to see her again. But before I lost consciousness, I must have spared a passing thought to someone else . . .