I grunted. “Go on.”

“When the Archive is passed…Harry, try to imagine living your life, with all of its triumphs and tragedies—and suddenly you find yourself with a second set of memories, every bit as real to you as your own. A second set of heartaches, loves, triumphs, losses. All of them just as real—and then a third. And a fourth. And a fifth. And more and more and more. The perfect memory, the absolute recall of every Archive that came before you. Five thousand years of them.”

I blinked at that. “Hell’s bells. That would…”

“Drive one insane,” Luccio said. “Yes. And it generally does. There is a reason that the historical record for many soothsayers and oracles presents them as being madwomen. The Pythia, and many, many others, were simply the Archive, using her vast knowledge of the past to build models to predict the most probable future. She was a madwoman—but she was also the Archive.

“As a defense, the Archives began to distance themselves from other human beings, emotionally. They reasoned that if they could stop adding the weight of continuing lifetimes of experience and grief to the already immense burden of carrying so much knowledge, it might better enable them to function. And it did. The Archive keeps its host emotionally remote for a reason—because otherwise the passions and prejudices and hatreds and jealousies of thousands of lifetimes have the potential to distill themselves into a single being.

“Normally, an Archive would have her own lifetime of experience to insulate her against all these other emotions and memories, a baseline to contrast against them.”

I suddenly got it. “But Ivy doesn’t.”

“Ivy doesn’t,” Luccio agreed. “Her grandmother was killed in a freak accident, an automobile crash, I believe. Her mother was a seventeen-year-old girl who was in love, and pregnant. She hated her mother for dying and cursing her to carry the Archive when she wanted to have her own life—and she hated the child for having a lifetime of freedom ahead of her. Ivy’s mother killed herself rather than carry the Archive.”

I started feeling a little sick. “And Ivy knows it.”

“She does. Knows it, feels it. She was born knowing exactly what her mother thought and felt about her.”

“How could you know this about her…” I frowned, thinking. Then said, “Kincaid. The girl was in love with Kincaid.”

“No,” Luccio said. “But Kincaid was working for Ivy’s grandmother at the time, and the girl confided in him.”

“Man, that’s screwed up,” I said.

“Ivy has remained distant her whole life,” Luccio said. “If she begins to involve her own emotions in her duties as the Archive, or in her life generally, she runs the serious risk of being overwhelmed with emotions and passions which she simply is not—and cannot be—psychologically equipped to handle.”

“You’re afraid that she could go out of control.”

“The Archive was created to be a neutral force. A repository of knowledge. But what if Ivy’s unique circumstance allowed her to ignore those limitations? Imagine the results of the anger and bitterness and desire for revenge of all those lifetimes, combined with the power of the Archive and the restraint of a twelve-year-old child.”