There’s something about it that tickles in my mind, like I’ve lived this moment before somewhere else. A flash of a memory when I feel as if I’m in two places and two times at once. “This was …” I’m trying to find the words and my sister finds them for me.

“It was our father’s,” she says. “In our cottage growing up. Don’t you remember?” She seems so hopeful but when I try to picture that home all I can see is the crumbling village. All I can hear is the echo of voices hazy around the edges. I shake my head.

“I didn’t either,” she says. “Until I went back. It was still on the wall. My mother—Mary, who raised me—told me it was hers. Something she’d found a long time ago when she’d fled to the ocean. It was the first real proof that there was an outside world, and she’d given it to our father so he could have something to hold on to. To give him hope.”

I close my eyes, desperate to remember. But all I can see are the photos in the makeshift museum I saw when I was younger—similar snapshots of a bright world now dim.

“Anyway,” my sister says, a forced brightness to her voice. “I’m trying to line up the landmarks.” She pulls me next to her. “See here”—she points at one of the tallest buildings in the picture—“I think that’s what that over there used to be.” She motions to the stump of a skyscraper in the middle of the Dark City that fell years before either of us was born. Crooked spikes of metal twist from a debris pile, rust turning everything a russet red like dried blood.

“And this,” she says, pointing at another set of low buildings in the photo, “is over there.” She sweeps her hand back along the island. “In the middle you can see how this green-roofed building lines up along that row where there’s the shell of an old glassed one.”

She kneels, grabbing one of her books. “And then you can look them up in here and see what they used to be like. Some of them have pretty crazy histories of hidden bars and secret entrances to the underground tunnels, like that green—”

My frown cuts her off as I take the picture from her, twisting it and turning it, squinting and trying to see the city that used to be. “I’m not sure,” I tell her. “I don’t think it’s the same at all.” I examine the photo. “What about this one?” I ask, pointing out a slender tower with a dagger-sharp tip. “This has never been there.”