I’d had four cousins on my mother’s side, and two aunts; I marked them down below my parents. One uncle on my father’s side with no spouse or children; I marked him, too. My friends—seven marks for them, my closest friends. Neighbors, too; my former babysitter who had gone off to school and come back for the summer, an old lady a block down who always gave me fruit from her garden. I murmured a name each time I cut, and it felt like I was carving those names into me, into my flesh and blood, where I could never fail to remember.

I was halfway down my forearm by the time Benny found me.

The first I knew he had come into the room was when he tore the knife from my hand. “What the fuck?” he demanded, and the knife punctuated with a clatter in the corner. I wavered on my knees, lightheaded, in retrospect, from loss of blood. It had dripped down to my elbow, onto my knees. “What the fuck are you doing?”

“Scarification,” I started to explain, because Benny had gone to our church, too, and so he should know.

“You’re not going to bleed to death on my ship!” he’d shouted at me, wild, eyes red; he’d been crying himself. I’d stared at him. I don’t think I had been crying, and maybe that was why he’d looked at me with such terror in his anger.

“Fuck,” he’d said again, in a voice that wobbled and cracked, and shoved some fabric at me; his sweatshirt, I think. His sweatshirt, to mop up the blood.

“I didn’t ask for this, Sean,” he’d said. I remember clearly the way he said it. “I didn’t ask for this.”

I held the sweatshirt to my arm. My hand was stiff and aching.

“Clean it up,” he’d said, and left.

I couldn’t remember all the names I’d said anymore. I couldn’t even remember all the faces. I’d spent so long trying to remember, bringing up those faces and those names at every moment, that the memories themselves had gotten worn through. It was like sticking your nose in a flower; the smell that was so strong at first faded with overexposure.

But that had been eight years ago now, not twenty months, and I still tried, with everything I had or ever could have, to hold those names in my head, my heart.

“You’ve read enough off that tablet to know the scientists made the manikins out of their own DNA,” Lieutenant Gupta said once I had finished, tidying up the bowl and campstove and wrappers until the place looked as if we had not been there at all. “Have you found out where the Philosopher Stone is yet?”

So that I could tell her where it was and she could ditch me, discard me in the dark and then forget me like she’d forgotten the names of all the people she’d lived and died beside? Lieutenant Gupta wasn’t taking care of me out of the goodness of her heart. I had precisely one piece of leverage to use to keep myself alive. I wasn’t giving it up that easily.