“I knew it! He found out she’s a spy,” Olivia says. She hurries past me and opens the small metal gate designed to keep little kids from escaping.

Max is perched on the edge of a swing. A couple of swings down from him, a mother is trying to get her toddler out. When the boy throws a tantrum, Max hops up to help untangle the child’s legs.

“There you go, buddy,” he says. The boy stares up at him with fascination. The boy’s mom thanks him. Who knew that Max Rodriguez was such a softy?

Max’s smile kicks up to a grin when he glances over and sees us. “Hey!”

“You find out her gram’s a spy?” Olivia sits on one of the swings and pushes off with her foot.

“Stop calling her that,” I say automatically, my eyes going to the paper in his hands.

Max hands it to me and runs a hand through his hair. He nods to the benches near the slide. “Sit and read. We can talk after.”

Olivia jumps off the swing and plops next to me on the bench. She tries to read the paper over my shoulder. “What does it say?”

Brains use chemicals and electricity to either find memories or store them for later. Mine, as I read, is exploring data it’s already collected. It can determine in advance if there’s a point to the search. The hippocampus and frontal cortex analyze a variety of things to decide if they’re worth remembering. Other brains, without HSAM, might discard a memory that doesn’t seem important. But my brain holds on to it. I hoard the memories in a hidden maze of cells, lobes, and intricate pathways too detailed for me to fully understand, no matter how hard I try.

“It says Tatyana Petrov was born in Moscow, Russia,” I say. “Her father was a politician, and her mother was a professional ballerina before she gave birth to Tatyana. When she was thirteen, Tatyana and her mother disappeared. No one knows what happened to them.”

Max shoves both hands in his pockets and leans against the slide. “I ran the name through immigration records here, but there wasn’t anyone with that name. Then I tried to find out more about her life in Russia, but there was nothing else. The only reason I found out this much was because her father was a pretty big-deal politician and he put out a reward for information about them.”

I shake my head. “None of this makes sense.”