“A car accident?”

“We needed some sort of reasonable explanation for the lapse in time,” Scott told him. “We will transfer him to a secluded room in a nearby hospital, which is where he will wake up. There needs to be a reason for that. We have someone taking care of the corresponding damage to your car as we speak.”

“Damage? I’m still making payments on that car!”

“It is unavoidable,” Scott said. “Stop worrying about the trivial.”

“So, he’s going to remember something that never even happened?”

“It’s a false memory,” Dr. Pike explained. “Something lifted from someone else.”

Jeremiah was shocked. “You can do that? You can pick and choose what he’s going to remember?” A whole new set of worries seeped into his mind.

“It is an amazing achievement, that little drug,” Scott said as though that were what Jeremiah had implied. “If we were so inclined, Mr. Adams, we could be just as selective with you. We could wipe out every memory you have of this whole arrangement and even you wouldn’t realize you’d been cloned. But, of course, that wouldn’t serve our needs for the project at all, would it? We need your mind intact.” He shot a tense smile at Jeremiah, which did little to lighten the weight of the insinuation. If Meld could be used to implant precise, tailored memories, the possibilities were endless. And sinister. It made his skin crawl.

If the public had even an inkling of what Meld could actually do, the suicides would almost be beside the point.

Meld had been fast-tracked from the start, and the medical community had gone giddy at the drug’s potential. The ability to actually see into a patient’s mind—even the somewhat foggy glimpse that Meld offered—had implications for all manner of physical and psychiatric mysteries. Jeremiah hadn’t been surprised at how quickly the drug had been accepted. It was a marvel. But had they seen the other edge of that sword, he wondered, or known what Meld was really for, would it have passed the initial trials? More to the point, he thought, would he have been so keen to help push it on the public?

Charles Scott glared down at him with a glint in his green eyes that felt like a warning, and Jeremiah replayed in his head the man’s ambiguous threat during their first meeting several weeks before.

“You now know as much about this project as anyone else involved,” he’d said. “It wouldn’t do to have too many people walking around with this kind of information. Our investors have a tendency to get nervous.”

Although Scott had quickly followed that remark with the matter of Jeremiah’s substantial compensation, there was no mistaking the implication: the moment he’d been told about the cloning project Jeremiah was already in. That first meeting hadn’t been an invitation so much as an orientation, and the contract he’d later signed had been a formality, at best. And the entire thing had done nothing but gain momentum from that moment on.