“Audra.” He shakes his head, lays a hand on the phone. “You returned less than two months ago from Europe. I’ve never seen you go home.”

The air leaves my lungs.

What have I done?

“My last name. Ellison . . .” But even I know that by the time I search the slew of Ellisons in the United States, they could be dead. If they’re not already.

As though reading my train of thought, he glances at me. “If you were trying to protect them, maybe you have.”

And maybe I haven’t.

“Why didn’t you stop me?” I say angrily.

“It isn’t up to me to intervene except to save your life. The decision was yours. That, and you disappeared several months beforehand. We lost track of you until you showed up in an obscure headline, dead. Except the Audra I knew was too smart to die.”

“How did you find me?”

“By tracing Luka. He abruptly disappeared from Europe five weeks ago.”

My heart won’t stop pounding.

I tilt my head back, press my palms to my eyes, sifting through the remnant of my memory. There are pieces, like the shards of a cherished, broken thing: the garnet ring given me by my mother, an afternoon fishing with my father, my first, clumsily tied fly. Hugs, stories about Mickey Mouse. But their faces, like their first names, are gone. And you can’t remember what is no longer there.

“I can get you to a safe house,” Rolan says. “But unless you have something more to go on, there’s nothing we can do for them.”

I may not remember names or faces. But I am the same person I was. Dealing with the consequences of my own actions is one thing. Putting faceless, even forgotten others in danger is something else.

I grab the phone, begin to map a route. “I know where we need to go.”

7

Interstate 65 through Lebanon, Indiana, is an unremarkable, even homely, stretch of road surrounded by brown cornfields on impossibly flat earth. But I have never seen a more comforting sight than those six divided lanes.

It is 3:30 on Monday afternoon, and I am at the wheel. After two days of catching a couple hours’ sleep at a time in a Walmart or motel parking lot, eating whatever we can grab at the usual cluster of fast-food restaurants just off the exits, and otherwise driving nearly nonstop, I should be exhausted. And I am. But less than an hour away from Lafayette, Indiana, adrenaline has electrified my veins and brought me to wired life.

Rolan, not so much. He drowses against the window, having done the majority of the driving with only brief breaks from the wheel and none at all from my incessant questions.

“Can you tell a Progeny by looking at them?” I had asked him that first night, thinking I sounded insane to even my own ears.