I had feigned sleep for most of the drive from Ohio to Indiana, just for the privacy of the dark behind my eyelids. I hoped my mother hadn’t suffered. But of course she had; she died. I wondered if I had found a sibling in Europe. If it was for him or her, along with my parents, that I laid down my memory. I was pretty sure I never had siblings growing up; I faintly remembered creating an imaginary big sister for myself when I was four or five. A strange concept, choosing to forget the one person in life you’ve always wanted there. And now, for all I knew, my actions had exposed her. Him. How long would it be before I learned that person had washed up on the shores of the Danube or died in some freak accident God knows where?

In Indianapolis we got caught in rush-hour traffic before we could skirt the city.

“Look out the window,” Rolan commanded.

I didn’t want to. The last thing I needed was to be seen by anyone packed into the lanes around us. But I did, afraid the entire time I’d find a homicidal Luka gazing back. What I saw was almost worse: the eyes of men, women, children glued in my direction as we inched past.

“I don’t get it,” I said, sinking lower in my seat and wishing for the sunglasses I had bought last week. What could they possibly be staring at?

“You probably began to notice it a few years ago. It happens around eighteen. One day you’re invisible. The next, a few people notice you. And then a few more. Some Progeny thrive on it. Others go into hiding. A few go crazy.”

The minute he said it, I had a flash recollection of two memories. Of a kid I’d crushed on all through junior high asking me to prom out of nowhere. Telling me, weirdly, when I got mono and couldn’t go, that he loved me. Of studying a year later in a college library—a soaring, vaulted cathedral to the gods of higher learning. Not at one of the many long tables in the open reading room, but in a cubicle in some obscure wing. Of crossing campus early before class or hours after dark, eating sandwiches covertly behind the stacks. I assumed, when the image had come to me in the weeks since my procedure, that I was a loner by choice, an introvert by wiring.

I realized now I was hiding.

“What they’re seeing isn’t me,” I murmured.

“It is you, reflecting whatever it is that enthralls them most. Beauty. Power. Mystery. Seduction. Intelligence.”

I flipped down the sun visor and looked in the mirror. The same face that met me every morning as I brushed my teeth stared back, bags under her eyes.