“Well, let’s play it out for a few days,” Orr told him. “In the meantime, find that damn anomaly source, Chief.”

“Yes, sir.”

Orr signed off and Bell sat there, tense, worried, his skin crawling.

Have you seen anything unusual?

That was the problem: Bell could have answered both yes and no. His memories were scrambled. His guts told him that he hadn’t seen a thing, but his memory told him that he had. That was the scary part.

What had Hubbs told him? That city can erase memories, Chief, and write new ones. What you remember might not be the truth. You might be suppressing things that are too awful to remember. Then again, maybe I’m losing my mind.

And that was it, wasn’t it? That was the fear that nipped away at Bell. He’d had a strange, inexplicable paranoia since he was a teenager that his memories were suspect. It made no sense, yet the fear of it was pervasive. A secret terror he’d never admitted to no one.

The root of it was his Uncle Bernie.

He’d been a very sweet, kind, lovable man who owned a butcher shop in Passaic, New Jersey. One day, distracted as he often was, he stepped out into traffic and was struck by a speeding minivan. He was thrown head-first to the curb. It took thirty-three stitches to close his scalp. He was in a coma for six days. When he came out of it, he didn’t recognize anyone. He didn’t have amnesia per se—he remembered his job, his name, his history—but his family and friends were strangers to him. He kept calling out for his nonexistent wife (Rhonda), his nonexistent children (Bobby and Clara), and his equally nonexistent brother (Joseph).

He could not be talked out of this delusion and became convinced that a conspiracy of some sort was in place. Then, as therapy continued and the weeks passed, it all faded. It was temporary, but frightening. To Bell, the scariest part was how certain Uncle Bernie was of his imaginary family’s existence. He even had detailed memories, backstories, and histories for each of them.

Though his mom told him crazy things like that happened with head trauma, inside, Bell had trouble accepting it. It had made him uneasy for a long time. Even into adulthood, there had been a nagging fear as to the nature—and reliability—of memory.

And what had stirred all of this back up was the city and what he had seen there. Or not seen. Like all the divers, he had written up a detailed account of his excursions into the ruins. And, as of yesterday, he had found a terrible discrepancy. What he had written of his second jaunt into the city with Murphy was not what he remembered at all. It was a dry essay of endless tunnels and exploration, but not much else.

His memory was quite different.