“Andy, it’s finished.”

Andrew Hilton is more than ninety years old and hasn’t stood at his full height in ten. He was a tower of a man in his prime, two meters tall and built like a boxer. Nearly nobody he ever met was able to look him straight in the eye, at least not and tell him “No.” Illness has gradually eaten away at that over the years. He feels as if he lives at the bottom of a deep bath, with everybody he ever meets looking down at him from slippery, unscalable walls, none of them able to reach down to help him. He’s spent his final months crumpled up in bed like a dying spider, changing to a corpse’s color ahead of time. It might have been bearable if he’d lost his mind, but he remembers what he used to be: a leader, a powerhouse. He used to be able to alter the course of terrible events for the better, to get justice. He used to protect people.

“Andy. You can wake up now.”

But there’s a warm wind through his thin, colorless hair, and there’s direct sunlight coming down on him now, and the heat is filling him up like a tonic. He’s outside; it’s been too long since he was last outside. When he opens his eyes he sees the lake, “his” lake, the one in the North he used to have all to himself every summer. He’s on his sailboat, lying on a thin foam mattress laid on the deck. It is a near-cloudless day, a travel industry promotional photography day, one of maybe two the lake sees in any given year. The water is calm and deep, a clear blue verging on black.

It’s perfect. He didn’t know he had the strength left to safely leave the hospital, let alone travel this far. But if he’d put his mind to it and selected a final moment, this might have been it. A half-mile away behind the boat is the little lake house, empty, dwarfed by the mountain of dense forest rising up behind it. His eyes are still recovering, it’s just a squarish smudge of cream, but he knows it. There’s a red dot to one side of the house, which could be a vehicle. Not his vehicle.

“Do you remember me?”

Hilton focuses. The woman speaking is seated on the deck beside him. She is around fifty years old, with her wavy, not to say unruly, hair pulled back into a pale blue scrunchie. Her hair is very dark and streaked with gray. She wears glasses with thin blue rims, and a pale gray hiking top with a quarter zip. Laid on the deck in front of her are a light hiking jacket in cyan and a large plastic box full of medical supplies, with a separate little box for sharps disposal. As he watches, she disposes of a used needle, and puts a small bottle of colorless liquid back in its compartment.

A dim memory surfaces and starts taking shape. The woman is twice as old now as when he knew her last, and she moves with twice the confidence. It seems absurd, on reflection, that he could forget her. He taught her everything he—Well. Everything he could remember at the time. He remembers her as a field operative. He remembers sending her through hell, a fistful of times. “Sheridan.”

“Andy,” the woman softly explains, “you died. You died surrounded by grieving family. They loved you very much, and they cried over you. The funeral for the fake is in a few days, but unfortunately you won’t be able to see it yourself. You’re dead now, and this is what comes next.”

“Sheridan. Marie.” Hilton feels gold spreading through his bones, miracle juice.

It’s Quinn now, but she doesn’t correct him. “When you retired, Andy, we did what we do to all of us who retire; what all of us agree to when we sign up. We gave you some medicine that made you forget. As you stepped out of the door for the last time, all the work you did for us—great work, which saved lives—evaporated away, and your cover story sealed over those years and became reality. That’s why you’ve spent your whole retirement believing that you were a former section chief at MI5. It’s what you wanted, it’s what we wanted, it’s what you agreed to.

“But you, alone, agreed to something else as well. And you must be starting to remember, now, what that something else was. I’ve injected you with a serum that throws the human aging process into hard reverse, and it affects everything: organs, tissues, memories. You’ll be coming up on it soon. Remember?”

“Yes,” Hilton croaks, remembering, dizzy.

“You signed over your final twelve hours to us. You asked for a full and happy and well-deserved retirement…but now, for the last day, you work for us again, because of one particular job. I have it in writing here, you see? Do you recognize your signature, and mine? I witnessed.”

“Yes.”

“Do you remember who you are?”

“Doctor Andrew Hilton, of the Unknown Organization,” he says. “Antimemetics Division founder.”

Quinn smiles with relief. It’s good to see him again.

“We need some memories from you,” she explains. “Memories that nobody else in the world has access to, and that are buried so deeply that we can’t extract them without killing you. So this afternoon, that’s what we’re going to do. We’re going to extract those memories, and once we’re done, you’ll be dead.”

Hilton has already begun to regress to the time when he himself set this wheel in motion. He remembers, very clearly, discovering the mystery in his own head, the blank spots that he couldn’t explain, and couldn’t safely access with any kind of chemical or physical technique. He remembers deferring the mystery until now.

“What happened in ’76?” Quinn asks.

■

Hilton sits up. His skin is beginning to clear, and his breathing is improving.

He feels as if his brain has been cleaved in two by a wormhole. His eyes are focusing on different time periods. In his right eye he sees the lake and the boat he’s dying on; in his left he sees a collage of electrifyingly familiar past faces and places. Ed Hix with his grin and thick glasses and baby face, looking like some kid dressed up as an Organization researcher; the original lab crew at Shenfingley, great techs but a hopeless excuse for a cricket team; young Marie with steel-strong nerves and a mind like a laser; suits and lab coats and Hazardous Response operations. And everywhere paperwork, and floods of serial numbers.

He starts to speak.

1976 was the year he founded the Division. He brainstormed the whole thing in one legendary week, hammering out the science and then distilling the first chemical mnestic with the help of a handpicked trio of assistants, the first antimemetics researchers. No antimemetic Unknowns had even been observed up to that point—the entire operation was a shot in the dark—and yet the team immediately struck gold. Passive black holes of information, active predatory infovores, unrememberable worms that covered the human skin like dust mites…contagious bad news, self-sealing secrets, living murders, Chinatowns.

Quinn wonders if there might be something more serious awry with Hilton’s head. His version of events is hopelessly romantic. In Quinn’s experience, nobody looks back on Organization work fondly.

“But it was all too fast,” Hilton says. “Containment protocols take time to develop, much more time than I took. I discovered more Unknowns than the entire rest of the Organization that year, essentially single-handedly. It was too easy. It was as if I knew it all already, and I was just catching up.

“And then…one day I realized I couldn’t remember my life before Antimemetics. I knew I’d been an Organization operative for decades prior—that was where I got the authority to start my own division—but there was nothing else there. It was a wall in my mind, which even mnestics couldn’t get me past. I went to the paper archives and looked at my own personnel file, and…”

Hilton trails off. Not because he’s forgotten what to say next; it’s deliberate. The trailing-off is exactly what happened.

“You woke up back at your desk half a working day later, remembering nothing,” Quinn says. “You went through the loop a dozen times before someone realized what was happening and broke you out of it.”

Quinn knows all of this. The file still exists, and the antimemetic effect still clouds the back half of it. All of this would be over in a second if any of that back half could be read.

Hilton goes on. “When I assembled the evidence what I found was…well, a hole. Like a jigsaw with only the edges and corners. So I did the only thing I could do, I looked at the shape of the hole. And, together with Ed Hix and others, I formed a theory.

“This is not the first Antimemetics Division. Before 1976, there was another one. I was part of that division; possibly, I led it. Certainly, I am the only known survivor of it. Something happened to that team. Some antimemetic force chewed up and swallowed the idea of the Antimemetics Division itself. I was let off lightly; I lived. The rest of those people, whoever they were, however many of them there were, are missing without trace.”

Quinn nods. “This much we know already. I was there when you wrote the note, remember? The question is known. It’s the answer that we can’t get to without killing you. It’s the answer that we’ve waited all these years to get at. I’m here to ask you, Andy: What. Happened?”

Hilton covers his right eye and grimaces, trying. He fails. “It’s not there. You haven’t sent me back far enough. There’s still that wall in my head. I remember why the question exists, but I don’t remember the answer. I need more.”

Quinn swabs his arm, and gives him another ten years.

■

Excerpt from Document L407-098, User’s Guide to Chemical Mnestics:

• The Class X mnestic drug is a failed eternal youth serum. X rejuvenates both mind and body by up to ███ years, but its effects are temporary, wearing off in a matter of hours. Furthermore, as the drug wears off, the suppressed time reasserts itself all at once, causing a harmful “whiplash” effect on the subject’s physiology. X can rejuvenate an individual safely by up to 30 days, but with stronger doses the whiplash effect becomes dangerous, and past a threshold of 16–18 months it is fatal in all known subjects.

• X’s restorative effect on the human memory is essentially a side effect. However, this side effect is so useful that it has become the drug’s main practical purpose. The Antimemetics Division uses small doses of X to temporarily sharpen or restore memories from the recent past. This aids Organization operatives in the accurate recall of incidents involving memory-corrupting entities.

■

Hilton seems like another man once the second X dose takes effect. Wrinkles are sliding back up into his face, muscle mass is returning to his limbs, but it takes Quinn a second to realize the real reason why; she’s just booted him back across the field/desk operative transition. Hilton has regressed a little way past senior management, the realm where most problems were solved by saying the correct words, and into a time where he survived through physical fitness, situational alertness, and hands-on experience.

Hilton gets to his feet for the first time in years. He watches a bird—a heron—fly the length of the lake shore. It has immense gray wings, almost as broad as Hilton is tall. It carries a long, skinny branch in its bill, for nesting material. The bird drifts past them at an easy-to-track speed, but somehow it passes behind something, and Hilton loses sight of it.

He doesn’t sit down again. He smooths down his hospital gown, wishing he had a sweater. And some fishing gear. He brushes a hand through new, old hair. His sideburns are back.

“We weren’t Organization at first,” he says. “The first Antimemetics Division was a British Army project. The Ideational Research Establishment. It was formed during World War II. We called ourselves the Unthinkables.

“It began as an experiment in advanced propaganda. The objective was to cut through the physical conflict and find a way to rupture the ideological machine, to obliterate the idea of Nazism. After two years, enough theory had been developed that the task had been reduced to an engineering problem. Another two years, and the engineering problem had been reduced as well, and what we had built was a very special kind of bomb.

“Unfortunately, we didn’t understand what we’d built. Back then, we didn’t have the mnestics or the shielding that we could use to protect ourselves. We didn’t understand how far ahead you need to think when you’re working with this kind of technology.

“We got looped. It was textbook. We built the unthinkable bomb, took it to Skye and test-detonated it…and it worked perfectly. The bomb destroyed itself, and erased its own successful detonation, and flattened all the knowledge that had gone together to build it. We forgot that we had ever built the bomb at all, and started over.

“To our credit, we realized quite rapidly what must have happened. There was a four-year gap in our progress now, and there was no other way to explain it. But by the time we put the pieces together the second time, the war was almost over. The Nazis had been defeated by the Soviets, by relatively conventional means, and the Japanese had been broken by the atomic bombings. So we completed the second antimemetic bomb, and after that, we sat on it.”

Marie Quinn is silent for a long moment.

“You don’t buy it,” Hilton observes.

“The timeline is way off,” she says. “It’s off by almost sixty years. You’re telling me that the British Army was secretly developing antimemetic weaponry as early as the 1940s? Not theory. Real machines?”

“Indeed.”

“It…I know what I’m saying when I say this. It doesn’t seem possible.”

“Oh, Marie. You’ve been working here how long?”

“I know. Too long.”

Hilton flashes a smile he hasn’t flashed in decades. “You’ve lost sight of what we could do before the transistor. We were resourceful, we had to be. And canny. This is why you resurrected me, isn’t it? For the sake of one more good war story. God, I’ve missed shop talk.”

“I resurrected you because I want a very specific question answered,” Quinn says. “Although I can see that in a way you’ve already answered it. This bomb was the means, wasn’t it? The old Antimemetics Division—”

“The Unthinkables.”

“—bombed themselves. Somehow.”

“That’s right,” Hilton says.

“From context,” Quinn goes on, “I’m guessing you knew what you were doing that time. I’m guessing it wasn’t an accident.”

■

The displaced half of Hilton’s brain is anchored in the seventies now, so the true history of the original Unthinkables is an open book to him. And he reads:

“After the war the second bomb collected dust for years. Oversight started to flicker out. We completed our research and production objectives, and were given no further objectives. Funding became shaky and we couldn’t figure out why. It wasn’t entirely clear that the project overseers knew what we were doing. Or even that they remembered we existed. It was a side effect from our experimentation, of course, one we had no way of managing at the time.

“Then, in 1951, a cult movement began in Ojai, California. In a matter of days it was a national phenomenon in the U.S., and still growing. It reached Britain in the middle of its second week. Dominated the headlines. It was a mad fad, a kind of mania. And it was wrong. In the team, we had the theory, the analytical tools; we could see that everything about this thing was incorrect. The philosophy behind the cult was, well, warped, like any cult’s, but beyond that, it was unnaturally contagious. It was taking high-profile public figures by the score; it was altering government-level decisions in our country and the States, and it was starting to find a toehold in Europe. This was week two. To spread that far in months would have been vaguely credible, but days was simply impossible. News, and telecommunications technology, just didn’t work like that back then. This was half a century before social media. It was the opposite of unthinkable; it was unforgettable.

“We knew that this was our hour. This was what our bomb was designed for. We prompted our overseers for guidance. But there were no orders.

“At the time that the outbreak began, we were a special British Army laboratory, through and through. As we’d always been. Fifteen days into the crisis the Organization ‘acquired’ us. All our classified research, all our material resources, and all the compliant top staff, including me. Anybody who wouldn’t comply was politely erased and sent back to the army. Twenty hours after the acquisition, we deployed the second bomb and the cult was gone. Nobody remembered it, nobody remembered being part of it, zero loss of life. A completely clean detonation.

“That was the real beginning. The Organization opened our eyes, showed us the true, global scope of the mystery. What people were truly in danger from, and what had to be done to keep them safe. The metaphorical equation, with us on one side, and all of those fearful Unknowns on the other. Do you still teach it that way? To the newcomers?”

Quinn nods.

Hilton frowns at her. “My God, what am I thinking? Sheridan. How are you?”

“Andy, we don’t have unlimited time here.”

“Spare me two damned minutes. You look well.”

“I…” Quinn reflects. “Well. I’m still here. I’m running the whole show now.” She rummages in a pocket and shows him her pass.

“Chief of Antimemetics? Entirely to be expected,” Hilton says, approvingly. “I had an inkling, after working with you for a few years, that you might be a lifer. Some people just have the right character for the work. Of course, I’d never say that to an impressionable young operative’s face. It can be a frightening prospect. But some people just have that stance, where one senses that they could make quite productive use of a little authority.”

“Mmm.” Quinn’s felt the same way about some of her own operatives from time to time.

“How long have you been with the Organization now? Twenty years?”

Quinn waves an irascible hand. It’s more than that, and she doesn’t like to think about it. “Every year I tell myself, ‘Next year you’ve got to get out.’ And I never do it.”

A wry smile. “Why? I know why, but tell me in your words.”

“…Because every now and then I make a decision no one else could make that saves about a thousand people’s lives. And…I admit it, it’s a rush. And also, I couldn’t forgive myself if I left the Organization without that capacity…And those two things added together become a kind of…addiction.”

“It’s okay to enjoy helping people, Sheridan.”

“And it’s Quinn, now.”

Hilton beams. “Ah! I knew it!”

“His name’s Adam. He’s not part of the Organization.”

“Perfect. I’m happy for you. Don’t let go of him. Whoever the poor sap is.”

“Andy, please. We’re on a schedule. What happened after 1951?”

■

Hilton focuses on the water. From a point in the lake ahead of him, circular ripples begin to spread.

He says, “With the Organization’s resources, we were able to develop the first memory-reinforcing treatments. We had a workflow. Funding became stable. We recruited. The pace of research ramped up. We built new bombs, to all-new designs. And every new scientific advancement uncovered new hidden Unknowns. I breezed the Organization field test and went out catching ghosts. My life turned into the Twilight Zone. I…”

He blinks hard. He covers one of his eyes, then the other.

“I remember all these different people now,” he says. “It feels like my memory is in stereo. Almost every antimemetic Unknown we caught before the wipe in ’76, we caught again soon after the wipe. That means I remember two acquisition logs for each one. I remember two Antimemetics teams and I don’t remember who belongs on which side of the wall. The terminology bounced around a lot, we changed names a few times before we were ‘Antimemetics’…Do you remember Beatrix Wilson? The neurologist? Studied the mechanisms of anomalously accelerated memory loss…wrote a library on the subject…”

Quinn doesn’t. Something splashes in the water behind her, distracting her for an instant, but she looks around too slowly to catch what it is.

Hilton goes on, “Dr. Kitaka? Jamie Sitt?”

“Andy, this is important. Are you at the right place in your own timeline to remember what happened yet?”

Hilton concentrates. And he discovers that he is. Something changes in his eyes, as he stops reminiscing. He speaks more slowly now, his voice dropping almost to a whisper:

“There is an Unknown that your division has never seen. The Unknown that my division couldn’t contain. The escapee. This is what you wanted, isn’t it, Marie?”

“Yes,” she says. “This is the data I’m killing you for.” She leaves a gap where, if she felt there was anything to apologize for, she would apologize.

Hilton locks eyes with her. “It came at us. We weren’t prepared to be attacked directly. It was eating my division alive. It came at us so hard and so fast that the only way we could stop it was to self-destruct. If you know it exists, it knows you exist. The more you know about it, the more it knows about you. If you can see it, it can see you. And it hates to be seen.”

His left eye flashes like a cat’s. Quinn blinks, suddenly acutely aware of her surroundings. She runs the logic, as fast as she can.

I know it exists.

“But—”

Hilton says, “And you can see it. You’ve been staring right at it all afternoon.”

There are only two of them on the boat. The boat is anchored more than half a mile from any of the lake shores. She hasn’t brought any backup with her. There’s a radioactive prickling in her brain. She doesn’t—

Red flag. Why didn’t I bring any backup with me? That doesn’t make sense.

There should be a team at the lake house. There should be a Hazardous Response operative and a medic here on the boat with me. And a second boat. At minimum. Am I all alone out here? Why did I do that?

She pulls her gun, but doesn’t aim it at anything, yet. “Where is it? Is it in you?”

Hilton’s voice is becoming urgent. He covers both of his eyes again. “Destroying all knowledge of it was the only way to contain it. And restoring my memories was a foolproof way to bring it back!”

It’s in his eyes. His left eye. Quinn backs up to the other side of the boat, draws a bead on the center of Hilton’s head, and says, “Andy. Are you still in there?”

“There is a way to fix this,” Hilton hisses, dropping to his knees. He keeps his eyes screwed up and gropes his way forward blindly, on his hands and knees.

“Andy, you need to tell me what this thing is.”

“That’s the opposite of what we need to do,” Hilton says. “You need to set another bomb off.”

“We don’t have that bomb, Andy. We lost that technology—” Quinn begins.

“You’ve always had it. There’s an engineering lab at Wyeleigh. You know it. An underground complex the size of a football pitch. In pristine condition, and totally disused. Why? Think about it. That’s where your bomb’s installed.”

“But that just sets us back to square one. If I set the bomb off,” Quinn says, knowing full well that she is hundreds of miles from it and can’t hope to reach it in time anyway, “how do we contain this thing? When?”

“We won’t,” Hilton tells her. “We can’t, ever. Don’t you get it? The whole Division is looped. We start the Division, we run headlong into this thing, and either it eats us, or we wipe ourselves out in self-preservation. Humans have been looping through this problem over and over again since long before the forties. Maybe for centuries.”

His blindly probing fingers find the medical box. It’s too late. As Quinn watches, a waving black pedipalp coated in dark hairs forces its way out through Hilton’s left eye. Hilton screams. Still on his knees, he grasps the pedipalp with both hands and tries to break it, but it’s solid, as if it has bones inside it.

“What is it?” Quinn shouts at him. “That can’t be the whole story. What does it want? Can it reason, can it speak? Does it have a name?”

“It has a n—a number—”

“What number?”

“Five,” Hilton begins. “Five. I can’t—”

A second spider leg, significantly longer, slides out through Hilton’s trachea, ruining his throat and voice box and producing a gout of blood. He gurgles. A third leg shoots from his abdomen, like a spear.

Quinn shoots Hilton in the head. Hilton falls forward, limp, then rises back up, lifted by the three spider appendages as if he is a puppet being controlled by something gigantic and invisible. His arms raise, as if suspended by wires.

Quinn squints. She fires four more shots over Hilton’s head, at the likely body mass of the invisible puppeteer, and fires the rest of her rounds almost directly into the sky. The whole boat vibrates, along with the surface of the lake, as if responding to infrasound or a localized earthquake. Then the boat shudders violently and starts to lift out of the water, raised by more unseen appendages.

Quinn holsters her gun and goes for the medical box herself, pulling it away from Hilton’s floating feet. There’s a compartment with L2 amnestic, the fast-acting stuff, in serum form. She does a hurried burst of mental arithmetic, measures out the correct dosage in a syringe, and, hands shaking, plunges it into a wrist vein. The boat is still rising. Whatever the monster is, it’s colossally tall, or maybe it flies.

She is, of course, already dosed up to the eyeballs with mnestic drugs. Otherwise, she wouldn’t have been able to perceive any of this. Organization medical literature warns in the strongest possible terms against putting both kinds of drug into the same brain. Best-case scenario, this ends with her in the hospital.

They’re fifteen meters up in the air now, five stories. There’s a stabbing pain developing in her left eye. She kicks her shoes off and throws the gun away. She goes to the edge and contemplates the drop for a disbelieving second. She jumps.

It takes two heart-stopping seconds of free fall for her to hit the water. The chilled hammer blow of the impact is enough to blank her mind out. By the time she surfaces she doesn’t remember where she fell from, or why. And likewise, the skyscraper-sized being that claimed Hilton and the boat has forgotten about her.

“What in the world?” she gasps, treading water. “What the hell, where the hell?”

There is nothing above her, no explanation. Only the symptoms of the drug cocktail give her any indication of what just happened: a sensation like hundreds of tiny lumps of hot solder in her brain, and pain and exhaustion spreading to all of her tendons. She wants to die.

Swim, part of her says. Get to shore first. Then you can die.

■

The response team finds her around dusk, unconscious on the lake shore. They stabilize her in the helicopter, then take her back to Wyeleigh for examination, and to have her system flushed.

She spends a solid eight days at home, detoxifying: no mnestics, no amnestics, no exposure to dangerous memory-corrupting Unknowns, no work visitors. “No work,” the doctor also tells her husband.

“You know I can’t stop her,” he replies. Adam Quinn is in his fifties, gaunt and well manicured, with rimless glasses and thick, graying hair. He does his best, distracting his wife with soup, fresh gingerbread, historical fiction, and bingeable crime miniseries. But Marie is working again, from her bed, by midway through day three. It takes a while for her sleep cycle to straighten out again, and whenever she wakes up, day or night, she gropes for her work phone, like a reflex action.

It isn’t anywhere near the first missing event in Marie Quinn’s life, nor is she the first person in the Antimemetics staff to lose time, but the experience is no less disturbing for its familiarity. As per procedure, she writes a report detailing everything she can remember. The gap in her memory is about sixteen hours wide. Class X could help fill the gap, but a mnestic dose that strong, now, would cost her an organ.

■

Then she returns to the office and adds her report to the extensive, complex map of missing time that the whole division maintains collectively. The map has accreted gradually in a windowless spare meeting room with red-painted walls. It is a map of holes, sprawling across the entirety of the longest wall in the room, and most of the next wall, and some of the floor.

Quinn almost slips and falls as she’s pinning her new notes up. A piece of paper, a personnel profile, has come unstuck from the wall and fallen to the floor. The printout is several years older than anything else on the wall. The profile is for a senior Organization official named Jason Lo. Quinn doesn’t recognize the name, or the face. She tries to figure out where on the map it might have fallen from, and fails.

She spends an hour rearranging the rest of the map, pinning things together. Some of the reports of missing time are from years or decades in the past. The majority of them originate not from the Antimemetics Division but from the Memetics Division, which is ten times the size and extremely well Organized, with battalions of trained operatives on every continent. There are events from all over the continental United States, and the UK and Ireland, and Scandinavia, and India, and Oceania. It’s a mess. The Memetics Division doesn’t seem to have a good handle on the fact that they’re losing time.

Not that having a handle on that fact seems to be helping the Antimemetics Division figure out where the time is going, or what it means.

Many of the events are dubious in their authenticity or merit. Some of the notes are so obviously irrelevant that Quinn screws them up and discards them. Then she becomes woozy—the doctor promised dizzy spells—and settles heavily into the beaten-up office chair in the corner.

Her doctor promised a lot of things. He has begun voicing serious concerns about the deleterious effects that prolonged mnestic drug usage is starting to have on her endocrine system. He dropped an appointment into the middle of her schedule for next week, to discuss dosage limits. Quinn plans to dodge the appointment. Specifically, she plans to reschedule the appointment for one month later, over and over again, forever. Because she has work to do.

Sitting there, leaning on the arm of the chair that isn’t broken, she stares at the map. In the data, there are very faint patterns starting to form. An outline is slowly becoming visible. The outline of an enemy, perhaps, or a group of enemies. She removes her glasses and grinds the heels of her hands into her eyes, concentrating, trying to make the fog clear. But the thing she wants to see isn’t there.

Someone knocks on the meeting room door.

“Yep,” Quinn calls out.

The man who enters is a misleadingly stocky, perpetually unshaven individual, somewhere just shy of forty, and inarguably the most dangerous person on the site. He is the Division’s physical fitness and combat instructor and the leader of its two Hazardous Response Teams. His name is Geoff Ives. He carries a few fragments of paper of his own. Reports, gathered from the team who recovered Quinn at the lake. With a curt nod to Quinn, he heads over to the wall, locates Quinn’s report at the tail end of the timeline, and pins his notes up beside it.

He says, “My team’s version of what happened is pretty consistent. It’s not a long story.”

Quinn can’t find the motivation to get up and look for herself. “What is their story?”

“An emergency beacon was triggered at 18:04:17 UTC last Monday. The point of origin of the beacon was in the vicinity of the lake where you were recovered, most likely on the lake surface itself somewhere. We can’t be more specific. The beacon itself hasn’t been recovered.”

“I don’t remember triggering a beacon,” Quinn says. But then, she doesn’t remember anything. She’s accepted that attempting to retrieve that memory would probably kill her.

Ives says, “Team Xi-1 was airborne by 18:10. The beacon cut out at 18:26 while they were still en route, which is why we don’t have a precise fix. Despite an unrelated mechanical issue with the aircraft, for which the pilot had to compensate, they made excellent time and reached the lake at 19:50. You were located at 19:53. You were loaded into the aircraft and en route home by air within four minutes of being located. Four team members were left behind to investigate the surroundings. They found your vehicle, and an abandoned lake house. Nothing of interest.”

The account dovetails with Quinn’s. She stands up. She moves closer to Ives, and squints at the reports on the wall for a while. Then she glances at the door, as if it could open at any time.

And she points at one of the Hazardous Response reports, at an alphanumeric code embedded in the emergency beacon’s outgoing signal. “This isn’t my code,” she murmurs. “Someone else triggered the beacon.”

Ives frowns. He pulls his phone out and looks the code up in the UO personnel files. There are no matches. The code is no one’s.

He doesn’t say anything.

“Someone was with me on the lake,” Quinn says. “This person saved my life. I could have died. In the lake or on the shore. They might have been acting as my bodyguard, I don’t know…And there’s nothing. Nothing on this wall. Nothing in the files. Nothing in the lake. This alphanumeric ID is all we get. Who was this? Where are they, right now? What happened?”

Ives looks doubtful. Not so much about the facts, but about how to respond.

“We’re losing people as well as time,” Quinn says. “This is one person. But there could have been a dozen people with me on that mission. Or trip, or trap, or whatever the hell it was. I don’t go unprepared…We have empty roles. And empty spaces in the personnel files.”

“I will admit that we are shorthanded,” Ives says.

“ ‘Shorthanded.’ We have two hundred people. If we want to do our job the way it needs to be done, we should have two thousand. Do you agree?”

“Yes.”

“How long have we been actively recruiting for, and this is all we have to show for it?”

“As long as I can remember,” Ives says.

“Geoff. How far back is that?”

He can’t answer the question.

“When did this even start?” Quinn asks him. “The Antimemetics Division. Who founded us? When?”