第18章 The Extraction

The procedure began with a sound like a struck tuning fork, and then the world unspooled. Sarah had heard the dead describe it. She had read Vance's notes on the marker, the way the extraction took the architecture of a memory with it, leaving a clean hole where a life used to be. She had watched Raymond Tate stare at nothing from a hospital bed. She had never imagined the feel of it from the inside. The headpiece hummed. The chair held her. And her mind, her own mind, the only country she had ever truly ruled, began to open like a house with all its doors unlocked. She could feel herself being sorted. The first things to go were the surface ones, the easy ones: the name of the street where she had parked her car, the color of the sky that morning, the number of the room where she had interviewed a witness the week before. She felt them lift away like leaves on a river, and she was helpless, and she was furious. She could feel them going, each one a small bright thing she had carried her whole life, and she could feel which ones the machine was reaching for next. A birthday. A funeral. A face she had loved. The machine was not cruel. It was indifferent, and that was worse. Then the deeper water began to move, and she heard her mother's voice, and she thought, no. No. Not that. Kowalski had taught her a trick once, on a rooftop in the rain, when she was a rookie and afraid she was not good enough. He had told her that a strong mind was not a locked vault. It was a river. And when the river rose, you did not build a wall against it. You chose what to hold onto with both hands. She chose. The memory she reached for was not her mother's face. It was a smaller thing, an older thing: the ferry ride to the mainland when she was nine, her father's hand on her shoulder, the gulls wheeling white against a gray sky. It was the first memory she had ever been sure belonged only to her. She held it with both hands, and she let everything else go. The machine pushed against her grip. It wanted the memory she was holding. It could feel it, the way a hand can feel a stone in a riverbed. But the deeper it reached, the more of the shallows it was forced to take instead, and the shallows were full of things she no longer needed: her first partner's name, the address of the apartment where she had lived at twenty-three, the face of the man who had proposed to her and been turned down. She gave it all. She gave it gladly. And the whole time she held the ferry and her father's hand and the gulls, and she waited for the door. It came as a crash. The basement door slammed open and Okafor came through it like a battering ram, the fire extinguisher from the hallway swinging in both hands. Vance was behind him, and two officers Sarah had never seen before, and the chaos was absolute. Okafor brought the extinguisher down on the machine's console. Glass and wire exploded. The hum died. The headpiece went dead on Sarah's skull, and the room snapped back into focus, and she was on the floor, on her hands and knees, gasping, the taste of copper in her mouth. Osei was already moving. She was at the back wall, through a door, gone. "After her," Sarah said. Her voice came out hoarse, wrong. "Don't let her get to the archive." Okafor was already running. Sarah pushed herself to her feet, and Vance caught her arm. "You're bleeding," Vance said. "I'm missing things." Sarah looked at her own hands as if they belonged to someone else. "She took pieces of me. I can feel the holes." Vance's face was pale. "Sarah, sit down. Let me check—" "There's no time." Sarah pulled her arm free. "She knows we found the archive. If she gets there first, she burns it. Come on." They caught Osei in the tunnel that connected the house to the old line, a hundred yards from the vault where the cylinders waited. Okafor had her on the ground, one knee in her back, his cuffs going on with the practiced speed of a man who had done it a thousand times. Sarah came down the tunnel behind them, breathing hard, and Osei looked up at her, and she was not afraid. She was amused. "You held onto something," she said. "Good. I knew you would. Frank taught you well." Sarah knelt beside her. "You took pieces of me tonight, Doctor. I want to know exactly what you took." Osei smiled. "That's the beautiful part, Detective. You'll never know. That's what extraction is. You will live your whole life with a hole in it, and you will never be able to tell me what used to be there." Sarah looked at her for a long moment. Then she stood, and she said: "Then I'll make sure the rest of this city never has to find out what you took from them." Behind her, in the dark of the tunnel, she could hear Okafor reading Osei her rights, and the sound of it was the sweetest thing she had heard in twenty years. Vance caught up to them at the grate, her kit banging against her hip. She looked at Sarah and said, without preamble: "She took something real. You should let me look at you." "Later," Sarah said. "Sarah." Sarah stopped. She looked at her hands, at the way they were still shaking, and she said, quietly: "I don't know what she took, Leticia. I don't know what I'm missing. And I'm afraid that if I stop and look at it, I'll find out." She looked up. "So later. After this is over. After I've made sure she can't do it to anyone else." Vance held her gaze for a moment. Then she nodded, and they climbed out of the dark together, into a city that had no idea how close it had come to losing its memory. In the car, on the drive back, Vance made her sit still and ran the scanner over her temple. "The surface layer is gone," she said at last. "A few years of your twenties, most of it routine. Work memories, addresses, faces you haven't seen in decades." She set the scanner down. "She wanted Kowalski, and she didn't get him. You held onto him the way he taught you to hold on." Sarah looked out the window at the city sliding past. "Then I won," she said. "You won." Vance was quiet for a moment. "But Sarah, it took pieces of you. I need you to understand that. Some of what's gone is gone forever." Sarah nodded slowly. "I know. That's the price. He paid it for twenty years, and I paid it for one night. I can live with that." ---