Saturday and Sunday. The longest weekend of Maren's life.
David had a work trip a three-day conference in Philadelphia that required his attendance because he was presenting a paper on structural load-bearing in historic buildings, a topic that Maren had once found endearingly boring and now envied for its clean, verifiable reality. Load-bearing was physics. Load-bearing didn't lie. Load-bearing didn't rewrite itself while you slept.
So Alma was with her. Two full days.
They did the things they always did. Saturday morning: pancakes, because Alma had decreed years ago that Saturday was pancake day and had maintained this decree with the iron consistency of a constitutional monarch. Maren made the batter from scratch flour, eggs, milk, a pinch of salt, a teaspoon of vanilla and let Alma stir, which meant batter on the counter, batter on Alma's chin, and a pancake shaped like "a horse" that looked more like a country whose borders had been disputed by three empires.
They watched a movie. They built something out of Legos a spaceship, according to Alma; a structural hazard, according to the laws of physics. They went to the park despite the cold, because Alma believed that parks were a human right and weather was a suggestion, and Maren sat on a frozen bench and watched her daughter climb and swing and shout and decided, for two hours, to simply be here.
But the decision-making machinery in her mind did not stop. It never stopped. It was the part of her that Lena had weaponized the part that ran calculations even during pancakes, that assessed risk while building Legos, that couldn't look at her daughter's face without performing a background audit of its own emotional response.
Is this love real? she thought, watching Alma on the swings.
She hated the thought. She hated that the question existed, hated that it had been made possible, hated that someone Lena, Sollen, the protocol, the 6 Hz signal had introduced enough noise into her cognitive system that even motherhood was suspect.
The love was real. She knew this as certainly as she knew anything. But the certainty itself was part of the problem because certainty was exactly what the implanted memories felt like. The aquarium had felt certain. The Thanksgiving had felt certain. The green cardigan she'd remembered that this week, reaching for a sweater that wasn't there had felt certain.
How do you trust a feeling when your feelings have been edited?
Saturday night she read Charlotte's Web, chapter fourteen. Alma fell asleep on page three. Maren turned off the light and sat in the doorway for her count of ten and watched her daughter breathe and felt the old ache the parent's ache, the one that lives in the gap between the person you are and the person your child deserves and she let herself feel it fully, without analysis, without triage, without asking whether the ache belonged to her or had been written by a machine.
It belonged to her. It was ragged and imperfect and it did not have a 6 Hz frequency or a template ID or a donor designation. It was hers.
She went to the kitchen.
She poured the glass of Malbec she hadn't drunk the night before. She sat at the table in the dark and held it and thought about Lena's offer.
Step back. Keep Alma. Keep her life.
She thought about Dolores, sitting on a couch, remembering her husband's funeral while he brought her coffee.
She thought about Henrik's bitten nails and the way his voice shook when he described a grief that wasn't his.
She thought about Marcus Cole's stained-glass window with resolution limits. About Patricia Huang's rain on limestone. About Frank DeLuca feeling like "a different person." About eight hundred subjects sleeping every night in the embrace of a drug that was rewriting their minds while they dreamed.
And she thought about herself. About the seventy-two hours she'd lost. About the woman singing in Portuguese her grandmother's voice, living now in a stranger's memory because someone had decided it was useful raw material. About the aquarium and the cranberry sauce and the green cardigan and all the other small, precise lies that had been woven into the fabric of her life so seamlessly that she'd worn them without noticing.
She lifted the glass.
The wine was dark. Almost black in the kitchen light. It smelled of oak and dark fruit and the slight tannic bitterness that she'd once read was caused by polyphenol compounds binding to salivary proteins, because Maren could not experience anything without also explaining it, and this was both her gift and her exhaustion.
She brought the glass to her lips.
Her phone buzzed.
A voicemail. From Henrik. Left at 3:07 a.m. she'd missed it, or her phone had been on silent, or the radiator had been clanking when it came in. She didn't know. She pressed play.
Henrik's voice, low and rapid, the barely controlled breathing of a man who has been running or is about to start:
"They broke into my apartment. I came home and the door was open and my laptop is gone, the backup drive is gone, the printed files are gone. They took everything. Maren they know I talked to you. I'm at a gas station on Route 9. I don't know where to go. Call me."
Maren looked at the wine in her hand. She looked at the glass. She looked at the dark kitchen the refrigerator drawings, the pharmacy magnets, the calendar with David's weekends in blue, the mug from Zürich with the nail-polish chip on the rim.
She poured the wine down the sink.
She watched it go a dark spiral, the drain swallowing it in a single gulp and there was nothing poetic about it, nothing symbolic she intended. She poured the wine because she was going to drive, and she was going to drive because Henrik was at a gas station on Route 9 in the middle of the night, and whatever was going to happen next required her hands to be steady and her blood to be clean.
She called Henrik. He answered on the first ring.
"Come to my apartment," she said. "I'll text you the address."
"Are you sure? If they know about me "
"Then they already know where I live. Come here. Bring nothing electronic."
She hung up. She checked on Alma still sleeping, still breathing, still curled around Clover the rabbit with the steadfast commitment of a child who has decided this particular stuffed animal is the hill she'll die on. Maren pulled the blanket up. Touched her hair. Did not wake her.
Then she went to the kitchen and washed the wine glass and dried it and put it away and sat at the table to wait for Henrik Cale, who would arrive in forty minutes smelling of cold air and gasoline and fear, carrying nothing but a phone with a dead battery and the knowledge of a twelve-minute window on a Tuesday night that was now seventy-two hours away.
The radiator clanked. The apartment settled. Maren sat in the dark and did not pour another glass and did not consider Lena's offer again.
The decision was made. It had been made, she realized, not in this kitchen and not tonight. It had been made in Dolores Aguilar's living room, in the moment Leonard's voice cracked, in the space between the word coffee and the silence after it.
She would not step back. She would not be contained. She would walk into the sub-basement on Tuesday at 2 a.m. and she would take what was there and she would burn Sollen to the ground with it, and if Lena came after her custody, she would fight that too in daylight, in open court, with the evidence of what had been done to her and to Dolores and to Henrik and to eight hundred people who had signed consent forms for a sleep study and received, instead, a new set of memories they'd never asked for.
She would fight. She would probably lose something. She would fight anyway.
This was not courage. It was arithmetic. The cost of silence was higher than the cost of noise, and Maren, who trusted numbers more than feelings, had done the math.