65,097.

11.

300,009,099.

8,765.

9,089,888.

100,000,000,006,000,000,000.

85,968.

85,969.

"No way to know for sure, but think about it this way. The majority of people walking around probably have no exact memory of their eighth birthday or tenth birthday or of their ninth Christmas or any of that."

Normal people don't remember everything.

Normal people forget.

Do normal people ever have just one memory that is so . . .

very . . .

unrelenting/unavoidable/unfathomable?

"The hot air balloon and carousel and all," she said. "Do you think those things even happened?"

She'd spent her time in the waiting room searching for hot air balloon companies and carousels in the area on her phone.

Horse stables, too.

It was useless.

So far, Lucas's plea to the world to help them had turned up nothing, and she had zero expectation that it would.

"As I told Lucas and Kristen," Sashor said, "it's a lot easier to implant a fake memory than it is to erase a real one-though it's true that people are having success in treating trauma victims with post-traumatic stress by just recasting the trauma-like if they witnessed a car accident or something awful. But the reverse is much easier. So it's possible that the hot air balloon memory was implanted in you, though to what end? It would be one thing if you remembered that your captor was a man, say, with a scar on his forehead. Because if that were a fake fact, an implanted memory, it would throw the police off the trail. A hot air balloon? What's the point?"

He went on to say that the problem now was that "source errors" could creep into their minds. That, at least in terms of helping to locate Max, Scarlett and the others were becoming less reliable with each pa.s.sing second.

"You'll think you're recovering your own memory," he explained, "when it's actually something you pulled out of a news report or movie or article."

Great.

She asked, "Do you think hypnosis could really help?"

Then tried to imagine it.

You are getting sleepy.

Very very sleepy.z z z z z z z z z z Was that how it really worked?

"I have my doubts," Sashor said. "The person Kristen is working with has been at the center of an ongoing controversy for years now. She's been involved in a few prominent abuse trials, and there's concern about false recovered memories."

"She said she remembers not liking me," Scarlett said. "How does that work? Like memories of emotions?"

It was a nice, roundabout way of asking about her longing for Lucas.

She'd answered "yes" to the question about being in love.

She couldn't recall a single incident of kissing, but had visceral memory of what it would feel like.

Had felt like.

With him.

Last night, at Opus 6, it was all coming together.

So many rocks and w i n d i n g, l o o p i n g paths.

She liked it there. S h e f e l t t h a t w a y, t o o.

Maybe when they got together later-just the two of them, like they'd planned-they'd know.

Know what, though?

Something.

Anything.

Sashor said, "That aspect of memory is still one of the most mysterious."

"Do you think it's weird that I'm not sure I want to remember where we were?" she asked then.

He shrugged. "What do you want?"

She considered saying "To be with Lucas" or "To be with Lucas again."

What she said instead was another truth. "I want Tammy-that's my mother-to accept that aliens weren't involved."

He laughed.

"No," she said. "For real."

"Oh." He cleared his throat. "Well, that's unfortunate."

Scarlett liked this guy.

"I did a study once of people who claimed they were abducted by aliens," he said, surprising her. "I wanted to try to see if they were p.r.o.ne to false memories in other facets of life."

"What did you find out?"

"That people who think they were abducted by aliens really want to believe they were abducted by aliens." He smiled and picked up a tiny horseshoe from a game on his desk, tossed it at a small sand box, missed the pole. "And that they get mad at you if you suggest that maybe they experienced an episode of sleep paralysis and it was scary and now this is how their brain has constructed a script around it. It gives their life meaning."

"That sounds like her, all right. She keeps saying how we were chosen. For this special thing."

"Well, you were," he said, and he wrote down the word "chosen," underlined it. "But probably not by aliens. Just don't tell her I said that."

"So I'm pretty much doomed," she said.

"You'll be okay," he said. "You're strong. All of you. And you seem like, I don't know, good kids. So whoever raised you seems to have done a decent job, if you discount the fact that it wasn't his or her or their right to do it in the first place. Either that, or you all formed a support system for each other."

"Can I try?" She nodded at the game, and he pushed it toward her.

"Actually I have one more question for you," he said. "It's really just for my own research purposes."

She took the tiny horseshoe in her hand and aimed. "What's that?" she asked.

"I know you were only five, but do you remember anything that was happening in the world before you disappeared?"

"Such as?"

"Anything. Like a presidential election or s.p.a.ce shuttle launch. I'm interested in when a shift occurs and memory starts to include not just small personal memories but has more context in the world."

Scarlett's kneejerk feeling was to just say no, but she took a minute.

The world?

The news?

Her mother's clippings came to mind.

"Oh, like that school shooting?" she said, adjusting her grip on the toy.

"You remember hearing about that?" Sashor sat up straighter.

Well . . .