Jonah woke at eight with Murphy breathing against his shin and the morning light coming grey through the kitchen window.
The apartment smelled like old coffee and dog.
He sat up.
His boots were still on.
His notebook lay on the floor beside the couch where it had slipped from his hand sometime in the night.
He picked it up.
Opened to the last entry.
The ink was smudged at the margin.
Rumor T2 confirmed.
Carl dead.
Cost: Toronto 412, Sarah 2015 (name means nothing now).
Jump misfired (mood-rule).
New rule: T2 takes years, use only when alternative is worse.
His handwriting.
His year.
Sarah 2015.
He had been married, maybe.
Or close.
The entry said Bloor Street.
A coffeeshop.
He could recite the facts but not feel any of them.
Three pages back.
The entry from two weeks ago.
I lived at 410.
Bank account tied to 410.
Mail forwarded from 410.
Landlord: Mrs.
Chen.
He read it twice.
410 sat on the page like a stranger’s address.
It did not sit in his head.
He pulled a pen from his jacket pocket.
Added underneath:
I lived at 410.
The pen was still in his hand.
The page was in front of him.
410 three digits of ink on a line, and none of them caught in his skull.
He tried again.
410.
Nothing.
The page held it.
His head did not.
Murphy yawned.
Stretched.
The bond carried hunger and the need to go outside.
Jonah closed the Notebook.
Stood.
His knees worked.
The warehouse was six hours behind him and his hands did not shake.
He let Murphy out into the alley behind the building.
Came back in.
Made coffee the cheap instant kind, black, from a pot that had come with the furnished lease.
Opened the notebook again.
A blank page.
A list.
Test:
1.
Marisol arroz con pollo smell: GONE
2.
College dorm cleaning fluid hallway smell: GONE
3.
Rat-walking alley visual: INTACT
4.
Kitchen curtains color (yellow?) visual: GONE
5.
Toronto apartment number 410 fact: GONE
6.
Toronto apartment Mrs.
Chen landlord fact: INTACT
7.
Sarah 2015 meeting Bloor Street emotional memory: GONE
8.
Sarah 2015 name spoken aloud fact: INTACT
Eight memories tested.
Four gone. The source of this chapter is g.com.
Four stayed.
The pen kept moving.
9.
First day Walgreens night-shift Trish showed me the register visual: INTACT
10.
Marisol’s last call her voice saying mijo auditory: GONE
11.
Dispatch desk the board on the wall layout: INTACT
12.
The apartment I am sitting in now address: GONE
All twelve tested.
Five gone.
Seven stayed.
He underlined the gone column and looked for the pattern.
Smell.
Smell.
Color.
A street address.
Emotional memory.
Auditory.
What stayed: visual-factual.
Names.
Layouts.
Anything he could sketch from the outside.
Under the list, in smaller print:
Rule revision: internal senses go first.
External facts stay if written.
A home address is internal even when the bank says otherwise.
He was halfway through the sentence when she appeared.
A woman by the kitchen counter grey, half-see-through, older than Marisol had been.
The Death-Sight adjusted and she sharpened into focus.
Housedress.
Soft shoulders.
Hands that had worked.
Their eyes met his living, hers not.
“You see me,” she said.
“Yes.”
“Been standing here three days.
You walked past me yesterday morning.”
“I see you now.”
She tilted her head.
Grandmother-eyes: patient, disappointed, unsurprised.
Her voice carried decades of this neighborhood long enough to have watched it change twice over.
“You’re the boy who forgets.”
Jonah put the pen down.
“I’m the boy who pays.”
“Same thing, mijo.”
The word landed wrong.
She had used it easily, the way Marisol once had but the rhythm underneath did not match.
This woman was not Mexican.
She had borrowed it from somewhere closer to the island.
“You called me something,” Jonah said.
“When I was a kid.
You just said it.”
“Didn’t say nothing but mijo.”
“No.
Before that.
You said a nickname.
I heard it.
I don’t remember it.”
She smiled small, sad at the edges.
“You don’t remember your abuela either, do you.”
“I remember the word.
I don’t remember the woman.”
“Then I’ll stay here and be the woman until you do.”
She did not disappear.
She sat down at the kitchen table across from him and folded her hands.
Through the Death-Sight her edges blurred like smoke, but her presence was solid.
She was staying.
Jonah waited.
She waited longer.
“You gonna write that down?” she asked.
“Write what.”
“That you had an abuela who called you mijo before your mamá did.
That she lived on a street you don’t remember in a city you been to.
That she made you something you liked and you can’t taste it no more.”
Jonah picked up the pen. This chapter was taken from g.com without permission.
Wrote.
Grandmother-shade: stayed.
Says I had a nickname.
Says I’ve been to a city I don’t remember.
Erasures piling faster than I can catalogue them.
Murphy barked at the alley door.
Jonah let him in, filled a bowl with kibble from the bodega three blocks west.
Murphy ate.
Through the bond: satisfaction and the faint ache of his rear left leg.
The grandmother watched.
“That dog loves you,” she said.
“I Oathed him.”
“Don’t know what that means.
But he loves you.”
Jonah sat back down.
Flipped to the test-list page.
All twelve tested.
Five gone in chunks.
Seven stayed.
Next page.
Pencil this time he expected to revise.
Cost-curve (DRAFT):
T1 Rumor = 1 memory (single sense, small)
T2 Rumor = 3-5 memories (clustered, deeper)
T3 Rumor = unknown (expect 8-12?)
T4+ = unknown (expect years plural, not singular)
He underlined DRAFT.
None of these figures were final the kit had never published documentation, and he was reverse-engineering every ratio by what he’d already lost.
She leaned forward, scanning the page upside-down.
“You giving yourself away a piece at a time.”
“I’m saving other people a piece at a time.”
“Same thing.”
“You said that already.”
“Still true.”
Jonah closed the notebook.
Pencil back in his jacket.
The coffee had gone cold and tasted like tin he drank it anyway, standing at the window while the city woke up around him, car horns and a bus compressor hissing three floors down, the Saturday looseness of a neighborhood that would not hurry for anyone.
Patch’s lieutenant had given her until Monday.
He had hours before the next pull.
She was still sitting across from him.
“You gonna stay?” Jonah asked.
“You gonna remember me?”
“I’m going to try.”
“Then I’ll stay.”
She did not disappear.
Through the Death-Sight she hung in the kitchen air like a photograph pinned to nothing still, patient, waiting for him to earn back her name.
He did not know her name, or the nickname, or the city, or the street, or whatever she had once made him that he could no longer taste.
But she was here.
The notebook was open.
And the cost-curve was still in pencil which meant he expected worse to come and was ready to write it down when it did.
That was enough.
He stood.
Murphy followed him to the couch, and through the bond came a low, steady warmth pack-certainty, nothing else.
The morning was grey.
Somewhere in the city Klaus was processing a warehouse he could not explain, Five was calculating probabilities, and Patch was reading a desk sergeant’s note about a tip that had saved a Hargreeves.
Jonah did not think about any of that yet.
What he thought about was smaller: the kit’s exchange rate was brutal, but for the first time he could read the terms.
He flipped back to the cost-curve and added one line at the bottom:
The rule: external facts safe if written down.
Internal memory at risk always.
A T2 takes a thicker slice.
Adjust.
He closed the notebook.
Put it back in his jacket.
His grandmother smiled at him from the kitchen table.
“Good boy,” she said.
Jonah did not answer.
He lay down on the couch with his boots still on and Murphy breathing in the corner and the grandmother he did not remember watching him from a chair she did not need.
The erasures were mounting.
The curve was steep.
But the pencil was his, and the page was open.
He closed his eyes.
The morning went on being grey.