Chapter 1: The Scar

I wake to the taste of copper in my mouth and the distant wail of sirens bleeding through my bedroom window. My throat feels raw, like I've been screaming, though the apartment around me sits in perfect silence. The morning light cuts harsh angles across my ceiling, and for a moment—just a breath—I don't recognize the pattern of shadows above me.

That's when the wrongness settles in.

Not the dramatic kind that announces itself with fanfare. This is subtle, insidious. The feeling you get when you walk into a room and forget why you came, except the room is your entire life and you can't remember entering it at all.

I push myself upright, and my head swims. The bedroom looks exactly as it should: my dresser cluttered with books on grief counseling and consciousness studies, the poster of the Milky Way I bought at a conference three years ago, my running shoes kicked off beside the closet. Everything familiar. Everything mine.

So why does it feel like I'm looking at a stage set of my own existence?

My hands are shaking. I press them flat against the mattress, trying to ground myself in something solid. The sheets are cool beneath my palms, expensive Egyptian cotton I saved up for after a particularly difficult month at the clinic. I remember buying them. I remember everything about that day—the sales clerk with the crooked smile, the cafe where I stopped for coffee afterward, the way rain had just started to fall as I walked home.

I remember that day perfectly.

But when I try to think about yesterday, there's nothing. Not fog or haze or confusion—just absence, like reaching for a light switch in a room that's never had electricity.

The bathroom tiles are cold against my bare feet. I don't remember deciding to get up, but here I am, standing in front of the mirror with fluorescent light buzzing overhead. My face stares back at me: same high cheekbones, same dark eyes with flecks of gold that catch the light, same small scar on my chin from falling off a bike when I was seven.

I know this face.

I turn my head, pulling my hair back with one hand, and that's when I see it.

The surgical scar sits just behind my right ear, following the curve where skull meets neck. It's still pink, the tissue raised and tender-looking, marked by the precise, almost delicate work of a medical laser. I've seen this exact scar hundreds of times—on clients sitting across from me in my office, on training videos, in the mirror-image photographs we show patients during their initial consultations.

It's the signature of a memory extraction procedure.

My fingers move to touch it before I can stop them. The skin feels hot beneath my touch, slightly swollen, and when I press gently against it, a dull ache blooms through my skull. Fresh, then. Recent. Within the last few weeks, if I'm reading the healing stages correctly.

But I didn't have a procedure. I would remember that. I would remember making the decision, sitting through the counseling sessions we require for all patients, signing the consent forms in triplicate. I would remember the prep appointment, the neural mapping, the careful documentation of exactly which memories I wanted extracted.

Except I don't remember any of it.

I lean closer to the mirror, examining the scar with the clinical detachment I usually reserve for other people's trauma. The incision is textbook perfect, no signs of infection, healing cleanly. Whoever performed the extraction knew what they were doing. And the placement—behind the right ear—suggests a standard episodic memory removal, not the deeper procedural or semantic extractions that require multiple access points.

Something specific, then. Not a skill or a fact, but an experience. A stretch of time.

How much time?

I close my eyes and try to remember. What day is it? What month? The last clear memory I can grasp is... I was at the clinic. Dr. Vance and I were reviewing a difficult case together, a young woman who wanted to extract the memory of her daughter's death. It was raining that day too, I remember, because Sarah had complained about forgetting her umbrella.

That was in March.

I open my eyes and look at the small calendar hanging beside my bathroom mirror. The one my sister sends me every year, covered in photographs of places I've never been. According to the calendar, it's September.

Six months.

Six months are just gone.

My knees weaken, and I grip the edge of the sink to steady myself. This isn't possible. Extractions don't work like this—they can't work like this. We remove specific memories, discrete episodes, contained experiences. Not vast swaths of time. Not half a year of someone's life.

The nausea hits suddenly, and I barely make it to the toilet before I'm retching, my body trying to purge something that isn't physical. When it passes, I sit back against the cool tile wall, breathing hard, tasting acid.

I need to think. I need to understand what's happening.

But first, I need to get out of this bathroom.

The kitchen feels too bright, too ordinary for the surreal horror of what I've just discovered. Sunlight streams through the window above the sink, illuminating the herbs I grow on the windowsill—basil, rosemary, thyme. They're thriving, green and healthy, which means someone has been watering them. Someone has been living this life I can't remember.

Me. I've been living it.

That's when I see the vault.

It sits in the center of my kitchen table like an accusation, like a bomb, like a gift. The device is small, roughly the size of a jewelry box, with smooth titanium sides that catch the light. My name is printed on a label across the top in my own handwriting: IRIS MITCHELL. Below it, a date: MARCH 15.

The day after my last memory.

I walk toward it slowly, as if sudden movement might cause it to vanish, might prove this is all some elaborate hallucination brought on by stress or illness or a brain tumor that's eating away at my temporal lobe. But the vault remains solid as I approach, more real than anything else in this kitchen that should be familiar but feels increasingly foreign.

Memory vaults are beautiful objects, in their way. Elegant. Designed to be kept on mantels or in safe deposit boxes, to be touched and held and considered. Some clients display them like art pieces, proud reminders of pain they've conquered. Others bury them in storage units or entrust them to family members, wanting them preserved but not present.

I've never seen one with my own name on it before.

Beside the vault sits a piece of paper, folded once. I recognize the stationery—expensive cream cardstock I keep in my desk drawer for handwritten notes to clients. My hands tremble as I unfold it.

The handwriting is unmistakably mine. I know the way I form my lowercase g's, the slight rightward slant, the way I cross my t's with a decisive horizontal slash.

The note reads: "Don't open this. You chose to forget for a reason."

I read it three times. Four. The words don't change.

I pull out a chair—it scrapes loudly against the floor, making me flinch—and sit down heavily. The vault and the note sit before me like evidence at a crime scene. Evidence of what? A crime I committed against myself?

Chose to forget.

I've counseled hundreds of people through this exact decision. I've walked them through the ethics, the implications, the irrevocable nature of what they're about to do. I've watched people cry with relief as they signed the final consent form, and I've watched others walk away at the last moment, unable to go through with it.

I've never—never—thought I would be sitting on this side of the decision.

My professional opinion on memory extraction has always been clear, maybe too clear. I believe in it as a tool, when used carefully. For true trauma, for memories that prevent people from functioning, from living, from being anything other than vessels for their own pain—yes, extraction can help. But I've also seen it abused. I've seen people try to delete every uncomfortable moment, every argument, every instance of grief or shame or regret, until they're left with a life so edited it barely resembles reality.

And I've always, always advocated for keeping the vaults. Never destroying them. Because you can't know who you are if you erase where you've been, even the painful parts. Especially the painful parts.

So why would I do this?

I try to remember again, forcing my mind toward the blank space where six months should be. It's like pressing against a wall. No, not a wall—a void. An absence so complete it has its own presence, its own weight.

Nothing comes.

I pick up the note again, studying it for clues. The handwriting is steady, not hurried or shaky. I wasn't panicked when I wrote this. The paper isn't torn or crumpled. The words are carefully chosen, economical. Clinical, almost.

You chose.

Past-tense me apparently believed that future-tense me—present-tense me—might doubt this. Might think it was forced or coerced or done under duress. The note anticipates that fear and tries to counter it.

But it doesn't say why.

I reach for the vault, then stop myself. The device has a biometric lock, programmed to open only to my fingerprint, but it also has a secondary security measure—a six-digit code that must be entered before the biometric scanner will even activate. It's a safety feature we implemented after a case where a husband tried to force his wife's finger against her own vault to access memories she'd chosen to keep private.

I would have set that code myself, six months ago, when I was whoever I was then. I would have chosen six numbers that meant something to me at that moment, something I'd remember.

Except I was choosing numbers I knew I wouldn't remember. Numbers that the version of me who woke up with a surgical scar and six missing months wouldn't be able to guess.

I was locking myself out on purpose.

The realization settles over me like a weight. This wasn't just about removing memories. This was about making sure I couldn't get them back. At least not easily. At least not without really trying.

What could be so terrible that I'd want to forget it this completely?

Or—and this thought sends ice through my veins—what could be so dangerous that I'd need to?

I push away from the table, suddenly unable to sit still. The apartment feels too small, the walls too close. I pace to the window, look out at the street below. It's a Tuesday morning, or at least I think it is, and the world is carrying on exactly as it should. A woman walks a small dog. A delivery truck double-parks. Someone sits on a bench eating a breakfast sandwich.

Normal. Everything is normal.

Except for the six-month hole in my head and the warning from my own hand sitting on my kitchen table.

I'm about to turn away from the window when it hits me.

Not a thought or a realization—a memory, sudden and violent as a car crash.

A man's voice, urgent and frightened, calling my name: "Iris! Iris, please—"

A face materializes in my mind with shocking clarity. Dark hair, slightly too long, curling at the collar. Eyes that crinkle at the corners when he smiles, a deep brown that catches light like polished wood. A small scar through one eyebrow, barely visible. The sharp line of his jaw. The particular way his mouth shapes my name.

I don't know him. I've never seen him before.

But the memory knows him. My body knows him. Because along with his face comes a flood of sensation so overwhelming I have to brace myself against the windowsill: the feeling of his hand in mine, the sound of his laugh, the specific warmth of his body beside me in bed, the taste of coffee on his lips when he kisses me good morning.

Love. I loved him. I love him. Present tense, past tense, the verb tense doesn't matter because the feeling transcends time, exists outside of memory, carved into some part of me that doesn't need neurons or synapses to remember.

And underneath the love, terrible and vast and suffocating: terror. Grief. A loss so profound it has physical weight, pressing down on my chest, making it impossible to breathe.

I gasp, the sound ragged and painful, and the memory fragments. It doesn't fade gently—it shatters, leaving razor-sharp edges that cut as they disappear. The man's face is gone. The feelings retreat like a wave pulling back from shore.

But I'm left standing at my window, tears streaming down my face, my body shaking with the echo of emotions I can't explain and a certainty I can't deny: something happened during those six months. Something that involved this man I don't know. Something that ended in a way that broke me badly enough that I chose to cut it out of my own head rather than carry it.

I wipe my face with shaking hands. The tears keep coming, irrational and unstoppable, mourning a loss I can't even name.

This is what people mean when they say the body remembers. The mind might forget, might lock away or delete or suppress, but the body holds onto things. Muscle memory, cellular memory, the autonomic nervous system that doesn't need consciousness to know when to be afraid or when to grieve.

I cry for several minutes, standing at the window, watching the normal world continue below while my own reality fractures further with each passing second.

When it finally subsides, I feel hollowed out but clearer. The flash of memory—or whatever it was—has made one thing absolutely certain: I can't just sit here staring at a vault and a warning note. I need answers. I need to know what happened.

And there's only one place to start.

I get dressed quickly, pulling on jeans and a sweater without thinking about it, running a brush through my hair and tying it back. The scar behind my ear throbs as I touch it. Good. Let it hurt. Let it remind me that this is real, that something happened to me, that I'm not losing my mind.

Or at least, if I am losing my mind, I'm not doing it quietly.

My keys are where they always are, hanging on the hook beside the door. My wallet, my phone, my bag—everything exactly where it should be. I'm walking through my own life like an actor who's been given all the right props but none of the script.

The clinic is a twenty-minute train ride from my apartment. I've made this commute thousands of times. I know which car to board to end up closest to the exit at my stop, know which doors stick, know the face of the man who sells coffee at the platform kiosk even though I've never learned his name.

It should be comforting, this familiarity. Instead, it feels like a mask, like everything around me is performing normalcy while underneath, nothing is normal at all.

I watch my reflection in the train window as we move through tunnels and between buildings. The woman looking back at me has my face but feels like a stranger. What did you do? I want to ask her. What happened to you?

The reflection doesn't answer.

Mnemosyne Clinic occupies the top three floors of a glass and steel building in the medical district. The name, lifted from Greek mythology's personification of memory, seemed clever when the founders chose it. Now it feels almost mocking. A goddess of memory presiding over a temple of forgetting.

The lobby is exactly as I remember it—sleek and modern, with soft lighting designed to be calming and abstract art that doesn't demand too much attention. The receptionist, Marcus (not the Dr. Marcus Keene from my records, just Marcus the receptionist with the friendly smile and the weakness for gossip), looks up as I enter.

"Iris! You're back!" His smile is genuine, warm. "We've missed you around here. How was your leave?"

I open my mouth and close it again. My leave. Of course they'd think I was on leave. I can't very well say I have no idea what he's talking about.

"It was... good," I manage. "Needed it."

"I bet. You were looking pretty burned out there at the end." He taps something on his screen, then nods toward the elevators. "Dr. Vance was asking about you yesterday, actually. Said to send you up when you came in."

"Thanks, Marcus."

I walk to the elevators on autopilot, my mind racing. Burned out at the end. What end? The end of what?

The elevator chimes softly as it rises. Second floor. Third. Fourth. The doors open onto the administrative level, where my office sits in a corner overlooking the street. Where the records room holds files on every procedure performed at the clinic.

Where, apparently, I'll find documentation of whatever I did to myself six months ago.

Dr. Sarah Vance passes me in the hallway, her arms full of file folders, and does a double-take. "Iris! Good to see you. Feeling better?"

"Getting there," I say, because it seems like the right answer.

"Good, good. We should grab coffee later, catch up." She shifts the folders to one arm and squeezes my shoulder with her free hand. "Really glad you're back."

She continues down the hallway, and I continue toward the records room, trying to parse what just happened. Sarah seemed happy to see me. Casual. Normal. Not like someone who knew I'd just discovered I was missing six months of my life.

Which means either she doesn't know, or she's a much better actor than I've ever given her credit for.

The records room is empty, thank god. I swipe my employee badge across the reader, and the lock clicks open. Inside, rows of filing cabinets line the walls—physical backups, because for all our technological advancement, there's still something about paper that feels more permanent, more trustworthy. But most of the actual data lives in the computer system, encrypted and backed up and theoretically secure.

I sit at one of the terminals and log in with my credentials, half-expecting them not to work. But they do. Of course they do. I'm not suspended or fired or flagged in the system. I'm just an employee returning from leave, accessing her own files, perfectly routine.

I pull up my personnel record first. The timeline is there in stark, bureaucratic language:

March 16: Request for voluntary leave of absence submitted and approved.

March 16: Note added to file requesting complete privacy and no contact during recovery period.

August 30: Expected return date.

September 3: Employee contacted, confirmed intention to return.

September 6: First day back.

Today.

I read it twice. Three times. I submitted the leave request the day after my last clear memory. And then I apparently spent six months doing... what? The file doesn't say. Just "recovery period," which could mean anything.

I navigate to my medical records next, my hands surprisingly steady on the keyboard. The extraction procedure file loads slowly, and when it does, I understand why Sarah looked so normal. Why everyone has been so casually welcoming.

According to this file, I had a standard, voluntary memory extraction. Single episode, early procedural trauma, no complications. The supervising physician was Dr. Marcus Keene, head of surgical services. The date was March 16. The recovery period was estimated at six months, which aligns perfectly with my leave.

Everything looks completely routine.

Except for what's missing.

I perform memory extractions as part of my job. I've read hundreds of these files. They're detailed, thorough, almost obsessively documented. We record the initial consultation, the pre-procedure counseling sessions, the specific parameters of the memory to be extracted, the patient's stated reasons for the procedure, the informed consent process, the neural mapping results, the surgical notes, the post-procedure evaluation, the follow-up appointments.

This file has none of that. Just the basic procedural details, like someone filled out the minimum required fields and called it done.

It's not just sparse. It's deliberately empty.

I'm still staring at the screen when the records room door opens behind me. I close the file quickly—pure instinct—and turn to see Sarah standing in the doorway.

Her expression isn't casual anymore.

She glances over her shoulder, checking the hallway, then steps inside and closes the door. When she turns back to me, her face is tight with something that looks like fear.

"Iris," she says quietly. "We need to talk."

Before I can respond, she crosses the room in three quick strides, grabs my arm, and pulls me toward one of the empty consultation rooms that line the records area. These rooms are soundproofed, designed for private conversations with patients. No windows. No cameras.

Sarah pushes me inside and closes the door, then stands with her back against it like she's afraid someone might try to enter.

"What—" I start, but she holds up a hand.

"Three weeks ago," she says, her voice low and urgent, "you came to me asking questions. Strange questions. Questions about illegal memory modifications. About whether vaults could be accessed without patient consent. About whether it was possible to alter extracted memories before storing them."

The words land like physical blows. I asked her that? Why?

"I told you I didn't know," Sarah continues. "I told you those kinds of modifications were theoretical, that the technology didn't work that way, that you were starting to sound paranoid." She pauses, and when she speaks again, her voice is even quieter. "Two days later, Dr. Keene called me into his office. He wanted to know if you'd contacted me since returning from leave. He specifically asked if you'd asked me any unusual questions."

My mouth has gone dry. "What did you tell him?"

"I lied," Sarah says flatly. "I said you hadn't contacted me. I said I'd barely spoken to you since you came back." She pushes away from the door and moves closer, her eyes intense. "Iris, I don't know what you're investigating. I don't know what you found six months ago or what you're looking for now. But whatever it is, you need to either stop or finish it fast."

"Finish what? I don't even know what I'm—"

"They gave you two weeks," Sarah interrupts. "Keene said it during the meeting. He said they'd given you time to 'recover and stabilize' and that the two weeks started three days ago. I don't know what happens when those two weeks are up, but..." She pulls a folded sticky note from her pocket and presses it into my hand. "You gave me this address three weeks ago. You said if anything happened to you, if you seemed different or confused or if you came asking questions about the past six months, I should give it to you."

I unfold the note with shaking hands. An address is written in my handwriting—not my apartment, not the clinic, somewhere in the warehouse district on the east side of the city.

"What's at this address?"

"I don't know," Sarah says. "You wouldn't tell me. You just said it was important, that it was insurance, that I needed to remember it." She moves back toward the door, her hand on the handle. "Listen to me, Iris. I like you. I respect you. But I also like my job and I don't want to get involved in whatever this is. So I'm giving you this address, and then I'm forgetting this conversation happened. Understand?"

I nod, unable to speak.

Sarah opens the door, glances out to make sure the hallway is empty, then looks back at me one more time. "Eleven days," she says. "You have eleven days left. Make them count."

Then she's gone, the door closing softly behind her, leaving me standing alone in the soundproofed consultation room with a sticky note in my hand and my heart pounding so hard I can hear it in my ears.

I look down at the address. My handwriting. My contingency plan. My insurance policy against... what?

Against whatever is waiting when those eleven days run out.

The vault at home suddenly feels different in my mind. Not a choice anymore. Not even a warning.

A ticking time bomb, counting down to something I can't see but that my past self feared enough to erase herself rather than face.

Eleven days.

I close my fist around the sticky note and try to breathe.