Her mouth was open but her lungs went limp. Bomb, she thought. The coming light had been a bomb. Another bomb. A plane carrying a bomb. A drone, a larger drone, packed with explosives. She heard a scream but it was not hers. She tried to breathe. She thought she was gasping but there was no sound, no movement, no air. She was sitting up, she was sure, but then she could no longer keep her head upright. Her face met the floor with a sickening slap. When she opened her eyes again, she saw her arm but couldn’t move it. She reached for it but she had no hands. They were connected but nothing worked. She slept for a year, a hundred years, or didn’t sleep at all. When she opened her eyes again, the air was cool. There was no more wall. She could see, she could name what she saw—stars, water, blood, twisted metal. But she couldn’t breathe or move.

  She heard screams. Her hearing had returned. Joan was talking, moaning. Low animal howls. “Get me up,” Joan moaned. “Get me up.” Then the floor was vibrating. Delaney sensed people around her but now her eyes seemed to be stuck to the floor. More screams were both loud and miles away. She was shifted onto a gurney. She tried to scream as they moved her but she made no sound. Nothing she thought became words.

  She was awake enough to think she had lost her limbs, that her spinal cord had been severed, that she’d lost her ability to speak. Now she was moving through the room, heading for the window. To where the window had been. Now there was nothing, just sky. Not through the open wall! she wanted to scream. She could feel the night air. It was so cold. But no. She was not being sent into the night air. They turned and rushed down the hallway and again she saw the body, part of a body, a body shredded, faceless. The hair was yellow and red. She passed out again.

  Then she was awake and flying. Together they seemed to be flying, she and the paramedic. They were moving through space at unimaginable speed, she knew, but then again she and the paramedic were not moving at all. She was weightless but also her head was one with the ambulance. Her head, she was certain, had been fused with the metallic floor. She was looking up from the floor. She tried to blink, but she couldn’t speak or move any part of her. The head of the man above her swung around like a balloon on a string. He smiled down at her. “Hold on,” he said. “A few more miles.”

  The siren was too loud. It shouldn’t be so loud, she thought. She tried to speak, to ask the balloon man to turn the siren’s volume down. She closed her eyes to quiet the sound.

  A crash woke her. They were inside now. The lights above flew above her, bright as doves. Her head crashed through three doors. Four. Stop the crashing, she said. She couldn’t speak. Stop the lights, she begged, though she had no voice.

  “We knew Soren was dead,” the paramedic said. He’d come to visit her. Where was she? She had no idea. He’d introduced himself as a paramedic. His name was Roger, he said, he was an EMT. But he looked like a child. He had acne. She thought of a summer camp counselor. Buoyant and excited to make plans.

  Where am I? she asked, but her mouth still wasn’t working.

  “We were the second team,” Roger said. “The first team got the other two. As I said, my partner, he thought you were gone.”

  Had he already said this? When? Had she met him before?

  “The first team said no more survivors,” he continued. “He even took your pulse and found nothing. But I had a mirror. You know that mirror test, under the nose? My mom taught me that when I was a kid. She was an EMT for a while, back in Pakistan. She said, ‘Roger, if there’s one thing I need to impart, is that the pulse is sometimes hard to find, so have a back-up plan …’”

  He talked a great deal but Delaney didn’t mind. Delaney liked him and wanted him to stay. “I’m probably rambling on,” he said, and laughed. “I just wanted to check on you. My day off, as I said. We go off three days, but I have nowhere else to be. The nurses know me. They think I’m strange for visiting people I bring in, but where else am I going to go? I don’t have kids.”

  He stayed another hour.

  “You were covered in blood,” he said. “Just covered in blood. A bomb hits a building, half the place is blown to hell, and when we got up there, we see a bloody lump. You were just a wax head in a pile of bloody linens.” He smacked his lips, as if tasting his analogy.

  “That’s why we didn’t even go near at first. We thought your head had been severed. So we didn’t get close. So much blood, but not your blood, as it turns out. We actually went to the blond guy first. His body was in better shape, but when we turned his head, we knew he was gone. His face was gone. I mean, gone,” he said, then realized his enthusiasm was inappropriate. He apologized.

  “Then, as I said, my partner went back to you and didn’t find a pulse. That’s when he realized you hadn’t been decapit—You know. Then, like I said, I came and did the mirror test and you were breathing.”

  When had he said all these things he said he’d said before? Delaney thought she might be living in a kind of time loop. Did she have amnesia? How would she know? Roger was still talking.

  “So I yelled, Over here, over here! It was crazy. The craziest thing I’ve ever seen, and I’ve been doing this for almost three years. Mostly we pick up drunks and junkies.”

  Delaney passed out and slept for days. She woke up and saw her parents. Their faces were close to her. And were they singing? They seemed to be singing. She woke up again and they were gone. Then someone was drilling in her head. Someone was pulling string from the backside of her eyes. Now rope, pulling and pulling ever-lasting lengths of rope. Now she was being moved. Why was she being moved? My fucking god that hurts. Why move me? Why would it be a good idea to move me?

  XXXIX.

  IT WAS A DRONE, a military-grade model developed at the Every. It had ripped the walls off the Havel, blasted a twenty-foot-high hole in the side of the building. Soren was gone. Four others had died, too—no one Delaney knew. No one could figure out why the toll hadn’t been higher. Eighty could have been killed, security said, had it not been for the tubes. The tubes! Wrapped together in theirs, Joan and Francis had suffered only concussions, scrapes, mild burns, mild embarassment, nothing more.

  Delaney had four broken ribs. She’d been burned. Her feet had been scalded. Her palms were simmering, seemed to be burning still. She was in a hospital, she realized, then forgot. She heard the voice of Wes, speaking to her from the bottom of a well. Joan’s face appeared and she seemed to be talking, but Delaney couldn’t hear her. One morning she realized she had no hair. She asked a nurse where her hair had gone. The nurse seemed to have no idea. She looked at Delaney’s chart. “Ease the swelling in your brain, I’m thinking,” she said. “They probably opened your skull. You broke four ribs, too. And it’ll be painful to walk for some time.”

  Delaney spent weeks in intensive care. In the hospital, between glorious morphine flights, wild thoughts overtook Delaney’s mind. The assumption was that this was the work of anti-Every trogs, that this was their 9/11 moment, and of course the logic tracked. They had motive. So many had motive. Millions unemployed when the Every began to kill travel, planes, buses, cars, trains, roads. Those ruined by Friendy, eyeshame, OwnSelf. But when Delaney closed her eyes she saw Mae. Mae had done this. Mae and Gabriel. They’d found out about Delaney’s plans and arranged to be rid of her. But could they really know what Delaney was at the Every to do? It seemed both possible and highly implausible. Delaney was one of twelve thousand Everyones on campus. Over a hundred thousand worldwide. It was mathematically impossible that Mae had any idea who she was. But Gabriel knew. He knew quite a bit.

  Or it was Stenton. With perfect clarity she saw it. He’d engineered the bombings—all of them. Only he had motive and capability. Joan’s Reichstag comment made more sense now—the consolidation of power in the wake of violence. Mae couldn’t do such a thing, but Stenton would. Stenton was made for such a moment. But just as quickly, she dismissed all these theories. These people were too visible, too transparent to plan terrorist attacks on their own company. No, no. Even Stenton couldn’t. But someday the truth would come out, she thought. A journalist, a news agency, would piece it together, would conduct interviews, examine documents, make actual phone calls, check facts, start over, and in six months or two years finally figure out who was behind the bombing—who had killed Soren and the others, and had almost killed Delaney. Then she realized she was going mad. There were no journalists and there was no news. How had she forgotten? She wanted less morphine—or more.

  She slept most of her days and dreamed of Wes. Or Wes visited. Wes seemed to be next to her for long stretches, or perhaps he was hurt, too? No, no. He was visiting, but nothing he said made sense. His words were concrete poetry, and in a different language. She had nightmares. Nightmares of Jenny Butler on a rocket, the rocket with no radio, no guidance, just speeding into space at the cruelest speed. She dreamt of Gabriel Chu sitting next to her in priest’s garb, listening to her jabber away before suddenly seizing her thighs, his eyes suddenly before her, searching through her own eyes as if peering through cracks in a fence. But most of her nightmares involved babies. Usually Mae’s baby. Always silent babies, alive but with terrible plans. One night she dreamt of a thousand babies emerging from Mae, all of them quiet and scheming. But the last baby was not a baby at all, but a lamb.

  One dawn she woke up in a new place. It wasn’t the hospital. The view was all water, the Bay, the same northern water view she’d seen when the walls had been blown off the building. Her head was suddenly clear, the clearest it had been in weeks. Her oval told her she’d slept eighteen hours of the last twenty-four. She felt a brief flush of pride and wished she could tell Francis. She looked around her and realized she was back on Treasure Island, but the vantage point was different. The view looked down upon the water from a hundred feet, the boats like waterbugs. Then she knew: she was in the Overlook.

  Now she was wide awake.

  There were no clocks in the room. She swung her feet from the bed and felt a screaming from her ribs. She touched her side and found her torso still tightly wrapped. Her feet were bandaged lightly. She dropped them gingerly to the floor. It was her arches where the burns were worst.

  She padded around the room, noting the lights on her bracelet awakening. Her movements were being monitored. She expected someone to arrive any moment. But who? She knew so little about this place. Would it be doctors? Counselors? Security? The people around her seemed to be sleeping peacefully. There were no bandages, no injuries. They were just Everyones, and this seemed like any other pod, and as she approached the window she saw the slashing reflection of the moon on the water. A sharp ache radiated from the back of her skull. She squinted, turned her head, and finally dropped to her knees. The pain had seized every nerve. She managed to crawl back to her bed, and when she lay her head down again, the pain receded. Too soon to walk, fool, she thought, and passed out.

  She awoke to Winnie. She hadn’t seen Winnie in months, and now Winnie was sitting by her side, knitting what appeared to be a sock. In the window beyond, Delaney saw a series of clouds, dots and lines, a kind of Morse code. When Winnie saw Delaney’s open eyes, her face lit up. “Look at you!” she said. She rested her first two fingers on Delaney’s temple. “You look so much better than yesterday. Yesterday I really worried about your face, like it’d be bloated forever. I told my husband …”

  Delaney closed her eyes and slept. When she woke, she saw her parents, whose faces were pressed together, as if peeking in on her from a small window. They said the word prognosis far too many times for normal conversation, and each time they were very happy about this, her prognosis. So happy, they said, and soon were gone. When she woke again it was hours later, or a day. The light was different, the clouds were gone.

  “You again!” Winnie said. She was still knitting. Now it really was a sock. How can Winnie spend a day here? Delaney thought. It must be Saturday.

  “This place is so crowded!” Winnie said. “No beds left, no chairs. A lot of people needing help. You have one of the last private rooms. Oh! Did you hear? You probably didn’t hear. I don’t know if I should tell you, but maybe you want some distraction? I know I like to be distracted when I’m in pain. Are you in pain?”

  Delaney closed her eyes to say Yes. And your talking hurts me, too. It’s too fast, too loud. Please stop. And who will wear that misshapen sock?

  “They don’t know who did it,” Winnie said. “The bombing. It’s driving everyone nuts. But Stenton’s on it. He’s the one, I think. He says leave it to him. Everyone’s turning to him to figure it out, to get the security here in order. Strong leader, right? They brought in the Widower for questioning. You know that guy, the one with the sign by the bridge?”

  Delaney closed her eyes in assent.

  “Well, the police brought him in. Or we did. Someone did. I mean, he had motive, right? Then they let him go and guess what? They find his body washed up on the shore of Treasure Island. A suicide. Someone saw his body while they were jogging on the perimeter. He must have jumped from the Bay Bridge. Which means, I’m thinking, he had something to do with the bombing?”

  Delaney didn’t have the energy to bother dissecting or debunking.

  “Oh and!” Winnie said, her voice rising, “Maybe you don’t know this. You probably don’t know this. We haven’t told the customers yet, so don’t tell anyone off-campus, okay? Actually, don’t say anything to anyone for now. Wait, can you even talk?”

  Mute, Delaney looked at her with exasperated eyes.

  “Oh,” Winnie said. “Sorry. Well, there was a hack of Thoughts Not Things. We’re assuming it’s Russians, but it could be someone posing as Russians to make us think it’s Russians. They do stuff like that. Or it could be the same person who did the bombing. If it wasn’t the Widower.”

  Delaney reached for the morphine button but realized she had not been given a morphine button.

  “You looking for painkillers?” Winnie asked. “That’s not something you control here. They don’t let any people do that. Definitely not the doctors. Too many mistakes! I like this color on you,” she said, and took the corner of Delaney’s robe between her thumb and forefinger.

  Delaney saw a figure shuffling past her room. He looked familiar, a middle-aged man with a faint smile on his face. He was holding a leather folder to his chest as if to keep it warm. Winnie turned to follow Delaney’s eyes.

  “Oh, I saw him before,” she said. “He walks around with the folder, like as if someone might take it from him.”

  The man turned and Delaney knew it was Hans-Georg. He looked right at her with his pale eyes, but he showed no sign of recognition. He smiled blandly and shuffled on.

  “And there’s nothing in the folder,” Winnie said. “Isn’t that sad? What was I talking about? Oh, the hack. You didn’t hear?”

  Delaney shook her head. The pain stabbed her in both temples.

  “Everything’s gone,” Winnie said. “They deleted all of Thoughts Not Things. All the scans. All of them. Every last one. If people downloaded them, they’re fine, but who downloads anymore? It was all in the cloud, and the cloud got hacked, knocked from the sky. Now we’re trying to figure out why they targeted Thoughts Not Things. Why not some other department? And does this have anything to do with the bombings?”

  Delaney closed her eyes again. She couldn’t stand more news, more words. She thought of all she’d scanned and burned. The wedding dresses, the photos, the baby shoes, toys and letters. A grandfather clock! When she opened her eyes again, it was night, and the moon through the window was a sinister void shrouded by fog. The Supples visited. There seemed to be thirty of them, forty. They were touching her face, her arms. Someone—Gemma?—was trying to cinch the waist of her hospital gown. There were many opinions about the gown. Was it synthetic? We can do better, they concluded. Delaney closed her eyes and thought of snowy mountains.

  Mount Breitenbach.

  Lost River Peak.

  Donaldson Peak.

  Hyndman Peak.

  USGS Peak.

  No Regret Peak.

  When she awoke, it was dawn. The Supples were long gone, replaced by Carlo and Shireen.

  “We wanted to visit,” Shireen said.

  “We had to visit,” Carlo said. “Being your friends.”

  “Definitely your friends,” Shireen said. “We were so worried.”

  “Not because the care here would give us any worry,” Carlo said, and gave Shireen an imploring look. “But just because what you went through. The care here is unparalleled.”

  “Right,” Shireen said, and giggled nervously. “Of course it is. It’s so good. I would never have implied otherwise. I needed help here, too, once and—”

  Carlo squinted sidelong at her.

  “We’re just so glad you’re awake,” Shireen said.

  “Of course she’s awake,” Carlo said. “Because she’s getting the best care available.”

  Delaney closed her eyes, hoping they would disappear. When she opened them, it was nighttime again, and she saw the same sinister moon. Her head throbbed, and she looked for a doctor. Where were the doctors? She had watery memories of doctors and nurses visiting between Winnie and Carlo and Shireen, but couldn’t remember what they’d said or done, and as she tried to recall anything about them, anything they’d said—where were the doctors?—sleep took her again.

  XL.

  WHEN SHE WOKE, Delaney found Kiki sitting on her bed, wearing a chartreuse robe. This was a new room, a pink room, a bright recovery room with a powder-blue couch and a row of cacti on the windowsill.

  “I heard you were here,” Kiki said, and tapped Delaney’s knee with her tiny forefinger. “I’m here, too. Getting better, just like you.” She blinked cheerfully. “Don’t you love this color?” she ran her hands over the lapels of her robe. Delaney looked down and saw that she, too, was wearing a chartreuse robe. She tried to sit up.