Slim wouldn't say much more after that. He commented on a few things about the city, but he wouldn't say anything else about Henry or the Circuit. I was sure he knew a lot more than he was willing to offer, but I certainly wasn't going to press him if Henry wasn't, and for his part, Henry didn't. He was lost in his own mind. I watched him for a while, wishing more than anything that I could get into his head. He'd moved off the barricade and onto the ground, his head back against the chain-link fence, his arms resting on his knees. His eyes were closed most of the time, but I knew he wasn't asleep; he was trying to bridge the information Slim had given him with what little he knew of himself. I couldn't help but wonder whether I still held any place in his thoughts. My gut told me that, at least for the present, I didn't. And that frightened me.

While we sat there, Henry purposefully detached, Slim and I were essentially on our own. He smoked a couple more cigarettes, and all I could think was how bad they smelled and how jealous I was that this weird stranger had shown up and seized Henry's attention. I caught Slim eyeing me a few times, but when I did, he'd look away as if he hadn't just been staring. Maybe he was resenting my presence, but he was crazy if he thought I'd leave Henry. The two of us held no interest in conversing with one another, though, and that was at least something. I didn't have to force words with Slim.

I began to drift in and out of wakefulness as the moments passed, but I was each time jerked awake with double fear--fear of my only memory returning and fear that Slim might try to run off with Henry if I lost consciousness. But the longer we sat there, the more time began to fold itself into strange moments, where I couldn't quite tell how long my eyes had been closed before suddenly opening them. Each time they opened, Slim was in the same place; Henry was in the same place. We were all still just sitting there. And then a weird thing happened. I was dozing, head beginning to droop, when a voice that sounded like my own spoke clear as day: He knows you. Don't trust him.

I bolted upright. The voice had sounded right next to me. But no one was there other than Slim, who gave me a suspicious raise of his eyebrow. The voice must've been part of a dream, I told myself, like how sometimes when you're in that haze between sleeping and waking, you think you hear things. As I was wondering about it, I suddenly realized I must look stupid to Slim. But what the voice had said--it had to have been my own intuition, and it'd reinforced my feelings toward him. I couldn't trust him. He did know more than what he'd told us. I stood up quickly, narrowed my eyes at Slim. "You're a liar," I accused him.

He, too, rose. "How so?" But I saw a rodent fear in his eyes.

"You do know me, don't you?"

He didn't immediately answer, was probably trying to figure out what to say, which ended up being, "I've never seen you before in my life."

"I don't believe you."

"Fine by me."

"Stop," Henry suddenly interrupted, having woken from his remoteness. "Look."

He pointed toward the junkyard, and I saw that where the horizon met the pile of nondescript refuse, the sky had begun to pale. It was turning a sort of sickly green color, like orange blurring with brown. Slim forgot about me and said, "Time to go." He said it to Henry, not to me; he was surely angry at me. "Come on. If you don't follow, you're never getting in. This chance is your one and only."

Henry stood and adjusted the waist of his pants; he was so lean, and I'd wondered how he'd found jeans in that cabin that'd fit him. Maybe he actually hadn't. Then he came close to me and, leaning in, said so Slim wouldn't hear, "Don't worry. We won't get split up."

His breath against my ear made my cheek begin to tingle. Or maybe it was what he'd said. I didn't know, but I felt such relief to hear he was still looking out for me.

"Let's get to the door, then. You've got to get it right when it pops, or it'll shut right back on you. Then you'd have to wait a whole other day." Slim strode over to the cement-block-of-a-building and stood right in front of the metal door. Henry and I joined him. The overhead light was flickering on and off, like it couldn't decide whether it really was dawn or not. My anxiety frustrated me. There was no reason to be so nervous yet, I tried to tell myself, but it didn't work. I was trembling slightly in spite of myself, and Henry must've noticed, because he did what I'd done for him earlier--place a hand on my back. My breathing slowed. His presence alone calmed me, and his touch was even better, although I again didn't feel that static I'd thought I'd felt in the field, under the bushes, with the wildflowers. I was beginning to think I'd imagined it.

There wasn't time for me to dwell on what I'd imagined or not imagined, though. The lamp overhead suddenly blinked off, and there was a loud but brief thunk from the door, which I guessed was a bolt shooting aside. I knew I was right when Slim reached out, turned the handle, and pulled it open. In we went, Slim letting Henry and me go before him. Then he shut the door behind himself, and I heard the bolt slide back into place.

The building didn't look any more impressive on the inside than it had on the outside. It was very bright, which was a jarring contrast to the dimness we'd been in for hours outside. Above, rows of fluorescent lights lined the ceiling. They were blaring down in all their whiteness on what appeared to be a huge, empty warehouse. The only things inside the building were the cement floor, the four concrete walls, and, right in the center of the floor, what looked like the heavy metal lid of a manhole—like the ones on streets that usually went into sewers, but much more intense, more like a cap that rose half a foot off the ground and had hinges. The place was creepy, even though there was nothing in it. I guess that was what made it creepy—the fact that it was so empty.

"This way," Slim said after making sure the door was closed and locked. He passed me and Henry and proceeded to the manhole, where he knelt down and pressed his finger on a dimly-lit, rectangular screen. After a moment, the screen turned bright yellowy-green, a tiny red light flashed and beeped, and he was able to yank the covering upward and open.

"It needs your print?" Henry asked, some hint of distrust in his tone.

Slim smiled. "Nah. Needs to make sure you don't have none." He waved his fingers at us and laughed.

I was disappointed. His prints were gone, too. It was another clue, no doubt, that we were somehow connected to whatever Slim was involved with.

"Come here," ordered Slim. He was crouched down by the hole that had been revealed beneath the cap. When I neared him, I could see that there was a tunnel leading down into the ground. Rungs lined it, like a ladder, and there were lightbulbs opposite the rungs, so the passageway was dimly lit. Still, I could tell it was pretty deep, because I couldn't see the bottom at all. "All right," Slim went on. You'll have to go first, so I can close this. You won't know how. First her, then you, Henry, and then I'll follow."

"I'll go first," Henry contradicted him.

Slim only shrugged and rolled his eyes as Henry, entirely undaunted, began to lower himself into the tunnel feet-first. I glanced at Slim, but then, seeing the irritation he aimed at me, concentrated instead on watching Henry, until he'd gone down enough for me to start my climb. When I couldn't see the top of his head anymore, I placed my feet on the top rungs and began my descent, tightly gripping the metal handles in front of me. I definitely didn't want to fall. Who knew how far down the passage went? When I myself was low enough, I saw Slim's feet on the rungs above my head, and I heard him pull the manhole covering down and back into place, a distant beeping indicating he'd probably reset the lock. Then it was just the three of us, the tunnel, and the lightbulbs.

We didn't say a word on our climb, not even Slim. On my part, I was concentrating on the rungs, because they weren't the widest things in the world, and it was a little difficult to feel them out with my feet; I assumed Slim and Henry were thinking the same thing. We must've gone down for several solid minutes, and then all of a sudden, without warning, there were no more rungs beneath me, and I thought for a second that I was going to lose my grip and fall, but then just as abruptly, solid ground was beneath my foot, and I stepped onto it and into a space where the tunnel walls ballooned out into something like a small room

"Go on, go on!" called Slim. "There'll be no room for me if you don't get out of the exit!"

Not quite sure where Slim wanted us to go, Henry and I backed up against the wall opposite the tunnel's rungs and found that it was a door. Without even considering where it could lead, I twisted the knob and tried to push it open, but it didn't budge until Slim came and typed a code into a number pad to the right of the door handle. Once he'd done that, he opened the door himself, and a very bright light immediately flooded the room. I had to shield my eyes from it, because they had adjusted to the dim lighting of the bulbs in the tunnel. Now, it was as if thousands of fluorescent lights were in front of me. I felt a push from behind, but only when I took my arms away from my face did I realize that it was Slim who had pushed both me and Henry into an extremely white room. White floors, white walls, white ceiling with rows of beaming lights, white tubes pumping cool air in the corners where walls met ceiling. It was very peculiar to see such a sterile place after the grimy tunnel and the enormous, empty warehouse and the filthy alleys of San Judo. There was one thing even more interesting about this room, though, and that was the fact that there was a person in it, sitting at a white desk in the wall opposite the tunnel door we'd just come through.

Slim went up to the desk and looked at the man behind it, who was crisp and neat with his close-cropped blonde hair and bright eyes and pressed white button-up as well as very young, which the spattering of acne across his face reinforced. "Hey, Mr. Clean, you've got to sign these two in. She's expecting Henry here, you got it?"

"Henry? You sure?"

"Yeah. Henry. No mistakes. They go immediately, I was told. Me? I've got to go change. I've been stinking like a garbage can since yesterday morning, and I'm not too keen on staying this way." Then he turned to Henry. "Listen, I'll catch you later. You won't be going anywhere too fast." He clapped a hand on Henry's shoulder (I thought I saw Henry flinch slightly, though he didn't pull away, as I wished he would have) and smiled in a way that, for the first time, made me feel that he was being honest. "I'm glad you're back, Henry. Really, I am. You stay, you hear? You're back home, now. Everything's going to be all right." One last stretch of his grin and he went around and behind the desk, disappearing through a door that blended in so well I hadn't even been able to see it.

I immediately felt Slim's absence. Although I hadn't liked him, he'd been friendly enough toward Henry, had become somewhat familiar by that point, and this new person we'd been left with was incredibly awkward. Giving me hardly a glance, he plastered his widening eyes on Henry, half-standing at his desk, "H-here you are, s-sir," he stammered, fumbling about with a flat rectangular device. "Y-you'll have to s-sign in." He lit up a screen on the thing he was holding and scrolled through a page where a list of names was typed into a chart alongside dates and another column of names.

Henry took the stylus offered to him and signed where the young man pointed with a shaking finger. Then the man took the screen, typed something into it, and asked, "Who are you here to s-see, sir?"

"I don't know who I'm here to see," Henry snapped, growing very quickly annoyed. "Didn't Slim say she, whoever she is?"

"Oh! Right." He scribbled something else into his digital device. "I'm so sorry, sir."

"Please," Henry growled between his teeth. "My name is Henry."

"For now, sir, right?" And then, weirdly, the guy winked.

At that, Henry about lost it. He grabbed the guy's collar on either side of his neck, jerked him forward. It was quite a scene, as the desk attendant, though young, was not of particularly small stature. I just stood there, frozen, almost enjoying it. "I don't know you, and you don't know me, so if you ever wink at me again, I swear to God I'll rip out your eye." Then he shoved the guy so hard he fell backward, tripped over his own chair, and clattered to the ground. When he managed to pull himself back up, he was trembling like a leaf, but there was also some strange air about him, like he wasn't surprised to have received such treatment from Henry. "And don't call me sir again. It's Henry."

The desk attendant nodded his understanding, shifting items on his desk so as to look busy, not directly looking at Henry. "Th-through the door behind me, to the left, and at the end of that hall. And, si--Henry--please don't think I'm telling you this because I d-don't trust you, but I have to tell everyone that there're cameras. So . . . you understand."

I certainly didn't understand, and I doubted Henry did either, but he didn't say anything, just rounded the desk while keeping his eyes on Mr. Clean, as Slim had called him. I followed, and once near the wall, Henry easily found the handle for the same door that Slim had gone through. Opening it, we left that first room and stepped into a hallway identical in all its white sterility. It ran left and right. The right side of it was something I hadn't expected to see; two beams of red laser lights crossed the corridor in a rotating X. It was like something out of a spy movie. Henry pointed out a small keypad in the wall, with buttons to presumably enter a code. Obviously, that was not the way we were supposed to go. To the left, where we'd been directed, there weren't any sorts of beams or security devices that we could see. If there were cameras, as the desk attendant had said, they weren't visible. We proceeded down the hall, passing several closed doors with zero markings on them. All had keypads. We didn't bother even touching them. Whatever this place was, the mystery of it all was overwhelming, and perhaps neither of us had the wherewithal to begin prying when we didn't even know what it all was.

We finally reached the last door, after what felt like being in one of those dreams where the hallway expands the farther you go down it. It, too, had a keypad, but the little screen on it said in digitalized letters open. We stood there for a moment, looked at one another. I saw myself in Henry's eyes. There was so much I wanted to say to him, but I didn't know how. I didn't know where this was all going to lead, and I was terrified that wherever it was, I'd be left out of it.

"Before we go in, Nadia," Henry said to me, "I want you to know that whatever is in there, it won't come between us."

Reassuring words, but I didn't feel the truth of them. I'd already grown a little bitter at Slim and Henry's apparent friendship, at how quickly Henry had tuned me out after he'd listened to Slim. "We can't trust him, you know. Slim. He wasn't being entirely truthful."

Henry lowered his brow, frowned. Perhaps he'd expected a different sort of response from me. "You're right. We can't trust any of this, but we couldn't ignore it, either. This could be the key to everything missing from our minds. Would you rather we'd walked away?"

"It really doesn't matter now, does it?" I was perplexing him. Some small part of me felt selfishly gratified that I could make him feel anything at all, and yet I didn't want to hurt him. Sighing, I added, "I hope you're right, that's all. I just met you, hardly know you, and I--I don't want to lose you so soon." I stifled a small choking sob I felt rising.

"You're wrong, though," he said, surprising me--about which part had I been wrong? "We haven't just met. I'm certain we knew one another before all of this, and I hope we'll be able to find out how, as soon as we go into this room. But whatever concerns you have, I promise I won't forget about you. Even if we get separated. You have to believe me."

I envisioned the little blue flowers he'd dropped into my open palm, wishing I'd kept them but, in the moment, not wanting Henry to think me foolish. As long as I could see that image, as long as I could play it through my thoughts, I'd believe him. I had to; there was nothing else.

So I signaled acquiesence, and Henry turned to the door and opened it.