The good news was that the soldiers did, in fact, have rations on them. The bad news was that when we were rolling the bodies we got a nice close look at the condition our attackers had been in. Their skin was covered in rashes, and on a few it had progressed to full-on boils and seeping wounds. We'd been warned that there was a reason Brinkmar had been evacuated, but I had just sort of assumed that Halenvar had figured out a workaround. I wasn't sure how long these guys had been here - at a minimum it would have been since the previous alignment, so about a hundred and eighty days. That would be encouraging - they'd still been in fighting condition and we weren't planning on staying that long - but it was possible they had also been getting healed regularly. We just didn't know enough.

We'd already traveled around the area we were in in a rough circle, seen a few other buildings and depressing dead landscape, but now we were actually going to head off in a straight line. Away from the ocean would take us towards Trallanar which we'd decided against, so that left moving along the coast. One of the Halenvar soldiers had what looked like a totally regular magnetic compass, but it was pointing inland and we were pretty sure that it, too, was telling us how to reach Trallanar. They didn't have maps, or at least not ones we could follow - Errod was sure that a page of gibberish and random symbols he'd found was some sort of encrypted chart.

Errod didn't seem to mind me stealing everything of value that wasn't too clunky off the corpses, so we left with way more stuff than we had arrived with. It was the mundane items we were most excited about; backpacks, bedrolls, and better boots for Errod. Later in the day we came across the site of another battle, but all the bodies had already been stripped of supplies and lined up respectfully. Most of the bodies were clearly from Halenvar, and had the same basic level of skin issues.

"We have to be close to somewhere interesting, right? They wouldn't just be out fighting at random spots in the countryside, would they?"

Errod was walking in a big loop around the area, looking thoughtful. "I think... I think they flew here? There's only one set of tracks other than ours, and they head the same way. I think it was the people we fought earlier, fleeing this fight. This ancient dead grass has been practically turning to dust as we walk through it; I should see where both sides approached and then where one departed and instead the one we see almost certainly wasn't the victors of the battle unless the Empire had only three men in this group.

"The ground over there is torn up as if something large hit it, but there's no sign of anything - and over here, there's a large circle where everything is flattened. It could have been an attack, but I don't see any indication anyone was hit with it. So... I think they may have been on flying platforms, possibly chasing each other. One crashed, the other landed, and then after the fight the Empire got the crashed one back up and took both."

"Not bad, Sherlock. Uh. Cultural reference from Earth, sorry. Okay, so the new goal is to get one of those flying things, right?"

Katrin smacked me. "You made me feel dumb for saying we should get to high ground, and now you want to fly - when Errod just said he thinks this is the result of one of those flyers being forced to crash so everyone onboard could be killed?"

"But... airships are so cool! Or... a flying platform, probably, which is less cool but I still want one."

She ignored me. "I suppose that means they were coming from over that way, based on the impact. Let's go the opposite way."

We hiked along for hours, making very slow progress. We were in great shape, but we were also exhausted and not on a proper road - even with the landscape being mostly fields and very avoidable copses of trees there were a lot of hills. We could go over them, possibly making ourselves visible from a distance and requiring us to wear ourselves out by going up the steep inclines, or we could go around and take way longer.

Even if Brinkmar was small relatively speaking, it could easily be way too large for us to trudge around on foot. Hammersmith had probably had a ton of those flying things ready to cart through the portal as soon as they'd secured the area around it. It was also possible some were from before Brinkmar was evacuated though, and the more I thought about it the more it made me want to go a little further inland and search for buildings. If we did find an exit back to the prime plane - especially if it was guarded - we might have to go through it right away. And also, it felt like the areas right by the evacuation points might be the most picked-over. If we found a flyer that would be incredible, yeah, but even if it was just trinkets and stuff it would be trinkets from Brinkmar!

Katrin and Errod clearly agreed with me in spirit, but weren't easily convinced to actually veer off from the shoreline. The hills were worse further in, and it risked us losing sight of the ocean and going in circles. It was a fair point, unfortunately. The ocean itself was... very strange. It was an endless sea of liquid metal, and unlike the island it was just slightly ephemeral; if it was taken back to the prime plane the liquid would sublimate into nothingness over time. Katrin played with some of it while we were resting, and she found that if she pushed mana into it the metal hardened and shifted colors. She didn't have the right abilities to use actual Alchemy, so the mana just trickled back out after a bit, but it was still interesting.

I tried to dip my feet in, but I was too buoyant in it. After a little testing to make sure my pants and jacket wouldn't absorb anything, I finally dumped all my bags and equipment and laid across it - even wearing clothes I could just float there. The sea was still, with only the smallest ripples, and for a second it was extremely relaxing. Then I realized I was way too visible to anyone that might be flying around, and tried to get back to shore. It was a disaster.

As buoyant as I was, when I reflexively tried to get up the way you would when you're in a hammock too much weight focused on a single spot and I finally dropped below the surface. I was right at the edge and it was shallow, but as more liquid flowed over me it felt deeply unpleasant. Past a certain threshold the weight of the liquid pushed me down, trying to crush me - but then as I lifted myself up I'd suddenly reach that tipping point and be thrust upwards and out. It made wading back to shore an awful and clumsy affair, and I was sure I looked stupid. While my clothes refused to absorb the metal some had gotten in my pockets, and getting it all out was a mess in itself.

"Good job laying low," Katrin said as I made it back to our spot under a rocky outcropping, "and very graceful. Errod almost went out there after you."

"Twice, actually," he said, "once to tell you to not to expose yourself like that, and once to save you from drowning - it seemed like you figured it out, though."

"Yeah, I hope you enjoyed the entertainment. I'm going to be finding bits of that stuff all over me for a week. That wasn't in the books, by the way - it was just regular water. You know, part of me keeps thinking that something I remember from those books will be useful here, but I bet almost all of it was made up. All those years of obsessing over them and it doesn't matter."

Katrin cocked her head. "It couldn't have been more than a year actually, right? Because you said you got them from Bill but you can't remember the details which means it was while you were living with him. And you were only there for about a year, and you left the books behind."

"No, I found the first book when I was at the Long Haul hotel. And then I... bought or stole the second one."

"Oh. You made it sound like you'd just gotten them from Bill."

"I... had to have been talking about the boxed set. He gave me that, I'm sure, and until then I don't think I'd read the third book. Although... no, okay, I do remember talking to... me... and saying that Bill gave us the books, because then I wondered if they were all part of my imagination or something. Huh. Now I'm not sure which memory is right."

"Well you did say you'd only read the last book once. And if you'd had the set of all three from the beginning that wouldn't be true, would it? That part makes more sense if you only had two of them at first."

"Yeah. Yeah. I've been meaning to try and recover those memories, and I already cleared out the fake stuff so it might work better now. When I first made it so I could visit my memories I did something to back them up, to pull them into my domain in Ematse. I was thinking about doing something later where I used Thought and Temporal to get all my memories back as they appeared originally, but I've got other things I've been using my potential for and there's still the Granch issue. But now... I mean, now that I've got both minds hooked up? We remembered a few things differently, and most of the stuff from Connie's end has faded pretty badly but if I do the thing again I might at least get some new information in there. Having it actively cross-referenced could do something, especially if it's in here somewhere but just hard to call up."

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I ended up doing it while we traveled. The ability had kind of triggered all at once when I first tried to enter my memory palace after unlocking it, so I'd never tried to do it deliberately. I ended up having to really focus on the link between my minds, and even prod at them using something not unlike what I did when preparing to make a template. When it finally clicked the whole memory palace shook for a second - the door to the hotel hallway flew open, and I could see a ripple go all the way down the hall out of sight.

I went right for the memory of Bill giving me the boxed set, and while it was... fuzzy... it seemed pretty stable.

Bill was sneering. It looked strange on his face, which was almost always smiling, but I could tell he wasn't sneering at me. Memory-Callie was at a cute little table in a kitchen, plate full of pancakes and bacon and home fries like something out of a movie. It was surreal, seeing myself in such a picture-perfect little domestic scene, and I found myself wondering how accurate it all was. The source of Bill's disgust seemed to be Jake Ross and the Sword of Destiny, which I was reading as I ate.

"Oh come on. Marjorie West is a genius."

"We'll have to agree to disagree on that one, kid."

"You'd like it if you tried it. You just have an irrational hatred of fiction."

"I don't hate fiction," Bill said, "I would simply rather read about history. Besides, that kind of book is particularly unpleasant."

"What! It's Jake Ross! What's unpleasant about it?"

Bill sighed. "Correct me if I'm wrong, since I haven't actually read them, but I understand it's the same as Harry Potter, or the Narnia books, or any of those others - the supposedly responsible adults make some stupid kid into a child soldier because they've decided he's the chosen one."

"I... guess? But come on, Bill, it's a story! Kids getting to learn magic and fight evil wizards and have adventures...?"

Bill snorted, and turned back to the stove where he was cooking some more pancakes. "Sorry, it was my job to make sure kids were safe and taken care of when they had been separated from their families, I don't like stories about manipulating them into doing your dirty work for you."

"Do you think horror movies are actually in favor of... I don't know, eating people?"

He pointed at me with the spatula. "An excellent attempt, but horror movies generally acknowledge the monsters are bad. They don't suggest that the blob is a good and kind leader as it eats everyone. Also I don't watch horror movies either, I've seen enough monsters in real life."

I started to say something, probably giving him shit for picking the blob of all things, and I gestured a little too emphatically - backhanding the glass of orange juice and dumping it all over my book. I sprung into action immediately, but it was clearly a total loss. I could see myself looking at the sink, probably thinking that being soaked with water would be preferable to letting the sticky juice remain, but that book had been thoroughly used already and so it wasn't a shock that as I stood there thinking a soggy clump of pages dropped out onto the table. I could see my shoulders slump, and I threw the remains of the novel into the trash can and then began to cry.

"Hey," Bill started, but I was sixteen and there was no way I wanted Bill to see me crying at that age. I turned to face the wall, like that would fool anyone, and Bill just leaned down and kissed me on top of my head and said "hang on" and walked out of the room. He came back with that fancy set of the Jake Ross novels.

The kiss on the head threw current-day me for a loop. I could still only really remember Bill as a case manager, and obviously they weren't allowed to do that. Still, it seemed like memory-me didn't mind so... sure.

"I was already thinking I might give this to you for Christmas, since you insist on reading that garbage," Bill said, "so... well, I do want to encourage reading in general, and we have plenty of time before the holidays for me to get you something better."

I had pulled out Jake Ross and the Shattered Crown and was staring at the leather cover, the gilt on the edges that I could see my reflection in. "Marjorie West signed this. Actually signed it. How much did these cost?"

Bill shrugged. "Nothing. It was from a charity thing, I won it in a raffle, and I was doing the raffle no matter what so that means it was essentially free. I was going to get rid of it, donate it to yet another raffle, but then you got here and... well, enjoy."

I remembered, dimly, that Bill was always doing charity stuff. Raffles, and soup kitchens, and building houses, and cleaning up litter. Memory-me was staring at the books, and I know what I was thinking. I was thinking about how I could have sold it and had more money than I'd ever seen in my life. More money than I'd seen even if I totaled it all up; every crumpled single my mom had given me to get groceries, every twenty my uncle had handed me for pizza, every pile of change from the desk drawers at Universal Servicing Systems.

It wasn't just that it was a fancy signed boxed set, though that was part of it. There was something else, something I couldn't recall.

I could see how delicately I was holding it. It would be nerve-wracking to read them since I'd be terrified of damaging them; if I accidentally dog-eared a page or got a spot on one from eating while I read I would have to immediately kill myself. And Bill had just handed them to me. Of course, he hated fiction. It wasn't like he had gone out and bought it for me, he had already won it at a raffle and had probably been really sad that he didn't win the... golf clubs, or coffee table book about the most boring moments in history, or a lifetime supply of white paint.

Some other memories filtered through the haze, just fragments - he'd regretted giving me those books. Not in a bad way, but in a very... dad way. I had made constant comments about what was going on as I read them and the plot never failed to get a reaction out of him, ranging from exaggerated eye rolls to tortured groans. There wasn't a single thing about the books he didn't find ridiculous, stupid, or somehow offensive. But it was a bonding thing to make him upset and so I just gushed about it more so I could see that twitch develop under his eye.

"I can't use divination, so I don't know... I can't promise the memory was accurate. Hell, people remember shit wrong all the time even without having their heads fucked with. But I had one of the books before Bill gave me the set. I think I had already lost the other one somewhere, probably left it behind at Universal Servicing Systems, but I'd for sure read it. That means... what?"

Katrin paused to lean against a boulder. "It means... the books were part of the memories that were supposed to be removed, maybe? Is it possible you forgot about them for a while, and have been remembering more over time?"

"I'm... pretty sure I was thinking about them after I ended up here, even before Errod mentioned Brinkmar. Not just them, books I'd read about magic and stuff in general. But I don't think I remembered anything about where I'd gotten the books. Connie mentioned Bill giving me the books and as soon as she did I remembered it, though we didn't remember it the same way - I think Connie remembered it more clearly and I was just sort of filling in blanks with guesses. I'm pretty sure before that I just thought I'd found them or stolen them or something. Although... that doesn't even make sense, it was this super nice set of hardcover books - for limited prints they did this thing where they numbered them, and it was like... number nine out of whatever. It wasn't mass produced, and it was signed by the author."

"Well there you have it, right? If you'd seriously thought about it you would have been bothered by not remembering where this expensive item had come from. And if you never read the third one until you had the set, then if you remembered the third one at all you'd have to remember having all three. That meant it was the first memory to come back, and you only now recalled where you got the first one. A minute ago you also couldn't remember where the second one came from, even though these books were so important to you. That will probably surface at some point as well."

"So... whatever erased my memories, it included the books. And then when I started to remember things, the books were some of the first things - probably because I was so obsessed with them for a while."

"Until when? Until the false memories?"

Had that been it? It had to have been. I'd still been reading them when I was with Bill, and then at some point I was taken away from him or ran away or whatever, and realistically I should have been miserable that I'd lost the boxed set and at the very least tried to get new copies of the first two, but I didn't. Wait. "There's something more I'm having trouble remembering. Something about the third book. I barely remember it, other than a few especially dramatic moments - Jake cutting the castle walls in half, and him almost dying to an assassin, and this thing where he found a secret maze of passages under Thanatos' monastery. But I don't remember the in-between bits, and I don't even recall how they ended. He went back home at the end, right to the moment he'd left, but that had been promised since the first book. I mean I don't know how he beat Thanatos or anything."

Errod took Katrin's bag - she was feeling the hike more than the two of us were - and he looked at me thoughtfully. "I wonder if that book was the reason your memories were removed. Maybe there was something special about the version you had? It would have to be specific to that, otherwise everyone that read a copy would need to be dealt with."

"Oh my god, that's it. That's... there weren't other copies. That's why - one of the reasons why - the boxed set was so valuable. It went out of print or something, I don't remember, and when I tried to look it up to buy a copy there was only one for sale anywhere and it was ridiculously expensive. And normally you'd be able to find a bootleg version, some shitty PDF - sorry, Earth thing, just a bad copy - but the only ones I found were clearly written by fans. They were full of typos and shit.

"So basically, Bill gave me something that he didn't care about and I... probably bragged about it online or something, or tried to sell it after I split from Bill, and when the wrong person realized I'd read the third book they wiped my memories. God, this is too much and this place is so dry and gross. I wish we could be talking about this while relaxing somewhere and drinking milkshakes. Whatever. I'll figure it all out eventually, they fucked up pretty bad."

We started hiking again, Katrin sticking right beside me as Errod went off ahead. "What do you mean?"

"Well I'm remembering, right? Multiple people that have looked at my memories have commented on how it needs maintenance, and they clearly aren't doing that. It was bound to fall apart over time."

"Well," Katrin mused, "unless they had been planning on doing that maintenance. Back on Earth, I mean. They could have just done it again, re-applied the memories. It was clearly due, but if they'd done it soon enough you wouldn't have remembered much."

I didn't really like that thought.

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