"Next on the list is Harlan's Hardware," Katrin's voice said over the hotel speakers. We'd been at this for two days and I was thrilled to be so close to finishing; the job at Harlan's had been pretty recent. I went to the door that felt right, and opened it - and there it was, the familiar smell of the hardware store. It wasn't a particularly big one, just a little spot in a strip mall between a carniceria and a nail shop. In this memory I was trying to deal with the fact that I had hit the '1' key twice and charged someone for eleven hammers by mistake. He was being an asshole about it, because god forbid a teenager at a new job make a mistake.

"How hard is it to ring up a hammer? It's literally one item. I swear to god, kids need computers to do everything for them nowadays. It's ridiculous."

"I just need to... um."

"Well for god's sake just start the order over!"

"Well I can't cancel it but I can uh... I can..."

"What do you mean you can't cancel it? Jesus. What a fucking mess. A six year old could ring up a hammer in a hardware store."

The problem was that only the manager could cancel an order, and while I could remove things from the order no problem it wasn't letting me remove ten at once and I knew this fucker would get increasingly irate with each beep he had to hear the scanner make. Since none of this was really real it was even more tempting than in the original timeline to just hit him over the head with a shovel and toss him in the alley out back, but I was a little wary of messing with my memories - technically I hadn't unlocked memory editing yet, but even normal people accidentally started remembering things wrong without the assistance of magic. I sighed and left without getting violent, then went a few more doors down and tried again. This memory was from several months later, and I was hiding in the back room eating a sandwich. Rob, one of my coworkers, popped his head in and told me I had five minutes left.

"I know what time it is, Rob. You don't need to ruin my break by doing a countdown."

He frowned like I was being totally unreasonable and left.

"Okay, two clear memories of Harlan's. What's next?"

"Last one for Earth, it's the Desert Oasis apartments."

I found a memory of that easily enough, and sighed. It was just like I remembered it, sparsely furnished and slightly depressing. Adrian was in his usual spot, sitting shirtless on the living room floor playing video games. I popped into my room and poked around, taking a few souvenirs and dropping them into the backpack I'd been wearing. Then I left the memory and entered another - we'd agreed that I needed to check more than one to be sure nothing was fuzzy, but I had shut down Katrin's argument that four samples was safest. This second one was of me nervously watching the maintenance guy work on the sink, still somehow convinced he would say it was my fault and I'd have to pay for it.

"Yeah, good here. Saw my piece of shit roommate and some staff, and the details all look clear."

"Why did you end up sharing an apartment with him anyway? He sounds terrible."

"Yeah. You're not wrong." I started to head back to good old room 217 so I could drop off my backpack full of loot. "Uh, not much of a story. There was a group thing, for kids about to age out of foster care. His birthday was really close to mine, and I didn't think I could afford a place on my own. Of course since I ended up paying for everything for two people it actually would have been better to do it solo but... well, at the time I was sure I needed it. Plus I'd... well, I'd only ever lived alone in abandoned buildings and it felt like... like there was supposed to be someone else with me. I don't know. It's stupid. But I had this idea, like you were just supposed to have a roommate when you moved out."

I reached room 217 - which was for whatever reason on the 18th floor in this place - and dumped the backpack out. "Okay, waking up."

I opened my eyes and flinched at the sunlight, then realized my legs had fallen asleep and carefully stretched them out and tried to wiggle my toes. Katrin stood and began pacing.

"Well that seems to confirm it," she said, "the blurry area only covers a little over a year. It starts when you're heading to a new group home, and ends when you arrive at a different one. So it seems most likely there's something that happened at that group home you want to forget."

"Wait, you're saying you think this was me?"

"Well... yes? I mean I assume. There's no magic on Earth, and even if there were why would someone edit out your memories from a group home? Probably something traumatic happened, and the blurry memories are all you'll let yourself see."

"Okay. I'm not saying I agree, but let's go with it. That doesn't really explain the extra stuff. Right? The extra memories of... I don't know, working at soup kitchens and trying to be a better person. Or... or of living in the woods. Or stabbing some people to death in their sleep."

"That last one, hopefully, was just a nightmare. You haven't seen any gaps where those things would have fit, unless they were during that year. But you don't think they were from then, do you?"

"No. Well, some of them maybe. Not the stranger ones, I think those are older."

"So probably the ones about living in the woods are from when you used to go camping - I still can't believe that's just a thing people do on Earth, sleeping on the ground for fun - and the ones about stabbing people to death must have been from when you were in foster care. You did say the memory felt like they were abusive foster parents, right?"

"Yeah. That was the vibe. But I can't picture the house or anything."

"It doesn't matter. If you had really stabbed your foster parents to death there would have been fallout from that, there's no way you could just forget it. It was a nightmare."

"And the soup kitchen thing?"

"That part might have been real," she conceded, "but even so it was probably heavily edited. You remember living in a house, maybe with Bill, but he was gone from your life by then. So it's possible you replaced whatever traumatic situation you were in at the group home with someone that felt... parental. And you don't have a lot of good examples of that."

"I guess Bill did fit, he had big dad energy and he abandoned me. So."

That wasn't fair. It was a job, and he quit. He was allowed to quit. And he tried to set me up with a place to live before he left, it wasn't his fault that I had an episode and wouldn't even go inside. Either way, it didn't matter anymore. That stuff was my old life. And whatever had made that year all blurred out - well, the parts at the group home - was ancient history.

"I'd still like you to look around a little more, just to be certain," Katrin said.

"Wait, you were just saying this was all me being crazy."

"I never said crazy. It's not crazy to want to forget some things. But... well, I'm still curious if you can narrow it down some. You know the group home is all muddled, and you know high school isn't. But you haven't seen any memories of things that aren't either of those places, or tried to find a memory of high school where you talk about where you're living."

"Yeah, I can poke some. Not like we're busy out here."

Of course that wasn't entirely true; we had to make sure the moskar were fed and cleaned, we had to constantly repair the walls in places, and we had to deal with all sorts of little invaders - lizards that tried to get into our food, creeping thorny vines, those awful mana beetles. But mainly we sat in our little mana wells and practiced - which in my case meant keeping my new senses on to constantly try to detect enchantments, probability tweaks, and threads of fate. In theory I should have also been making runes, but I still hadn't learned much of them and there hadn't been a book in the towns we stopped at - probably there was in Sentortzi but any book shopping would have been after narrowing things down at the library and obviously that didn't happen.

"Do you want help?" Katrin asked, and it took me a second to rewind the conversation and realize what she meant.

"Oh, the thing. With letting you guys into my head."

"You said it was fairly inexpensive, and you need to get it if you're going to build defenses."

"No, I know. Yeah. I have almost enough, even after getting the memory thing the other day. I'll do that soon." I said, and sort of meant it. I wanted to show Katrin and Errod what it was like on Earth, but if Katrin was going to insist on helping me look through my memories... yeah, not so much. Any memories I showed them would be very carefully curated. I still hadn't told them a lot of stuff about my mom, nor did I really want them seeing my more awkward or shitty moments. I didn't even want to see them myself - I'd been mostly pushing right past myself in my memories without paying a lot of attention, and not just because I was there to check if they were blurred out. There was a lot of shit that I didn't want to revisit.

"We could check your memories from here, as well - but I don't think that we need to."

"Yeah, ever since I came here I think it's been... oh shit."

Katrin looked at me, and then as if we had psychically connected she realized what I was thinking and her eyebrows went up. "You haven't looked at that memory!"

"No! Shit! We've been doing this for days, how have I not looked? Okay, going back in."

"I want to know everything. Take your time, really look around."

"I will, but I think I'm filling in some details with best guesses. I'll do my best though."

I closed my eyes, and was back in my memory palace - that was getting faster. It might have been that I was chaining new abilities through that one, but I suspected it was just that unlocking an ability didn't make you good at it. Just like any other skill, it needed practice. I headed out into the hallway, and headed for the right door - I just knew which one it was, and in fact I suspected with practice it could just be any door I wanted. After all, this was all some artificial construct I'd made subconsciously. I stood there with my hand on the doorknob for a moment, and then took a deep breath and opened it.

It was dawn, with the sun still not up but the sky alight - one of those classic Arizona sunrises where the clouds looked like they were on fire. I could see myself, squished between some bushes and a cinderblock wall, lit by flashes of blue and red. WHOOP WHOOP went the cop car, and I stirred. Memory-me sat up and reached behind her to rub her sore back -

"Keep your hands where I can see them!"

Seriously? Was that it? They thought when I stretched and rubbed my back I was going for a gun? Ridiculous. I watched as the other me raised her hands and then tried to stand, wobbling and awkward. I had a twig sticking out of my hair, and looked terrible.

"What are you doing sleeping in the park?" one asked.

"Is everything okay?" the other added.

"Yeah. Yeah, it's fine. Sorry. Just taking a nap, I -"

"You sleep in parks a lot?"

"No. No, I just didn't have my wallet and uh,"

"Are you on drugs? What are you taking?"

"No sir, I'm not on any drugs. I got locked out of my apartment and -"

"You couldn't get a key from the office?"

"No, they wouldn't let me in because -"

"Who wouldn't let you in? Is it your apartment or not?"

"No, I'm trying to tell you -"

"Hey, don't argue with me."

"I'm not arguing, I'm trying to explain."

Memory-me clutched her head, and the police looked nervous. I was looking around like a crazy person, and the one officer put his hand on his gun, and...

What the fuck.

And then I was in the air, a few feet over a snowy landscape. I slammed down, and blood started pouring out of my ears and nose, and then I collapsed backwards into the snow and the memory ended - I was still watching it, but I knew that nothing else was going to happen.

"Uh. Okay. That was strange."

"What happened?" Katrin's voice was distant, almost lost in the icy wind.

"There was a part that I'd... I guess I'd mostly forgotten about it. I mean everything was so strange, and... I don't know. It went by really fast, it was something between here and Earth."

"Can you slow it down somehow?"

"Yeah. I mean presumably. Let me try."

I was in the park, holding my head in my hands. Time slowed. Everything went black and silent, like I was the only thing that existed, and then... there it was.

"Oh motherfucker. This is going to give me a headache."

"What is it?"

"It's... it's like four different things, all overlapping. Jesus this is strange. It's the park, and the mountainside I ended up on, and then... what are the others?"

It was hard to pick the images apart - it felt like one of those magic eye pictures where you have to look just right to get a 3D image to pop out, except it was four different competing ones.

"The woods, in a clearing with some huge boulders covered in runes. Uh. And somewhere with... this awful green glow, and a lot of gears and stuff. Like a factory or something, it looks like the set of a sci-fi movie. Sorry, bad reference for you. I don't know how to describe it."

"Somewhere on Earth, or somewhere here?"

"Here, I think. Just something about it. No wires, just tubes and stuff. And that glow looks familiar. Why does it look so familiar? Oh, shit. Shit. I know what I'm seeing."

It was Ulren's laboratory. The time machine. That was the green glow, it was the crystalized time mana that he had huge containers of. I was seeing it because... because that's where Connie had been? It must be. Something about the fact that we were the same person gave me this one tiny moment of seeing through her eyes. But then what was the Stonehenge-style place?

"Okay the gears and stuff I think are the time machine, so best guess for the other is... it's got to be whatever brought me here, right? I mean, something did. And this place looks pretty fucking magic."

"Could be. It's as good a guess as any. Do you see anyone there?"

"Nnnno. No, but it happened too fast to turn my head or anything so they could just be out of view. Huh. Well, put it on the list I guess. It's not a priority, but at some point once Hammersmith is off our backs about getting her into Brinkmar - Brynnklar, whatever - and we've dealt with the guys that attacked us in Sentortzi, and... whatever else... we can try to figure out where that place was. I don't need to go back to Earth, but I should probably find out if it was just random bullshit or if I was... I don't know, if I was targeted specifically for some reason." I stood up, legs still a bit tingly, and went to get my knives from the wagon. "Too much talk about mysterious shit and strange memories in my head. Let's go find a monster and kill it."