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he’d ripped it from his notebook. I’d folded it and unfolded it so often that the paper had lost its crispness and the charcoal was smudged. It was a simple sketch of a metal doorframe emitting a bright light, but I felt the same uneasiness I had the first time I saw it. It was a door into the unknown, and it forced me to ask myself where I was going even as it helped me remember where I’d already been.
    Item number two was the Angel Eyes map I’d taken fromthe king’s study. It was a digital rendering of Aurora’s North American continent, with Farnham and the United Commonwealth of Columbia clearly divided. The only unusual thing about it was the collection of dots in random locations within the two countries; I’d noticed they were more concentrated around bodies of water, but other than that, I had no idea why the map was so important.
    “It was real,” I said aloud. That was my other mantra, the one my therapist didn’t know about.
It was real.
My mind flooded with things I couldn’t keep safely hidden away in Zip-loc bags: Thomas and I on Oak Street Beach, before I even knew who he was; the heady, charged moment when he told me that he saw me, the real me, beneath the Juliana disguise; our first kiss, at Asthall Cottage. Reuniting with him at Adastra Prison, when I thought I’d lost him for good. Those were all real, too; I just didn’t have anything to prove it except my own memories.
    Without warning, another vision slammed into me. I was standing on the shore of a wide river. The wet hem of my white dress clung to my ankles as I climbed up the bank. I looked up at the sky, and an enormous building swam into view. I was excited, but I was tired, too, shaking all over and sick to my stomach. I glanced down at my left wrist, which was tattooed with a symbol that filled me with power and purpose: two overlapping circles in silver ink.
    Wrenching myself out of the vision, I sank to my knees, breathing hard. I pulled up my sleeve to check my wrist, but there was nothing there.
    By the time I trekked up to the attic, the sun had sunk below the horizon. I switched on the light and surveyed the large, cluttered room. It smelled like sawdust and cardboard, thescent of a past best left forgotten. But I hadn’t come to forget. I had come to learn, and to remember.
    One half of the attic was full of furniture, carefully arranged like a Tetris puzzle and draped with old sheets. The other half contained what had once been an overwhelming number of boxes, but now that I’d made my way through most of them, it didn’t seem like enough.
    The furniture had belonged to my parents, and the boxes were theirs, too. For the last few weeks, I’d been sifting through what remained of their lives, excavating my family history in the hope of discovering something—anything—that could help me understand who they really were. I used to think I knew them. They died when I was seven, so I had some memories, but not many, and they were a child’s memories, anyway, barely distinguishable from dreams. Now Mom and Dad were total enigmas.
    When I came back from Aurora, I’d had to lie to a lot of people—police, reporters, the director of my school—but I couldn’t bring myself to lie to Granddad. So I’d given him a version of the truth, and he told me a secret he’d been keeping for ten years, confirming what I already knew to be true. Dad was born in Aurora; he was a KES scientist who crossed through the tandem to frustrate the attempts of researchers on Earth to develop many-worlds technology. That was how he met Mom. She was one of the researchers whose work he was trying to sabotage, but he fell in love with her instead. He turned his back on his mission for her, and for me.
    Every time I thought I’d gotten a handle on all this, it reared up and walloped me in the face. I always missed my parents, but I’d never needed them as much as I did now. I wished I could talk to Dad about Aurora or ask Mom for advice. Mom