“Two minds are better than one,” Uri laughs.

The brigands outside leave, satisfied the antlions have committed their killings for them. The illusion fades. Ava watches her appearance return to normal, the dust and gore vanishing in a pixelated flourish like the fever dream of a malfunctioning android.

“How did you do that?” She studies her own hands, mystified.

“You're Psions,” Ellie answers for the twins.

“It is the power of the tandem mind.” Uri climbs to his feet and brushes himself off.

“An understanding that all things are entangled; connected,” Uma continues, “an understanding that all is one.”

“When we combine the power of our minds,” Uri concludes, “we are capable of many unexpected things.”

“It's voodoo,” Ellie says, looking at the window where the killers had waited, “and I am most grateful for it.”

“Not voodoo,” Uri corrects, “it's not magic. It's nature. It's just physics. Through meditation we have learned to connect our minds, unlocking numerous psionic powers.”

“It is not uncommon among our people,” Uma elaborates.

“How old are you two?” Ellie makes her feet and pats herself down, checking to ensure her wholeness. “You look to be babies but you get on like much older souls.”

“We do not know our age,” the twins say in unison.

“You don't say?” Ellie laughs. “I guess sometimes even two minds aren't enough.”

“Why do I still have no memory from before I woke up with Human Resources?” Ava asks at that night's camp.

“Trauma,” Bach explains, “has a way of shutting the memory off for awhile. To protect the mind from itself.”

“Maybe that's it.”

Once again Bach has brought them to a perfect, hidden campsite that is also not terribly far off the road. It's almost too good to be true. And oddly while she knows this truism about the scarcity of super-convenient campsites, she does not know a simple thing like her family name. She possesses numbers and letters and even verbs and adjectives and the names of all sorts of things – but she has nothing that is uniquely hers.

No date of birth, no place of origin, nor the names nor voices of her mother and father. Does she have siblings? Has she ever been in love? And the experiences and memories which deep down she knows everyone should have—birthdays and movie nights and trips to the beach and the playground and the ballpark, the curriculum of childhood—are itchy and unrelenting as a phantom limb. As though her memory has been amputated.

“It just seems like I should be able to remember something,” she says through a mouthful of Hobo Hot Pocket, “I mean I can understand how I'd block out the memory of however I came to be captured—it must have been violent and awful—but what about the rest of my life? What can't I remember the weeks, months, and years prior?”

“Trauma,” Bach repeats, “has a way of scooping up the surrounding memories, too—no matter how benign—right along with the bad ones. Don't worry, it will all return to you when we reach the Doctor. She'll help you remember.”

With their close call with the brigands and the Scums in Canon City now a day behind them, they've been marching along the highway as it steepens up a mountain pass. In two days they will reach the Doctor, according to Bach. As long as nothing unforeseen occurs. He tells Ava there will be others like her there – whatever that means. Orphans? Or survivors, maybe? Perhaps amnesiacs? She doesn't ask. But the questions keep nagging:

How did Bach know her name?

Did they somehow know one another before they became prisoners of Human Resources?

Why does he have the same kind of implants as the Scums they fought?

Could Bach be a bad guy?

Could he have possibly killed her family?

These thoughts are unwelcome but she can't help but think them. It's weird, but somehow all of this is too convenient. Like it's a setup; like this whole time they've been on rails. All the way back to the ambush on the convoy and their escape – led by Bach. And while she wonders why it all feels a bit predetermined—why it feels like a set-up—she sees him telling his stories of the world gone by, sees the campfire reflecting in his eyes and sees that they are red and glossy.

And him feeling downcast hurts her, too. She depends on him. He feeds her and he reminds her to keep her shoes dry. He mends her jacket while telling his ghost stories. He knows when the water is unsafe to drink and he knows where to find hidden campsites and he knows who and how to kill. It seems to her that he has written the book on how to survive in this wasteland. And in the absence of a father or an uncle or some other family to care for and be cared for by, she thinks that in that same tender way she is beginning to love him, to depend upon him, even while she ponders his potential involvement in the murder of her family.

Memories become entrenched, the way a trickle of water carves a canyon. How this works is: within Ava's brain an electro-chemical signal jumps the microscopic gap between a pair of neurons. Then another leap happens, and another. And the process keeps repeating every time she recalls anything, reinforcing memories the way a child writes their name on the sky with a sparkler. Ava's brain is composed of as many neurons as there exist stars in the entire Milky Way galaxy, but this starry night is drawing its own constellations, yearning to make the emptiness represent something. Because that's all brains ever really do – work to fill in the blanks.

But the truth is: go even smaller than a neuron, and at an atomic level, everything is still mostly empty space.

When the wind gusts Ava is awakened and for a moment she mistakes Bach for her father. His arm slung over her protectively, his snoring breath warming the top of her head. But most likely all of her kin is dead. None of her impromptu comrades have any family left. Their people have all been murdered or sold. And in any event, Ava has no memory of her father nor barely even of the concept. She tries to imagine his voice. His face. Nothing. The most she knows of any father is this moment. The most she can fathom of love is her conflicted relationship with this bizarre monster of a man.

She tries to picture her mother, and suddenly within her mind there is a vision of a serious-looking woman wearing black-framed eye-glasses and a lab-coat, holding an electronic device upon which she takes notes, leaning in to peer closely at Ava.

“Sara,” she hears herself whisper in the dark, Bach stirs but doesn't wake.

And it is a long time before sleep finds her again.

“Bach, can I ask you something?”

“Of course.”

“It's about your implants.”

They've been at this climb all day. The air thinning all the while.

“What would you like to know?”

“Well, I was wondering where you got 'em.”

“All of my cybernetics have been professionally installed by licensed doctors.”

“A doctor turned you into a walking electric chair?” she scoffs, “jeez, some doctor.”

“Yes. I have been modified for combat.”

“I noticed the Scum had been modified, too.”

He stops. The whole party stops.

“Everyone take some shade,” he says, “have some water and catch your breath.” He shares his canteen—just regular water inside, not truth serum—with Ava. And he asks, “what's on your mind?”

“I just couldn't help but notice you and the Scum were similar in some ways – and obviously not in others! Like, you're not evil.”

“There are no doubt many who would argue with that assessment.”

“You know what I mean.”

“I do.” He sighs. “The Scum have a sickness, and it has sapped them of all humanity. I do not suffer the same as them, but my modifications do make me less human, too.”

“What kind of doctor would perform an operation like those two back in Canon City must've had? Whoever it was turned them into monsters.”

“Their modifications were not installed by a doctor.”

“How then? Who?”

“The Scum grow their cybernetics organically, like tumors.”

“What? You mean the mechanical parts just come from inside them? How is that possible?”

“You have identified the as-yet incurable nature of their affliction.”

Later toward dusk when they camp and are fed and the fire is extinguished Ava remains awake in the dark and she asks, “where will you go after you bring me to the Doctor?”

“I do not know exactly,” Bach replies, “but we will go together. I will not leave you.” Ava is conspicuously silent and so he asks, “did you think that I would?”

“Maybe I thought that, yeah. You could have been taking me to an orphanage.”

“Because I said there would be others like you there?”

“Yeah, I guess so.”

“I'm sorry I wasn't more clear,” he says, “as far as I'm aware there are no orphanages remaining in the entire world.” He leaves it at that and to her the situation remains almost as transparent as mud. But they will arrive at the Doctor's place soon.

“You're certain this is it?”

“Yes,” he assures her, “we will find the Doctor here. She will help you.”

When at last they arrive, the safe-house is a sprawling, half-burned log-built hunting lodge hidden down a half-mile of driveway behind a gate off a dirt road in the middle of absolutely nowhere in the mountains of this place Bach calls Colorado. Even Ava knows this is an unusual place to expect a doctor. Bach walks slowly up the last stretch of gravel driveway and the others follow.

“It looks abandoned,” notes Uma,

“It looks like a haunted house,” Ava jokes.

“There is no evidence proving the existence of poltergeists and apparitions,” Bach says with his usual lack of affect.

The door is unlocked so they go inside.

The lodge wallows someplace between the past and the present, lacquered beneath the filmy funk of untold years. Ash stirs with the rain coming in through the holes in the roof and slicks the floor with black sludge. Bach leads them along a hallway where family pictures once hung, the outlines of their frames still cut from the scuzz. Empty spaces. Sores in the floral wallpaper, Rorschach splotches of gray-green mold crawling out from beneath.

“Smells like something died in here,” Ava says.

“Like Canon City,” Ellie agrees.

Bach cocks his head and listens and so the others do as well. And it is quiet and nothing seems odd – but then is that the problem? Is it too quiet? Does he hear something? Without a word of warning Bach snatches Ava by the wrist and suddenly he's very nearly dragging her off her feet. He kicks open a door and she flinches and they hurry underground into the unlit cellar, stumbling frantic down a treacherous staircase, kicking obstacles unseen, sending toppled metallic canisters tumbling and lengths of rubber hose squirming snake-like into the pitch-black. Chunks of unseated drywall skidding and crumbling, the chalky white dust clouds perceptible by taste and scent alone. Ava coughs and suddenly Bach is hurting her, squeezing her wrist too hard, pulling her much too fast in the darkness.

“Let go!” she demands. “What are you doing?”

“Bach!” Ellie shouts, but he doesn't listen. He's possessed.

And then the darkness is interrupted by an eerie green light emitting from a thumbprint reader. Bach presses his digit against it and Ava hears metal-grinding-on-metal and then a blast door rolls aside and light shines from the entrance to a secret, subterranean place and beyond the doorway is revealed to be all sterile and white – a futuristic-looking laboratory which seems out of place in this rotting lodge and furthermore this world in ruins. The party staggers inside, awestruck.

“Well I'll be...” Ellie murmurs.

Bach paces further in, still squeezing Ava's wrist, still dragging her. She looks and his eyes are blank like a hypnotist's subject. He's not in control. Uri and Uma and Ellie react, quickening to keep pace, and the blast door slides shut behind them.

“Great work, Bach,” a woman's voice buzzes over an intercom, “I knew you'd get her. You always do.” And the sound of her voice seems to stir Bach out of his trance. He scans the room.

“Sara?” he growls in the empty lab, “what is the meaning of this?”

She laughs—a quick exhalation through the nose; the way some people rid themselves of snot and others express sarcastic humor—and somehow it's oddly familiar to Ava.

On the far side of the lab a doorway seems to just suddenly appear from nothing as it slides open. And a woman steps through, wearing a lab coat and black-framed eye-glasses.

Ava blinks and squints. There are tears seeping from the corners of her eyes and she does not know why and she wipes them away. But wait—she does know why she's crying—this is the woman from her vision. And she's—

“Mom?” Ava wonders.

And Dr. Sara snorts and says, “I hate it when they call me that.”