Cale dragged Lysandra around to a few other places after that, asking around about Mason Viatrix and where he had gone. Lysandra stopped paying attention. She stumbled after him and tried not to think about this new gap in her memory, but it was the only thing on her mind. Who would go after her, after all she had been through? Could she find them and force them to give her the memories back?
"Lysandra," Cale said after a few streets had gone by, "are you okay?"
"Yeah, I'm fine," she answered, under her breath.
"Are you sure about that?" Cale's voice softened again, and Lysandra immediately felt guilty.
"No," she admitted.
"I found Viatrix," Cale told her. "We'll go see him, if you want."
Lysandra hardly thought about it. She shook her head. "Could we just go back to your studio, instead?" she suggested.
Slowly, Cale nodded. "Yeah. That's fine."
As they walked, Lysandra began to pull her thoughts away from the hole in her memories. She asked Cale, "So, why did you want to find Viatrix, anyway?"
"He was an old colleague of mine," Cale said. "When I heard he Recoded your friend's memories and that she still remembered the job, I wanted to go back to his studio to see how he was doing - and what he was doing."
"Oh," Lysandra said. "Okay."
"Apparently his new address is several streets over from his old address," Cale added, "but it's no secret to the other Memory Recoders around."
Lysandra recalled running around Oblitus, alone, looking for a Memory Recoder and finding none. "How many other Memory Recoders are there?" she asked.
"A lot," Cale said. "Only a few of them ever get real business, like Zavier."
"They must be hiding," Lysandra muttered.
The two of them came to the door of Cale's studio. Cale unlocked it and let them both in, and they found Clove sitting in the chair in the front of the studio, kicking her legs back and forth absently and staring out the window. When Lysandra and Cale entered, she grinned at them.
"You're back, Cale," she said, hopping off the chair and crossing the room. "More work? Who'd you bring with you?"
Cale eyed her for a moment before replying, "This is Lysandra."
"Oh, okay. A client?" Clove asked.
"Yes," Cale answered. "A client."
"I'll leave you alone," she chirped before skipping out of the room. Cale didn't say anything more.
"I thought she remembered who I was," Lysandra said as Clove left the room and Cale went to his desk.
"She doesn't," Cale stated shortly.
"Why's that?" Lysandra whispered.
"Ever since she lost her memory initially, she's been having trouble turning short-term memories into long-term memories, too. She's one of the rare cases I told you about - a younger subject with chronic memory loss," Cale told Lysandra, not meeting her eyes.
"Oh," Lysandra said. "I'm sorry."
"It's okay. I'm used to reminding her," Cale said. Liar, Lysandra thought. "It's just because of the trauma her memory sustained when her memories were first stolen. They might be able to figure out a way to at least fix that part of her memory someday."
"Yeah," Lysandra agreed.
"Have a seat," Cale said shortly, gesturing to the chair in the center of the room.
Lysandra sat.
"Okay, ready? Close your eyes." Cale flexed his fingers just over her forehead. Lysandra wondered if she would remember their warmth when the procedure was over.
The procedure. "What are you doing, by the way?"
"I'm examining," Cale said. "I'm just searching for clues. Especially around the memory you say you just lost."
"How will you know where that is?" Lysandra said.
"Memory chasms, as we call them, are very obvious when you're scanning," Cale said. "They stick out. They're giant spaces in what is basically a very compressed but lengthy timeline."
"Right," Lysandra answered. "Okay. Go ahead."
"Close your eyes," Cale said again, and this time Lysandra obeyed.