The plan separated them at the service entrance.
They stood in the cold 2:19 a.m., the parking lot slicked with recent rain, the harbor wind carrying its salt-and-diesel breath through the gap between buildings and Maren handed Henrik a copy. She'd made it in the lab, during the transfer, copying the files simultaneously to two drives. A precaution so obvious it barely needed to be spoken.
"Train to South Station," she said. "The federal prosecutor's office has an after-hours drop box at the Moakley Courthouse. Envelope, labeled for Catherine Hale. Do not hand it to anyone else. Do not speak to anyone."
Henrik took the drive. He put it in his jacket pocket and pressed his hand against the outside of the pocket as though checking that it was there, the way a man checks for his wallet, or his keys, or the small solid evidence that he still exists in a world of objects.
"What about you?"
"I'm driving to Dorchester. Rina Lacey is waiting at the Globe offices."
"Lena will come after you."
"Lena is standing in a sub-basement holding a syringe she didn't use. By the time she decides what to do next, the data will be in two places she can't reach."
Henrik looked at her. In the parking-lot light sodium-vapor, orange, the light of industrial spaces and empty highways his face had the particular quality of a man who has been afraid for so long that he has begun to find fear boring. His hands were steady. His eyes were clear.
"Your grandmother's song," he said. "I want you to know when I hear it, I feel... grateful isn't the right word. But I feel something. Like being close to something good, even though I didn't earn it."
"You didn't earn it. And I didn't give it."
"I know. But I'm glad it's there." He paused. "Is that wrong?"
Maren looked at this man this junior data analyst from Milwaukee who had $40,000 in student loans and bitten nails and a borrowed sweater and someone else's grandmother living in his hippocampus and she felt something that her scientific training had no framework for: the recognition that some things that are wrong are also, simultaneously, beautiful.
"It's complicated," she said. "Go."
He went. He walked to the T station with his hand on his pocket and his head down and the stride of a man who was carrying something worth more than he'd ever been trusted with and was determined, through an act of will that drew on reserves he didn't know he had, not to drop it.
Maren got in her car.
The drive to Dorchester took seventeen minutes. She drove the speed limit. She used her turn signals. She came to complete stops at red lights and waited through the full cycle even when the intersections were empty, because there was a part of her the part that had spent her career following protocols and trusting systems and believing that the right way to do things was also the safe way that could not bring itself to break traffic laws even while delivering stolen evidence of corporate neurological assault.
She thought about Alma. Not in the abstract in the specific. She thought about the way Alma's hair smelled after a bath (shampoo and something underneath that was just Alma, the molecular signature of a person who was not yet old enough to smell like anything but herself). She thought about the weight of Alma's body on her hip, how it had changed from year to year from the dense, curled heaviness of infancy to the fidgeting, angular lightness of seven. She thought about the misspelled whale on the refrigerator.
These were real. She chose to believe they were real. She chose this not because she could verify it she couldn't, not all of it, not anymore but because choosing was something she could do that the 6 Hz signal couldn't undo. The signal could write to her hippocampus. It could insert memories and edit timelines and implant grief. But it could not make her choose. Choice lived somewhere the signal couldn't reach in the present tense, in the body, in the act of deciding, moment by moment, who she was going to be.
She arrived at the Globe offices at 2:38 a.m.
Rina Lacey was waiting in the lobby. She was a small woman with short dark hair and the alert, slightly rumpled appearance of a journalist who had been working for twenty years and had the posture of someone who leaned into things conversations, doors, stories. She wore jeans and a fleece jacket and an expression that Maren recognized from the mirror: the expression of a woman who did not sleep enough and compensated with focus.
"Dr. Shaw."
"Maren."
She handed Rina the drive. It left her hand with a finality that felt physical a weight released, a held breath exhaled, the transfer of responsibility from one person to another.
"There are fourteen people in that data," Maren said. "I'm one of them."
Rina took the drive and looked at it and did not ask how Maren had acquired it. She was a journalist. She knew that some questions were better asked later, in interviews, under the protection of the press, where the answers could be shaped and sourced and defended by legal counsel.
"Is there anything you want to tell me on the record right now?" Rina asked.
"Yes. I was the lead researcher on the Somniplex trial. I discovered that the drug I built was being used to modify human memory without consent. The evidence on that drive proves it. I'm willing to be identified as the source."
Rina studied her face. "Are you sure? Once you're identified, there's no going back."
Maren thought about the aquarium. The whale turning in the blue light. The memory that had lived in her mind as truth warm, detailed, specific and was a fabrication.
"No," she said. "That's the point."
Rina almost smiled. She pocketed the drive. "I'll call you tomorrow. Get some sleep."
It was the wrong thing to say and the right thing to say and Maren laughed a real laugh, sudden and exhausted, the laugh of a woman who had just broken into a pharmaceutical company's secret lab and stolen evidence of memory modification and driven to a newspaper office in the middle of the night and was now being told by a journalist to get some sleep.
She drove home. She checked the lock twice. She looked in on Alma still sleeping, still breathing, still holding Clover and she stood in the doorway for her count of ten and then for ten more, because this was a night that required extra counting.
She did not sleep. She sat at the kitchen table in the dark and listened to the apartment and waited for the world to change.
Her hands were steady. She noticed this the way a doctor notices a symptom with attention, with significance. Her hands, which had been shaking since the morning she couldn't find the aquarium photos, were still. Not calm still. The stillness of a body that has made a decision and is no longer fighting itself.
The radiator clanked. The pipes murmured. Outside, the first grey light of Wednesday began to color the sky above Somerville.
Maren sat at the table and held the quiet and waited.