An itch nagged at Raleigh, but it was too nebulous for her to identify, much less resolve. She set up a physical diagnostic macro to try to find it, then turned from the table to go down the hall to her room.

Third was making something in the kitchen.

Raleigh double-checked that it was, in fact, Third—that she wasn’t confusing the Nameless girl with Janni—then looked down the hall where Third had gone only a moment before, after she’d commented about their other roommate’s jealousy.

Her first inclination was to assume that Third had…Jumped—was that what it was called?—but Raleigh had also lacked memory between the drinks last night and breakfast that morning. The Jenga game on the table had some blocks in different spots than she remembered, too.

She checked her internal chronometer, hoping the issue was just a misfile glitch and not a full skip.

A few hours had passed since her most recent memory on file.

Twice wasn’t enough to indicate a pattern—but twice in under twenty hours suggested the start of a pattern, one that Raleigh couldn’t afford to have. Even if she assumed that she’d slept her usual six hours the night before, the skips were costing her more than half her memory.

She’d witnessed such lapses before, in others like her, though the data was archived. She could see the traces from the file path, but the file itself dallied outside the area of her storage that was enqueued and readily accessible. She’d have to actively choose to access that particular information.

Something in her gut told her the memories didn’t hold anything good.

Third peered at her through the pass-through, pausing a moment before promptly returning to whatever she was in the middle of tossing into a bowl. There wasn’t enough of a smell for Raleigh to identify it without scanning, and scanning to find out seemed…rude.

In the very least, scanning to find out what her roommate was cooking would be needlessly intrusive, particularly since doing so might trigger their psy sensitivity or telepathy or some such thing.

“Raleigh?” Third asked quietly.

Were Nameless even allowed to pry like that? Raleigh abruptly suspected not.

“What was I doing?” she asked Third. “When you came back to the kitchen?”

The girl studied her for a second, expression shuttered, then stirred the bowl’s contents. “Thinking.”

What had Raleigh been thinking about?

And why couldn’t she remember it?

The itch worsened, but Raleigh still couldn’t figure out where or what it was. She hadn’t felt it before—she knew that much, but it had a familiarity that meant it was programmed into her recognition software, though the definition was filed out of her reach unless she grabbed it on purpose.

Thinking shouldn’t have led to such memory loss, even if she’d decided to store the thoughts for later. She should’ve at least had an indirect summary of her actions left in her mind, to account for the time gap.

The answer was somewhere in that memory file her gut said she really didn’t want to read.

“Thinking,” she murmured. That didn’t sound dangerous. Worrying, but not dangerous.

Unless it meant her software was breaking down. What if her personal blocks collapsed? Or the failsafes that kept her from designating her home as enemy territory and going berserker on civvies?

As well as Third and Janni could defend themselves, she couldn’t be sure they’d be able to protect themselves from her, if she snapped and sought to kill them. She wanted to believe they could—and Third, at least, had mental conditioning that would let her respond appropriately if someone she knew suddenly turned homicidal—but Raleigh knew better than to assume. They dismissed her type of universe as not very advanced or dangerous, and that could easily end up giving her opportunity to eliminate them.

Nev’s hubris had enabled Raleigh to kill her.

Raleigh wasn’t about to risk her friends’ lives by being overconfident in their abilities.

She opened the memory file.