The building loomed tall and ominous before us, as depressing and terrifying as I remembered it. It jutted out in all its right angles against the cloudy sky, and I felt a desire to see it burning. I imagined whole chunks of it crashing downward, windows blowing out, glass sparkling into the air, the sound of a massive animal groaning as it collapsed inward . . . the thrill the image brought gave me ideas.

Turning to Henry, I studied his face. It was tilted upward, toward the top of the towering structure. He was much taller than me, but I could still see the clouds above reflected in his crystalline eyes. "Anything?" I asked.

He bit his lip, waited, then shook his head, his shaggy ash-blond hair contained under a knit hat. He wore a hat always, now. I'd tried to convince him to color his hair, but he wouldn't do it. The hat had sufficed.

"Well, this is where I first met you. At least, it's where we met one another after they wiped our memories the first time . . . or maybe it wasn't the first time. I really don't know. But it's where I first remember meeting you. You contacted me. You found me, and you helped me escape this building. Then we were on our own for a long while." I paused, thinking. "None of that feels familiar?"

He didn't answer but instead turned his face down, looked at the ground for a moment. I knew his reaction for a "no."

Sighing, I slung my pack off my back and began going through it. We were standing in front of Oliphant, at the front doors, which I was seeing for the first time in daylight. The building had been shuttered months earlier, maybe even almost a year ago, after everything had gone down with the Circuit. There'd been an investigation into the place, whether or not it was abusing minors or something, or maybe it was tax evasion--as far as I knew, litigation was still pending. I hadn't exactly kept up. But in the meanwhile, the whole place had been closed up. Henry and I had driven miles to return to it; our car was parked outside of the gates, about half-a-mile away, because they'd been padlocked and not worth picking. The weeds had grown knee-high on either side of the drive and were now brown and crisp in the winter air. A few birds flew overhead, black squiggles against the white sky, but other than that, the place seemed entirely deserted. People had been here, though--graffitti laced the front of the building, a few upper windows were broken. The front doors had been boarded, but someone had pulled the boards off and broken the glass in the door. I was grateful to whoever they were; we wouldn't have to work much to get in.

I retrieved a flashlight from my pack. It was super bright, would be enough to see whatever we wanted to inside. I anticipated the place would be a mess.

Henry went in first, having to work his tall, thin body into angles to fit through the opening, and then I followed him. Immediately, my sense of smell was met with decay. It wasn't the decay of anything once alive; it was more the decay of the place itself. I stared at the entranceway, more broken double doors that led into a main hall, from which even more doors branched and a central staircase rose. Once-comfortable leather couches, now with chunks of stuffing pouring out, lined a waiting area that also consisted of a large once-lush carpet and tables of magazines and pamphlets, which were scattered across the floor, covered in dust and debris. An aquarium stood against one wall, grimy, about a quarter-tank-full of murky liquid. This had once been the way they fooled parents and guardians--tricked them into thinking their children were being properly cared for.

I found myself smirking, stepped forward and kicked over a small wastebasket, spilling its contents. I felt Henry look at me out of the corners of his eyes, but that only made me kick the can again, sending it rolling down the hall.

"Come on," I said. "Let's find the office."

We began checking doors. I wasn't entirely sure what we'd find here. Files, documents, things that may give us clues about ourselves . . . that's what I wanted, but who knew whether anything like that remained, whether it had ever even existed. If the Circuit had been trying to hide us at Oliphant, would they ever have put identifying information there? I knew the answer was a probable no, but it was worth looking for, and besides, I'd had another reason for coming here; I'd hoped it would spark Henry's memory.

So far, that hadn't worked, but perhaps we just needed to spend a little more time.

A couple of months had passed since I'd found him. It was now a very cold early March, and even inside the building I could see my breath cloud with each exhalation. As we began to wander, I cautioned Henry not to go too far from me. I'd hardly let him leave my sight since we'd reunited, since the beach house and the masked people and realizing he didn't have any memory of me. I kept him close at all times. If that bothered him, he didn't say it. I just couldn't even handle it if someone got a hold of him again.

Whatever they'd done to him, Henry couldn't remember much. He could recall only about three or four months back, when he'd been left alone and told to wait for me. In that time, he'd said, he'd mostly been kept in a room underground, sometimes brought out to see daylight, to walk around, but otherwise held captive. He couldn't recall any specific torture they'd put him through, but he sensed it had happened. He felt that he'd been hurt, and when he'd said that to me, anger bloomed in my heart. It was probably why they'd wiped his mind, I told myself--they didn't want him to remember. And he had no information about them . . . they were always masked, and they never spoke to him.

I found the main office and entered through the door, immediately recalling the nausea I'd experienced the one and only time I remembered being there. My stomach rolled over upon seeing the desk where the huge man had sat, that man whose face I couldn't recall. And there was the row of plastic chairs, where I'd sat vomiting into a bucket on my lap. How weak I'd felt, then--how weak I'd been. I'd let them treat me however they'd wanted to, although I hadn't had much choice. And would I have had much choice now, if the same people were here, and I was in the same situation? What more did I know about myself now? Frustration welled in me as I realized I was hardly better off.

I walked around the desk and considered sitting in the chair, but then I realized I'd have felt ill to be in the same place as that man had been. Pushing it aside, I pulled the desk drawers out, looking in them for I-didn't-know-what. Nothing struck me as worth the trouble, just generic office supplies, old candy wrappers, some magazines. I slammed the drawers and entered another room that branched off of this one. Inside was a massive filing cabinet. This gave me some hope, but that hope dimmed when I saw how empty the drawers were. There were folders, but no papers. No files of any kind, anywhere. And there were no computers. Investigators had likely confiscated all of it. I'd known that, but I was still disappointed.

Meeting Henry back out in the hall, I could tell from his expression that he'd not found anything of interest, either, wherever he'd been. We continued through the hall in silence, he lost in his thoughts and I lost in mine. Talk hadn't come easily between us since I'd found him. He'd often lapsed into absent-mindedness--or, more likely, he'd drifted into painful thoughts. Wherever his mind took him, he never wanted to talk about it. That had frustrated me at first (still did, really), but it wasn't as if pushing him would get us anywhere. I wanted to rebuild to where we'd been before the Circuit had kidnapped him and taken him away from me, but I didn't yet know how to do that. In fact, one of the reasons I'd wanted to return to Oliphant was the hope that I could find some link to the Circuit, something telling me where they were, where I could find them, because where they were, there was probably more draloline, and that was the only thing I knew could bring back Henry's memories. More than once I'd cursed myself for taking so much of it that night I'd been alone in the beach house. If I'd even left a small bit of it, maybe Henry could've taken it . . . but I'd been down that black hole of regret too many times already. No sense in thinking of it again, now.

The hallways were dark, forbidding. Though it was day outside, the electricity, the heat--everything had been shut down. The only light came from too-few windows, and their brightness was more gray than white. It was all so cold: the temperature, the dimness, the emptiness . . . the person beside me.

A sadness filled me, walking those halls, ascending and descending the dark stairwells, peering into gloomy gymnasiums and classrooms, closets of quiet cleaning supplies, dorm rooms with untouched beds and desks. I couldn't explain the feeling--I certainly hadn't missed this place. Perhaps it had something to do with not being much better off now than I had been the last time I'd been here. Meeting Henry here, leaving this place--it had all been about hope. I'd solve all the mysteries of my small world! But here I was now, with the one person I cared about, and I wasn't even sure where I stood with him, and I certainly wasn't better off in the memory department. It seemed that the only things I'd been able to recall were traumatic, and every moment that had seemed to solve a mystery instead birthed three more. I had to catch myself before allowing tears to form in my eyes.

Where I'd actually stayed when I'd been in this place, I didn't know. I'd not paid enough attention to recall the layout of Oliphant, and I'd not been allowed in most areas of the building. When I had moved between wings, it had been under supervision. No one would've let me see anything I shouldn't have seen.

We found nothing, in our wandering, not for the longest time, anyway. We must've been in there at least an hour and a half, and we found nothing of interest. But then, at some point, we came across a set of doors that were locked. They were double doors, at the end of the hall on the third floor; they clearly went into a different part of the building. I sensed that this was the high security area, where Henry and I had been kept, where we'd met one another.

I looked at Henry meaningfully, but he gave me a blank expression in return, so I just turned to the door and examined the lock. I had a strange ability to speak to digital machines, where numbers were required, anyway; I didn't know where the skill had come from. But this lock, while digital, wouldn't work with the electricity off. So I swung my pack off my back and retrieved a few tools from it. While Henry watched, I pried the lock off with a screwdriver, and then the doors popped open.

We entered the high security area, which was almost pitch dark, and I was overwhelmed with the memory of being there. I forced myself to walk down the hall, my flashlight out. It'd been so dehumanizing, being stuck in those tiny rooms. No person was meant to be in a cage. When Henry had found a way to send notes to me, I'd been saved. He'd needed me. We'd needed each other.

I looked at him, side-by-side with me. Where were his thoughts?

"This was where they kept us," I told him. "You were here for a really long time. I was here for a little while, until you helped me escape. We went down into the basement, out through a water tank. A really big pipe. It was . . . scary."

Scary because of the darkness and the weird glowing gel and the anxiety of trying to run? No . . . scary to meet him. To entrust a self I didn't even know to someone who claimed with surreal intensity to be drawn to me. He'd pulled me in. Could I pull him in, now? Whatever rope was tying him to me, I didn't know where the end was in order to grasp it. However near he was to me, he'd never been further.

I didn't want to stay long in this part of the building. We began to retrace our steps, and as we did so, it occurred to me that no one had been in this particular wing. The rest of the building had been torn through, graffitied, littered with bits of broken furniture . . . vandals had been through more than once. But no one had broken the lock off the double doors of this wing; I was the first to do it. Maybe it had been too creepy for others . . . maybe they just hadn't come across it. Whatever the reason, I realized that if anything of interest were stored somewhere, it would probably be in this untouched place.

Pulling my flashlight out, I began to shine it in the rooms. They were depressing as anything--a bed, a toilet, a sink--and they were all identical. Nothing looked out of place in any of them, but the light sent shadows scattering in ways that chilled me. Then, after peeking into several, I came across one that had a small file cabinet in it.

I motioned to Henry, and he followed me in. The two of us sat there in the darkness, my light on a stand as bright as it could be, and we opened and went through the files in each drawer. Name after name of people we didn't know . . . most seemed to be data on various individuals housed at Oliphant from over the past years. This was sensitive information, no doubt--names and addresses of people. It shouldn't have been in the building. But it wasn't anything useful to us. Neither Henry nor I were represented in any of the files. We must've gone through a few hundred of them, but they were useless. Nearing the end of the pile, I was about to give up, when I caught sight of a name I did actually recognize: Roxanne (Roxie) Vargas.

My fingers paused in their page turning. I stared at the name for a moment, looked at the black-and-white photo of a pretty girl pinned to the folder. Roxie had been memorable enough in those early days. She'd disappeared after trying to run for it. I'd never known what'd happened to her--not thought much of her since then, actually. But something struck me, and I folded up the paper with her contact information and slipped it into my pocket. If Henry noticed, he didn't make sign of it.

"Come on," I said, partially because we were done and partially because I didn't want to explain why I'd saved the paper if he had indeed seen me do it. "Let's go."

Henry got to his feet, the shadows making him appear even taller and thinner than he already was. He was like some large white spider. I wanted to take his hand, lead him out of this place, but I hadn't touched him, even by accident, since we'd sat in that cliffside the night after I'd found him. What I'd felt then--that electricity--it had seemed to confuse him. It still confused me. And there'd been a tacit agreement not to tempt it again, not yet. Not until we were ready for what it meant.

I took him out of the high security wing and headed back to where I thought the entrance might be, down some floors, toward the middle of the building. But just as we saw the doors, I stopped. "Henry, wait outside, all right?"

"Really? Why?"

"I just . . . I need to do something. That's all. I'll be one minute."

"All right."

"Maybe five, actually. Ten. But not too long."

He listened, as I'd expected him to, and after he'd gone out I found the nearest descending stairwell and went down, down, down as far as I could go. When I reached the basement, which was dark as night, I retrieved my light and ventured into the black.

Pipes, furnaces, huge machines that were who-knew-what . . . the basement pushed eons under the building. Everywhere darkness, everywhere shadow. It was identical to that night--the night I'd left my room to find Henry for the first time down in this space void. How terrified I'd been, then; some of that came back to me now, moving through the unidentifiable piles and shapes. Back, back . . . it felt like more than ten minutes, as I'd told him, but I kept on. I had to find it. I was determined. And eventually, I did: the water tank. No longer was it glowing all eerie and green as it had when I'd seen it. There was no electricity, of course, and as I shone my light on the glass and saw my own face reflected in it, I thought I saw him behind me--Henry--and startled so much I dropped the light. No, I told myself. It was my imagination. He was outside, for sure. But my memories were crossing into reality, it seemed. As I picked up the light, I was sure I was surrounded by the glow of it all, and as my breath began to condense on the glass, I wrote the only name I knew--Nadia--with my finger and then backed away from it.

I had to move quickly. I didn't want to waste more time. Shuffling in my bag, I pulled out a device much like a lighter but far easier to use and much more reliable. What did I have that I could use, besides that? I wracked my brain . . . shone my light around me.

Within minutes, I was atop the gangplank that led over the water tank, which no longer held water but was full of debris, my shirt balled up in my hand, the lighter under it . . .

Leaving the building, I zipped up my coat over my naked chest and headed toward the gate, where Henry waited at the car. He gave me looks but otherwise, as was his way, said nothing, and I was glad of that. I had nothing to say.

As we turned the wheel to pull away from Oliphant, a deep rumbling followed us, rattled the car, and then a blast so loud and fierce it pushed us along our way. I lost some control of the car when I covered my ears but soon had it aligned to the road again. I felt totally gratified in Henry's wide-eyed shock as he turned back to look at the building, which was crumbling in on itself in the middle, its wings still standing strong but not for long. I watched it all the rearview mirror; more satisfied than I ever remembered being.