It was Martha who asked the question.

She asked it in the mill, on a Wednesday afternoon in late October, when the light through the high windows was the color of weak tea and the looms were clattering in their endless mechanical conversation. Martha's hands were on a bolt of gray wool, her fingers moving with the same automatic precision that everyone in the room had developed after years of repetition, but her eyes were on Evelyn.

"You don't remember Mary's laugh," Evelyn had said. It was not an accusation. It was a statement of fact, flat and clinical, the way Dr. Moriarty spoke.

Martha stopped moving. Her hands went still on the wool.

"How do you know that?" she asked.

"Because I don't remember it either," Evelyn said. "I remember that you told me about it. I remember you said she laughed when you came home from the mill, that it was the only thing that made the day bearable. But I don't remember the laugh itself. I don't remember what it sounded like."

Martha stared at her for a long moment. The looms clattered around them, indifferent.

"I didn't realize you were going to the transmissions too," Martha said.

"I didn't realize you were."

But of course they were. They were all going. The Royal Military Institute had been very systematic about its recruitment. They had targeted the mill, the factories, the sweatshops—places where women worked twelve-hour days for starvation wages, places where a woman would sign anything for the promise of money. The compensation was generous. The procedure was described as painless. The catch, if anyone had thought to ask, was that you did not leave the procedure the same person who entered.

Martha had undergone two transmissions. Evelyn had undergone three. Neither of them had told the other because they were both ashamed of what they were losing, and because shame, like everything else in their lives, was a private affair.

"It started with small things," Martha said. Her voice was quiet, barely audible over the looms. "I forgot the recipe for my mother's stew. I forgot my sister's birthday. I forgot the name of the street where I grew up. Each one felt like nothing. It's just a recipe, I told myself. It's just a date. It's just a street. But they kept adding up, and one morning I woke up and I couldn't remember what my daughter's laugh sounded like, and I sat on the edge of the bed for an hour trying to call it back, and it wasn't there."

"What did Dr. Moriarty say?"

"I didn't tell Dr. Moriarty. I stopped going."

Martha's hands resumed their work on the bolt of gray wool. She did not look at Evelyn again.

"Stop going," she said. "While you still remember enough to stop."

Evelyn wanted to explain that she could not stop. She wanted to explain about Thomas, about the two hundred pounds, about the arithmetic that made everything else irrelevant. She wanted to explain that she had already forgotten too much, that stopping now would mean she had lost pieces of herself for nothing.

But she could not find the words. Or rather, she could find the words—she had always been able to find words—but she could not find the feeling behind them. The urgency. The desperation. The need to be understood.

She opened her mouth. She closed it again.

Martha looked at her. And in Martha's eyes, Evelyn saw something she had not seen before: fear. Not fear of the transmissions, not fear of the silver thread, but fear of her. Of Evelyn. Of the flat, empty quietness that Evelyn had become.

"You're further along than me, aren't you?" Martha whispered. "You've lost more."

"Yes," Evelyn said. The word came out without emotion.

"Can you still feel anything?"

Evelyn considered the question. She sat with it the way she had sat with the silver thread inside her skull. She took inventory of her inner life the way a shopkeeper takes inventory of a stockroom—methodically, without attachment.

She could feel the bench she was sitting on. The pressure of wood against bone. She could feel the cold air on her face. She could feel the texture of the wool between her fingers.

But the things that mattered—the things that were supposed to matter—she could not find them.

"I can feel the cold," she said. "I can feel the wool. I cannot feel you."

Martha's face changed. It crumpled, the way paper crumples before it is discarded. Tears came to her eyes, but Evelyn watched them without any corresponding movement in her own chest.

"I have to go," Evelyn said. She stood up. She walked away from Martha and the bolt of gray wool and the clattering looms.

She walked to the laboratory.

Dr. Moriarty was waiting for her, as he always was. He had a new machine, he said. A refinement. The fourth transmission would be different. More efficient. Better calibrated.

Evelyn lay on the table. She watched the silver thread descend. She thought about Martha's question—can you still feel anything?—and she realized that the question itself was a kind of engine, a small thing that had been placed inside her and was now working, slowly and inevitably, toward some unknown conclusion.

The silver thread touched her forehead.

The fourth transmission took her memory of Martha. Not Martha's face or Martha's name or Martha's existence in the world—those were still there, catalogued and filed. It took the memory of the moment when Martha held her hand during the first transmission. The warmth of Martha's calloused palm. The pressure of Martha's fingers. The unspoken promise that passed between them: I am here, and you are here, and we will get through this together.

When Evelyn opened her eyes, that moment was gone. She knew it had existed—she knew, intellectually, that someone had held her hand—but the knowing was abstract, like knowing that a historical event had occurred. She could not touch it. She could not feel it.

She sat up. Dr. Moriarty was writing on his clipboard.

"Any side effects?" he asked, not looking up.

"No," Evelyn said. And she meant it. The absence of pain was the only thing she still knew how to measure.

She went home. She climbed the stairs to her room above the print shop. She sat on the edge of her bed and looked at the photograph of Thomas on her nightstand.

She could remember his birth. She could remember the pain, the blood, the midwife's rough hands. She could remember the moment they placed him on her chest, the weight of him, the impossible warmth.

But she could not remember the feeling.

She picked up the photograph. She studied the child's face. Wide eyes. Dark hair. A small mouth curved into a smile that had been there for a fraction of a second, captured and frozen.

Who are you? she thought. And the question was not rhetorical. It was a genuine inquiry, directed at the photograph, directed at herself, directed at the empty space where her love for this child used to live.

The photograph did not answer.

She put it down. She lay back on the bed. She stared at the ceiling, at the cracks in the plaster, at the water stains that had become constellations she could no longer read.

She could still feel the cold. She could still feel the wool.

She could not feel anything that mattered.

And somewhere in the machinery of her mind, a small engine was still running, powered by a question that Martha had asked in a mill on a Wednesday afternoon:

Can you still feel anything?

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