Page 42 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

BLACK HELICOPTERS, PROJECT BLUE BOOK, AND MK ULTRA

Thousands of government-sponsored experiments did take place at hospitals, universities, and military bases around our nation.

Some were unethical, not only by today’s standards, but by the standards of the time in which they were conducted.

They failed both the test of our national values, and the test of humanity.

… So today, on behalf of another generation of American leaders and another generation of American citizens, the United States of America offers a sincere apology to those of our citizens who were subjected to these experiments, to their families, and to their communities.

Back in my cabana, I locked the door, covered all the windows, and set the relic on the coffee table, half expecting it to magically transform itself into a marvel that would explain everything, but it just sat there.

Retrieving a magnifying glass from the desk, I lifted the artifact and examined it, looking for any kind of markings or defects, anything that might serve as some kind of clue, but there was nothing.

I turned it upside down, looked at it from the side, and took it into the windowless bathroom in a misguided attempt to see if it had any kind of luminescent qualities.

I even shook it, and while it did seem like there was a faint rattle inside, that got me no closer to understanding what to do with it.

So I just sat and stared at it for what seemed like hours, hoping some epiphany would come. It never did.

There was still so much I was missing. I felt like I was close to some kind of solution, but that it was just out of reach.

Then it occurred to me that since the very beginning, everything that had happened to me at Hildegard had felt like a video game.

I would discover a clue that would lead me to a location where I would discover either another clue or a locked pathway.

Then I would receive yet another clue that would lead me to a key that would open that lock, and so on.

Now that I was almost certain that I had done this to myself, I had to assume that I’d left those clues for myself.

It stood to reason, then, that if I searched through any clues I had yet to solve, that they would lead me to the next step toward whatever I was supposed to find.

One thing that bothered me was why I had made Robin allergic to bees when Isabelle was not, but as I sat there staring at the relic, the answer came to me.

It was so simple I’d almost missed it: I hadn’t wanted to find the missing owl key, and thus the relic, until I had recovered enough of my memory to know that I was Isabelle.

For some reason, Isabelle could go in the apiary, but Robin couldn’t.

I had essentially locked that part of the path until I had enough information to use it wisely.

But the problem was, now that I had what I’d been looking for, I had no idea what to do with it.

Then it occurred to me: I hadn’t figured out I was Isabelle on my own.

Whatever clue was supposed to lead me there had been skipped over when Guillaume attacked me.

Aspen and Lexi told me who I was. I hadn’t been the one to figure it out.

No clue had led me here, which meant there was still a clue out there for me to find, something that I was supposed to have found before the owl key.

I was almost there, but not quite, and my inability to cross that threshold was nearly driving me mad.

Frustrated, I walked outside and sank into a chair, staring up at the sky.

Dusk was coming in fast, but the moon was already visible, an alabaster crescent ushering in the night.

As I stared up at it, I was reminded of the strange feeling I’d had when I’d first found The Book of Widows—that vague, eerie feeling I was being watched.

I sat up suddenly, my memories unspooling back to the island, back to the night Aspen had drugged me and I’d gotten lost in the woods, and finally all the way back to my time in New York.

There I was again, sitting at the desk, feeling someone standing behind me, and when I’d come back to my senses, I’d found I’d drawn four symbols. These four symbols:

Since I’d first seen the tiles, I’d sensed that they were vaguely familiar but had quickly dismissed that instinct.

Moon symbolism, after all, was fairly common, but now it was clear to me.

I’d drawn them back in New York when I was in some kind of hypnotic state.

They’d been important enough for me to carry them through from my time here as Isabelle to my life as Robin.

They were a message to me; I was sure of it.

I just didn’t know what they could mean.

The widows’ keys were used for divination.

I knew that much. You selected three tiles, probably tossed them in the air (or something similar), and saw what order they landed in.

Then you consulted the text to see what the combination meant.

But I had drawn four symbols, not three.

Thumbing through the book, I tried to make sense of it, but nothing came to me until I landed on an entry I’d noticed before but glossed over. There was a single mark in it. Someone had underlined the word toad.

Vibrant Earth, Desolate Moon, Stable Sea

From a mountaintop, he sees three new goats. A wolf attacks. It takes only meat. The toad looks on.

Why would that be underlined? I thought through everything I’d encountered up until that point, and then I landed on something.

Back in the abandoned building, there was an office that had reminded me of Charles.

The painting in there had drawn my attention.

It was a painting of a toad. It couldn’t be a coincidence.

With absolute certainty, I knew that this must be the clue I’d missed.

I had to get back into that office and examine that painting.

As I hurried back outside, I thought I heard Finn call after me, but I didn’t answer.

I had a singular purpose now and couldn’t be distracted.

There was a strange charge to the atmosphere as I started into the woods and along the trail to the abandoned building.

When I reached the front door, I used Dorian’s card to open it and started down the hall to the office.

Inside that small room, every surface seemed to scream Charles.

I could honestly still smell the ghost of his cologne.

So where the hell was he? Ignoring the papers spread out over the desk, I went directly to the painting of the toad.

I stood before it a moment, looking closely to see if there might be a clue somewhere in its design, but nothing immediately jumped out, aside from the fact that it was a pretty bad painting.

Carefully I felt around the edges of the canvas, then lifted it down from the wall and turned it over.

There on the posterior, I found exactly what I sought.

A small key was taped to the canvas backing.

I removed the key and hurried back out into the hall, but as I started toward the conference room, I had a feeling I was being watched.

“Hello?” I called, but I was met with only silence. Shrugging it off, I hurried into the conference room and tried the key in the filing cabinet.

It turned with ease and opened to reveal a wealth of folders and a single white binder.

When I grabbed one of the folders, a Hildegard brochure slipped out.

It was a few years old and seemed to be fundraising material.

Flipping through it, I saw a bunch of bland promotional photos and then a list of names at the end.

They appeared to be the members of the board of directors.

A few of them were circled. Something about the brochure gave me a bad feeling, but I couldn’t quite put my finger on why.

I was about to look through it a second time when my gaze fell on the white binder, and I could barely believe what I was seeing.

It was large and white, with a plastic cover, and it had a label on the front: Project Bluebird.

My bluebird! I nearly screamed.

With tension in every muscle of my body, I sat down and opened it.

I could barely believe what I’d found. Project Bluebird was a binder?

It had never been a person. All along, it had been more research collected in one of Charles’s Luddite binders.

I started reading, the minutes ticking by as I plunged into the only world I used to know.

I tried my best to understand what I was reading.

It was the work Charles and I had done together, but it was far beyond my current realm of understanding.

I found the content completely unfamiliar, at least at first. The more I read, however, the more it felt like an unused part of my brain began to awaken, long-dormant synapses firing again, connections re-forming.

Much of our research revolved around the inherent neuroplasticity of the human brain.

We had modified an existing piece of technology called a hippocampal prosthesis, and using electrodes inserted directly into brain tissue, we had done something called deep brain stimulation.

We had been breaking down synaptic connections and essentially rewiring them.

Through this process, we could alter the way people think, the way they remember.

I found myself trapped somewhere between disgust and pride.

The invasiveness of the procedure turned my stomach, but the fact that Charles and I had come up with it was pretty exciting to me.

I read on, and with a sinking feeling, I began to realize that there had been testing on human subjects, or at least one human subject—Sabine étienne.

A photograph accompanied her biographical information, and when I saw her face clearly, I realized it was Paloma.