Page 43 of Atlas of Unknowable Things

I know what you are, she’d said. People were stealing her memories, she’d written in that cry for help.

I’d thought she’d been mad, but in reality, she was the sane one.

Sabine étienne really was Paloma. And we had done something to her.

Had it been willing? It must have been. There was no way I would have subjected a person to invasive tests against her will.

But what if it wasn’t against her will? Her grandmother had said she was obsessed with money and fame and desperate to be part of what happened up at Hildegard.

If she had volunteered herself, if she had wanted to be part of the experiment, and if I had truly thought the experiment would be beneficial for humanity, would I have done it?

Whatever we’d done, it had begun to undo itself, possibly when I’d shown her the photo that night, the photo of the werewolf victim, which I now knew was a photo of her.

It must have triggered something, and she’d realized I wasn’t her cousin.

Instead, I was a very dangerous person she needed to get away from as quickly as possible.

Her note had said she’d gone to California, but she’d probably just taken off and hidden somewhere in New York. She was probably still there.

Disconcerted, I stood up and stretched. This was getting to me.

I knew I was close now, but there was still so much outside of my grasp.

Setting the binder to the side momentarily, I returned to the cabinet and pulled out the pamphlet I’d found earlier.

Something had bothered me about it before, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.

Now slowly I paged through it, looking at the faces, putting names to them.

On the second-to-last page was a photo of two men identified as the CFO and the chairman of the board of directors, respectively.

The CFO had a name I recognized—Uta Hopper Symon.

But it wasn’t just the name that was familiar; it was the face.

He looked different, much more put together, wearing an expensive suit and boasting a winning smile, but it was the same man who had picked me up at the airport in Denver.

It was Jim, the supposed handyman. I’d wondered why he’d been wearing an expensive watch to do yard work.

I now knew he never was doing yard work.

He’d been wearing a costume, to what? To spy on me?

Feeling increasingly uneasy, I put the brochure back and returned to the Project Bluebird binder, trying to make sense of what I could.

The notes were pretty chaotic, and a lot of them would have made sense only to Charles.

For instance, I found a loose sheet of paper covered in digits.

They were sums, bursts of quick arithmetic, scrawled by a hasty hand—his, not mine.

For some reason, I had a rush of anger when I looked at the piece of paper.

This was important; I just didn’t know how.

It was as if it was trapped just on the other side of a wall I couldn’t see through.

Had I been angry with Charles in this reality, too?

And if so, what could a bunch of numbers have to do with it?

I folded up the paper and put it in my pocket.

I would need to spend some time with it later.

As I read on, there was a lot that went over my head—mentions of hostile material and biohazards, but I couldn’t quite understand what any of that had to do with the work that we did.

Also, although the hippocampal prosthesis was indeed a known piece of technology, there was no indication of exactly how we altered it.

One thing, though, became very clear—this experimental procedure we had engineered involved putting the participant into a state that sounded very similar to sleep paralysis.

I paused and stared up at the ceiling. Was this how Robin was created?

And was it possible that as my memories started resurfacing, that paralytic state had been reactivated?

My head was spinning so I decided to take a break, but just as I was gathering everything back up, I noticed something in one of the notes that I’d missed on the first few passes. It was a note from me to Charles about an unsecured entrance on the northwest side of the observatory.

The observatory—the one they told me had been torn down.

These were recent notes, less than a year old, which meant that the observatory was still standing.

I just had to find it. I moved over to the table with the maps of campus and the blueprints of the island and started sifting through them.

I couldn’t help but laugh when the truth of it struck me—I already knew exactly where the observatory was. It was the temple in the woods.

I straightened out all the papers, put the binder back in the filing cabinet, locked it, and then left to find this unsecured entrance.

Dusk was just beginning to fall as I headed outside.

I knew I had to find the temple, but I wasn’t exactly sure where it was.

Despite passing the TO OBSERVATORY sign multiple times, I was pretty sure I’d been on every trail on campus and hadn’t found it that way.

And yet I’d managed to get there on my own twice before—once when I was out of my mind on psychedelics and once when Guillaume had chased me.

Some part of me must have known where the observatory was both times, and for some reason that part had led me there when in a heightened state of consciousness.

As I headed through the woods, I did my best to relax and trust that I knew where I was going.

It couldn’t be very far from the center of campus because I hadn’t run that far the night of my attack.

I found the observatory path and started following it, but soon, trusting my instincts, I diverged, setting off through the trees until I came out at a familiar little clearing: the strange space with the yew tree.

Carefully I made my way down the slope and then came to stand at the tree.

From there, I surveyed the area, the fence in front of me, the bushes to the side, until I found it—a break in the foliage on the left side of the tree.

Hurrying over to it, I pushed through the thicket and cleared sapling branches out of my way until I emerged into a second clearing—the temple clearing.

I began searching the massive structure for this unsecured entrance on the northwest side of the building.

Eventually I found a gate and a wooden door.

With a heave, I pulled the gate open, and a terrible squeal echoed through the clearing as metal ground against stone.

Inside, the hall was enormous, cold, and dark.

It stretched out before me like a magnificent cathedral.

Throughout the expanse rose odd, vaguely terrifying statues, though from a distance, I couldn’t make out what exactly they were.

Along the wall were torches mounted like sconces, but they were extinguished.

And yet somehow the space was dimly lit, which seemed impossible until I looked up and realized I was standing under an oculus, a circular aperture in the domed ceiling that opened directly up to the night sky.

“Like in the Pantheon,” I whispered.

A common feature of neoclassical architecture, the oculus functioned as a light source, but it often served a deeper, more symbolic purpose as well.

As an open space, a kind of eye of God looking down on us all, it was meant to serve as a connecting point, a kind of gateway between mankind and the heavens above.

For a moment, I wondered what happened when it rained, but then I noticed there was a drainage system, little holes driven into the marble through which the water might collect.

I was about to get down on my hands and knees to examine them further, but a large model—a skeleton of some animal—caught my eye.

As my vision adjusted, I could see now that that the statues were in fact all skeletons. I was in some kind of museum.

Taking a closer look at the display, though, I realized it couldn’t be real.

It was a ghastly piece of art—it must have been.

Rising up on two legs, the creature was twisted and hunched, a monstrous torso attached to a skull that looked vaguely canine.

It brought to mind ancient Norse gods and biblical demons all wrapped in a single putrid package.

In fact it brought to mind the thing I’d seen standing at the foot of my bed.

“Isabelle?”

I turned to see Finn standing at the entrance.

He laughed, a low, disconcerting vocalization. “I thought it was you,” he said. “When did you remember?”

Backing away, I shook my head. “I don’t.”

“Yes, you do,” he said, moving slowly toward me. “There’s no need to lie. I’m on your side. I didn’t like Isabelle, but I like you, Robin. I’m willing to help you, especially if you can help us.”

“Why do you think I’m Isabelle?” I asked.

“Because you’re here. If you’re here, then you remember.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so instead of responding, I tried to buy myself some time.

Looking around the massive space, I concentrated on the strange displays, and taking them in, I saw that they were all similarly unnatural: nightmarish iterations of fiends that have populated folklore since the beginning of time—arachnoid monstrosities with skulls like goats, enormous vulpine specimens with scorpionic tails, and creature after creature with grotesque, twisting horns.

I stopped in front of a display of a hunched-over beast that had enormous spikes jutting from its spine. “What is all this stuff?”

“It’s a collection,” he said.

“A collection of what? From where?”

“From here.” He looked at me sideways. “So then you don’t remember everything, do you? Have you remembered the code yet?”