She almost succeeds, and only the long, thin scratch on the back of her hand is a reminder of what happened.

Something clicks in her head.

– Emily Johnson? – The student tries to catch his breath. – Let's go see Miss Clark.

And in her eyes is the unexplored Milky Way;

the unguided stars wander back and forth;

all roads end with Rome someday,

but without Rome the roads will never end.

The student leads her down service corridors-networks of narrow, windowless passageways with dim yellow lights and an endless string of doors without any identifying marks-so it's a mystery to Emily how he navigates through them. They enter the neurology department in two and a half minutes – the familiar break room, the cubbyhole, and the large space of the main part of the ward.

Emily enters Clark's office, holding her breath – if she had messed up or made a big mistake, she would have been reprimanded by either the attending or the head nurse, but not by the neurosurgeon: he has nothing to do with the junior staff, unless, of course, it was his own team.

Clark stands half-turned, his arms crossed over his chest, his white coat sloppily slung over his shoulders, his lips curved into a semblance of a smile.

Emily's spine sucked – fear mixed with a strange kind of awe. If it were Rebecca, she'd have pressed her lips together, relaxed her shoulders, and looked at the whole thing through a spiteful squint. But Emily isn't Rebecca; all she can do is wrinkle the already creased fabric of her gown and wriggle from foot to foot.

Of all the hospital's sixty-thousand-person staff, Miss Clark needed her.

Or…?

– Johnson," the neurosurgeon's heavy stare is almost physically palpable, "is our psychiatrist, Dr. Charles Clark.

Oh shit. Good thing she didn't say a word to him.

Her lungs run out of air as the student who called her here sits down on the padded couch and puts his leg over her leg; but-she's willing to swear! – at that moment, mischievous sparks flicker in his dark eyes.

The prank was undeniably a success.

Charlie had a mop of blond hair, ripped jeans, and a T-shirt with the Beatles emblem on it. Emily mentally excuses herself: Anyone would mistake him for a student intern; only the gray nametag that had fallen off his long robe gives him away as a doctor.

She looks closely: a long black Swatch strap, gray and blue Balmain, and a careless, as if intentionally placed blot on the lower left field of the robe – another famous logo, the name of which she does not remember. An envious sigh – in Britain, doctors are paid almost more than in other countries.

– Miss Johnson…

– You can just say Emily," the nurse says quietly, trying not to be distracted by her thoughts.

Are they brother and sister or husband and wife? Which one is older? And what is this woman's name anyway?

Why is she here…?

Charlie only silently spreads his hands as if answering unasked questions.

– Let's get right to the point. – Clark-whose-woman sits down in a wide, high-backed chair. – They say you spent the morning with a certain patient with a very strange diagnosis, right?

– But we didn't talk for more than half an hour. – Emily shakes her head. – I was only asking…

– You were talking about the mosaic. – Charlie leans his head back relaxed and looks up at the ceiling. – Just so you know, a mosaic, Emily, is part of a system.

– What system? – For the second time today, Johnson feels like a complete fool.

– Her memory, of course.

Everything Emily gives out in response fits into a simple, "Eh?"

– Our brain," Charlie explains patiently, "tries to cover the gaps in our memory with memories from nowhere. Or, if the trauma is too severe, it clings to words, places, actions-and inserts them like missing pieces.

– Like a mosaic," Emily guesses.

– That's right," the psychiatrist nods contentedly. – Her brain is clinging to two factors: it is you, Emily, and the puzzle. The puzzle. A fragment. A stumpy piece of life – whether past or present. And this idea-that she had something to do with it all-is now firmly planted in her head and taking root there.

– Like a virus?

– Exactly. Like a virus.

– She's about to have surgery. – It's like the neurosurgeon didn't even hear them talking. – We're gonna cut her head open again to see how she's doing. – A funny joke from her lips sounds like black irony. – She'll be conscious for a while, and Dr. Clark advises that you should be around. Maybe this way we can provoke… something.

– "Intraoperative brain mapping," Emily says in a cursory voice. Nightly vigils over textbooks have had their justifiable effect – Clark throws her a look full of surprise. I guess she's the kind of person who thinks all nurses are idiots.

– You think there's a tumor in there?

– We don't think anything," cuts off Clark-who-is-anything-woman. – It's Higgins who's thinking. And while he decides it's a good idea to open up her skull and make sure there's no sign of a tumor and her visual center has been removed for some other reason that the CT and MRI don't show. And he doesn't care at all that the scans don't show that very tumor.

– Do you mind? – Emily asks timidly.

– I'm not sure that prying into someone else's head without a good reason is a good idea," the neurosurgeon answers grudgingly. – But Mark insists on reducing all risks.

– By increasing them? – Johnson barely audibly clarifies. Clark-sitting-in-a-chair rolls her eyes.

– That's because nothing just happens," Charlie says. – You can't wake up blind or deaf or dumb and then go about your business in peace. And you can't go blind in a second and keep your eyeballs intact. She doesn't have any external effects, does she? So there must be something inside. – He folded his fingers into little arrows. – So it turns out that in order to know the causes of blindness, we need to know the previous diagnosis. If we know the diagnosis, we know what was treated. We find out what, we find out where and who. – Charlie yawns. – And so on.

Drowned in so much information, Emily finally loses hope of a lifeline.

– But why me?

– You'll sit with her for the whole operation," the neurosurgeon begins to lose patience. – What don't you understand?