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THE BAKED fish and seaweed that I’d eagerly consumed churned in my stomach.
I cringed, remembering my earlier conversation with Valcas—how the TSTA wanted to control travel talents, and Commissioner Reese’s strange question: “Miss Winston, do you believe that you are in charge of preventing death?” Was there an underlying meaning to his question? Had he known that I had the potential to become a healer like my father, that there was more to my talent than being able to transport silhouettes? Was that why the Commissioner had been upset that Valcas was still looking for my father even though his sentence had ended? And why I’d been forced into what was essentially a death mission?
Something didn’t add up.
Ivory gave my father a knowing look, as if she’d solved the puzzle that remained a jumble of misshapen pieces in my head. “Your suspicion helps explain the TSTA’s obsessive concern over why the accused committed their infractions,” she said. “Not that I gave up any of that information.”
I squinted, trying to remember the details of Ivory’s hearing before the Commissioner. “He gave you a choice of three million dollars or the mission for a single first-time infraction. Wasn’t that harsh?”
“Maybe, maybe not. What I did was worse than creating a daily reminder,” she answered.
My father frowned. “An overwrite?”
Ivory lowered her eyes. “I had to. To protect someone I love.”
“Huh?” I was completely lost.
Ivory’s hematite eyes bored into mine. “Have you seen a daily reminder destroyed?”
I nodded, remembering Valcas tearing the photo of us into pieces, which were then set on fire at the hearing. “Yes, one of the daily reminders that the TSTA had charged me with was resolved at the hearing.” I looked over at Valcas. “The Commissioner let him destroy it.”
Valcas frowned as I explained. “Valcas tore the daily reminder—a photograph his past self had written on—into tiny pieces, and then one of the bailiffs brought over a plate and a lit candle. After the photograph was burned, Commissioner Reese dropped the charge.”
Ivory crossed her arms. “The tearing and the fire are more than ceremonial. Those acts deleted the reminder from his past version’s memory and freed him of the reminder. Amazing how that works—officially destroying just one copy of the daily reminder is enough to destroy all of them.”
“Oh,” I said, looking at Valcas, wondering whether he’d carried any of the memories of the White Tower with him before the TSTA hearing. No wonder he’d been surprised when he caught the glimpses of what I’d recorded about his past self inside the travel glasses.
Valcas still frowned, but his face was otherwise blank.
I turned back to Ivory. “So, what did you do? Destroy a daily reminder on your own?”
She nodded. “Yeah, there are other ways of destroying daily reminders. I did something called overwriting, meaning that I destroyed a daily reminder by obliterating what was written and then writing something else in its place.” She looked away. “Like I said, I did it for someone else, not the person who created the original daily reminder, but yeah, for someone else.”
My father laced his fingers together. His face was solemn. “That is brave,” he said. Then, as if my ongoing confusion blazed like headlights on my face, he explained, “Ivory’s action counted as a double infraction. Technically, she’d created a second daily reminder; and, her knowledge about the original daily reminder counted as a failure to report its existence.”
I frowned, understanding. Just to be sure, I tried to explain it aloud, the way Edgar would have done. “In other words, Person A created a daily reminder to harm Person B. Ivory protected Person B by overwriting Person A’s daily reminder.”
Valcas squeezed me lightly. “Yes, exactly.”
“So then the person Commissioner Reese said he’d find out about and charge for being contributorily liable was Person B, the person you wanted to protect?”
Ivory nodded. “Yes, someone I care about very much.”
“Why didn’t you just report the original daily reminder to the Commissioner so it could be destroyed? Wouldn’t that have helped your friend? Wouldn’t you have avoided an infraction?”
“It’s complicated,” Ivory said, running a hand through her short white locks. “Super complicated.”