Chapter 1 I wasn’t sure whether I was dead or alive. Perhaps alive in the sense that I was still breathing, but was I even breathing? I wasn’t sure. I wasn’t sure of anything. Blackness swallowed me whole, and not the kind of blackness that comes from being in a dark room. No, this darkness was heavy and thick, and it wove into my body making my skin damp, and my limbs heavy. Where this dark place was, or how long I’d been here, I didn’t know. I might have been here for years, month, days, or even just a few seconds. Time felt nonexistent. After awhile, I started to convince myself that I must be dead. That the memoria extracto—or whatever the heck that memory removing rock Stephan had used on me was called—had taken my life, instead of wiping away my mind. But how could I tell for sure if I’d died, or if I was still thriving? I mean was there really a difference between death and losing every ounce of who you are? The only problem with my “I was dead theory” was that if I was dead, then why could I feel pain blazing in my leg—the exact leg Stephan had stabbed me in? Was feeling pain possible after you died? But if I wasn’t dead, and instead my memory had been erased, along with my emotions, then