At three forty-five, I could have followed NS to the east gate.
I knew which road A.V.'s driver would take toward Yandong University Hospital. I knew the clinic floor from the appointment card. If I moved quickly, I could reach the entrance before June disappeared behind a door that had already admitted everyone except me.
I stayed in the fitting room.
Kitty watched NS leave with June's card.
"You are not going after them?" she asked.
"It is a hospital appointment, not an enemy checkpoint."
"You said that like you were explaining it to yourself."
I folded an empty gown bag until the plastic became a hard white strip.
"If she wanted me there, she would have told me."
Kitty returned a row of sample caps to their box.
"That has never stopped you before."
"Maybe it should have."
My phone was already open beneath the table.
I had searched Young Adult Memory Clinic.
The results offered too many possibilities: sleep disorders, depression, medication effects, seizures, autoimmune disease, head injury, vitamin deficiency, infection, and rare neurodegenerative conditions. Every page contained a different future. Every symptom sounded like June if I was frightened enough.
I closed them all.
A search bar could give me diseases.
It could not give me permission.
At six twenty, June sent one message.
Back at the dorm. Tired. Recording tomorrow at ten. Please come.
I typed three questions.
I erased all three.
I will be there.
The university media room was smaller than the auditorium and far less forgiving.
A dark blue curtain covered the rear wall. Two soft lights stood beyond the camera. Tape marks on the floor showed where June's chair, lectern, and water glass had to remain between takes. A sound technician clipped a wireless microphone beneath the fold of her blouse and asked her to count backward from ten.
"Ten, nine, eight, seven, six."
June stopped.
"Keep going," the technician said.
"I know. I was waiting to see whether the level changed."
He adjusted the receiver without reacting.
"Five, four, three, two, one."
The recording was only a contingency. The live address remained the official speech, but the ceremony broadcast needed a clean backup in case illness, weather, power failure, or another national emergency made the stage unusable.
June's mother joined through a private monitor. A.V. appeared only as a black square labeled Guest Adviser.
The communications officer placed the approved script on the teleprompter.
Kitty stood near the captioning desk. NS held the printed continuity copy. I had no technical role, but June had asked the camera operator to put my chair directly behind the lens.
The five cue cards rested on my knees.
FOUNDATION.
YEAR ONE.
THE WALL.
THE PANDEMIC.
TOMORROW.
June looked at them before she looked at me.
"We can record in sections," the officer said. "The edit will appear continuous."
"One complete attempt first," June replied.
Her mother leaned toward her camera.
"There is no practical benefit to making this harder."
"There is to me."
The officer called for silence.
The red light came on.
June began.
She carried the Foundation Year passage cleanly. She spoke about arriving as strangers, learning one another's habits, and discovering that medicine was not only the study of bodies but the responsibility of remaining when another person was afraid.
At Year One, she slowed.
The script mentioned the King and Queen selection, the rain, and the Golden Lovers statue. Her eyes moved away from the teleprompter and found me beyond the camera.
"During our first year," she said, "I told someone an old campus story. It says the Lovers sometimes recognize two people before those people recognize themselves. He said statues cannot know anything. At the time, I thought he had missed the point."
That sentence was not in the approved draft.
The communications officer looked toward June's mother.
I remembered the night.
June had spoken with complete seriousness beneath festival lights while I laughed and told her stone did not choose anyone. Promises belonged to people, I had said, and people were usually bad at keeping them.
I had believed dismissing the story made me wiser than it.
June continued before anyone could stop her.
"Perhaps the story was never asking us to believe in stone. Perhaps it was asking whether we would recognize the person standing in front of us before time taught us too late."
My fingers tightened around YEAR ONE.
She reached the Wall.
The teleprompter displayed the line about constitutional forces entering the city.
June said, "When the constitutional students entered the city."
She stopped.
The officer raised one hand.
"Cut."
June closed her eyes.
"I know the difference."
"It was one word," Kitty said.
"It changed who saved us."
NS marked the line on the printed copy.
June's mother spoke through the monitor.
"This is why you record by paragraph."
"This is why we do another take," June replied.
The red light went dark.
June asked for five minutes.
She walked into the corridor without looking at me.
I followed.
She stood beside a vending machine with both hands pressed against its warm metal side.
"I found the appointment card," I said.
June did not turn.
"NS told me."
"He told me nothing else."
"That must have been difficult for him."
"Why does he have your medical file?"
"Because I left it in a taxi once. Then I left it in a lecture room. He offered to keep it."
"Why not me?"
June faced me.
There were shadows beneath her eyes that makeup could not remove.
"Because you had stopped sleeping. Because strangers sent you photographs of bodies from the Wall and told you to count them. Because I found bottles under your bed and listened to you say everyone would be better if you disappeared. Which part of that was I supposed to place my fear on top of?"
I had no defense that did not make her carry me again.
"What happened at the clinic?"
"They asked questions."
"What kind?"
"The date. The city. A clock. Numbers backward. Five words I had to repeat and remember later."
"Did you remember them?"
June gave a small, exhausted laugh.
"I remembered three without help. Four with a category clue. The fifth felt familiar when they told me, which apparently does not count."
The vending machine hummed between us.
"What were the words?" I asked.
"I do not remember. That is almost funny, right?"
It was not.
"Did they tell you what is causing this?"
"They are following it."
"That is not what I asked."
"It is what I can answer."
I looked through the glass at rows of water neither of us wanted.
"How long has this been happening?"
"Long enough that I cannot blame the online exams. Long enough that NS learned not to ask whether I remembered something when he could simply tell me again."
"And your mother?"
"She knows enough."
"A.V.?"
Her expression closed.
"His family helped arrange a specialist consultation. My mother trusts him. His driver is discreet."
"So he knows when you see a neurologist, but I did not even know there was something to hide."
"That is not because he matters more."
"Then why him?"
June's eyes filled before her voice changed.
"Because you matter enough to destroy me when you start looking at me like I am already gone."
I stepped closer.
She stepped back.
"Do not," she said. "Not because you are a stranger. Because you are not."
That hurt more than rejection.
"I am not asking you to tell the class," I said. "I am asking you to stop making me learn your life from things you drop on floors."
"I was going to tell you."
"When?"
"When I could tell you without watching hope leave your face."
"You do not get to decide which truth I can survive."
"You decided for me every time you pushed me away because you thought you were ruining my future."
The words found their target.
We had both called secrecy protection.
We had both used love as permission to make the other person's choice.
"Does it have a name?" I asked.
June looked toward the media-room door.
"Not one I can give you today."
It was not a denial.
I wanted to demand tomorrow, a report, a scan, every answer NS had carried while I remained outside. Instead, I held out the five cue cards.
"Then give me one rule."
"What rule?"
"If you get lost, if a room goes blank, or if you cannot remember where you are supposed to be, call me. You do not have to explain first."
June stared at the cards.
"What if I forget to call?"
"Then let me stay close enough to notice."
She took FOUNDATION from my hand.
"That sounds like a promise."
"I am trying to become less bad at those."
June wiped beneath both eyes before the makeup could run.
"Come back behind the camera," she said. "I can find the words when I see you."
The second take was not perfect.
June paused seven seconds before the pandemic section. I raised THE PANDEMIC just below the camera, where the frame could not see it.
She found the next sentence.
She spoke about windows filled with candles, lectures reduced to unstable connections, PPE exchanged in parking lots, and classmates who learned to recognize one another by voices because masks had hidden their faces for months.
She included the new line from the transparency report.
"We learned that a rule written equally can still fail unequally when some people know which door to knock on and others are left outside it."
Nobody asked her to soften it.
At TOMORROW, her voice steadied.
"We do not leave Utopia as proof that suffering was worthwhile. We leave as proof that suffering did not receive the final word."
She looked directly into the lens.
For one second, it felt as if she was looking across years instead of a room.
"Whatever distance waits after today, may we recognize the people who carried us before time teaches us too late."
The red light went dark.
Nobody spoke until the technician announced that the file was secure.
June's mother asked them to repair the long pause and replace the mistaken first take entirely. The officer explained that only the completed second take would be retained as the official backup.
A message appeared on June's phone.
A.V.: The second version was stronger. Please rest before the next rehearsal.
She covered the screen, but not quickly enough.
This time, I did not ask.
June gathered the cue cards and put them in order.
"They gave me five words at the clinic," she said quietly. "I lost two before the room was finished with me."
She placed the cards back into my hands.
"But I remembered the statue story. Every word of it."
"You always liked that story."
"You always laughed at it."
"I was an idiot."
"You still do not believe it."
I looked at TOMORROW on top of the stack.
"Maybe I have not understood it yet."
June studied my face as though trying to preserve it without paper.
"Then understand it before we run out of time," she said.
She walked toward the door.
The clinic had asked her to remember five ordinary words.
She had lost two.
But beneath studio lights, she had remembered a foolish story I had dismissed two years earlier, and I could not decide whether that was hope or the beginning of goodbye.