A weight was falling away, and the weight wasn’t merely the fact of the Task, its labors and conditions, but the myths beneath—my father as my savior, my plot to leave behind the Street, my notion that Lockless could be redeemed by my special hand. My forgetting. I forgot my mother. And then went off into the house of Lockless like I had no mother. And then I was conducted, brought up out of the coffin, brought up out of slavery. And now I felt myself shedding the lie, like old skin, so that a truer, more lustrous Hiram emerged.
