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"Move!"
The gun above the gate fired.
Elias slammed into Nia. The shot ripped over them and punched through the lift wall, spraying hot metal across her cheek.
They hit the floor together. His bad shoulder took the impact.
"Get off," he gasped.
"You jumped on me."
"Then we're even."
The weapon rotated with a mechanical click. A red targeting line slid toward Nia's boot.
"Nia." Tavi's voice crackled in her earpiece. "Move your ass. That's a Crown rotary. The second shot won't miss."
"You could've led with that."
"I thought the gunfire made it obvious."
Nia grabbed Elias's coat and hauled him toward the gate. His injured leg dragged behind him. The red line found her.
She threw herself through the doorway. Elias landed on top of her as the second blast carved a glowing trench through the floor.
The gate began to drop.
His coat snagged on a bent panel.
"Damn it." Elias twisted against the fabric. "Nia, leave me."
"Not happening."
"That's not a request."
Steel dropped toward his spine.
Nia drew her knife and cut through the coat. She dragged him clear a heartbeat before the gate slammed down behind them.
Dust shook from the ceiling.
Elias rolled onto his back, pale and sweating. "You saved me."
"Don't make it weird."
"You cut a very expensive coat."
"You're welcome."
"That coat survived three assassination attempts."
"Four would've been showing off."
A scraping sound crawled out of the darkness ahead.
Nia rose, pistol in hand. "Tell me that's not another gun."
"It isn't another gun," Elias said.
"That wasn't reassuring."
The gate had opened into a dead district. Broken offices leaned over a sunken street, and black memory glass covered the pavement in slick, uneven sheets. Old advertisements blinked in windows that had no walls around them.
A woman in a red dress smiled from one screen.
COME HOME TO THE LIFE YOU DESERVE.
Her face glitched once.
Nia's face flashed across it. Then Kellan's. Then a skull with light burning behind its teeth.
Nia looked away.
"Archive Nine," Elias said.
"You could've mentioned the core gate opened into this."
"I didn't know."
"Great. The man with all the keys doesn't know where the doors go."
"They rerouted the transit paths after lockdown."
"You started the lockdown."
"Yes."
He didn't defend himself. That made her angrier than an excuse would have.
Heat pulsed under her palm. The core sigil burned once, hard enough to curl her fingers.
"Tavi. Clean route?"
"Sure," Tavi said. "Back through the murder gun."
"Forward route."
"Forward is bad."
"Try using nouns."
"Archive Nine took the first memory surge when the Crownstack went dark. Every storage node cracked open. Personal records, sensory copies, testimony, childhood backups—everything spilled into the local grid."
Elias braced himself against the wall. "And the mnemonic scavengers fed on it."
"Yeah. Those too."
"How many?" Nia asked.
Tavi went quiet.
"One signal," he said at last. "But it's big."
"How big?"
"Big enough that I'm not telling you to shoot it."
Something shifted inside the nearest building. A shoulder appeared behind a pillar—too tall, too thin—then folded out of sight.
Elias followed her stare. "The registry's six blocks east. There's a service lift underneath it."
"How do you know?"
"My family owned the registry."
"Of course they did."
"They owned most of the district."
"Stop helping."
An alarm pulsed behind the sealed gate. Enforcers had reached the lift shaft.
Tavi swore. "You've got seven minutes before they force that gate."
"And the thing in the building?" Nia asked.
"It knows you're here."
"That wasn't my question."
"Then you're asking the wrong one."
Nia checked her pistol. Three rounds. Her knife was sticky with coat fibers. One charge remained in the relic burner at her belt.
Elias pushed away from the wall. "Can you run?"
"Can you lie and say you can?"
"Yes."
"Good enough."
"Most people would call this a terrible plan."
"Most people aren't being chased by a Crown rotary."
They entered Archive Nine.
The glass cracked beneath their boots but held. Faces moved under its surface: a man brushing his teeth, a child blowing out candles, a woman beside a hospital bed with both hands over her mouth.
Nia kept her eyes on the registry ahead.
The district whispered around them. Breaths. Half-laughs. A baby crying below the pavement. A man saying please over and over in a calm voice.
"Don't listen," Elias said.
"I wasn't planning to."
"You turned your head."
"I have ears."
"Then use the rest of you and keep moving."
A boy's voice slipped between the whispers.
"Nia?"
She stopped.
Elias caught her elbow. His palm was hot through her sleeve. "Don't answer."
"Nia, wait."
Kellan sounded fourteen, before his voice went scratchy and before he started stealing her boots for fun.
Her body turned before her brain caught up.
The alley to her left was empty. At its far end stood a blue door in a wall that couldn't belong there.
Nia knew that door. Their first apartment in Low Calder. Cheap blue paint. Brass number six hanging upside down because Kellan had hit it with a broom.
"Nia," Elias said, softer now. "That isn't him."
"I know."
"Then don't walk toward it."
"I said I know."
The door opened.
Warm kitchen light spilled across the pavement. Burnt sugar and machine oil filled Nia's throat.
Kellan ran into view, seven years old and barefoot, a paper crown covered in silver foil balanced on his head.
"You missed it," he said.
Nia's hand closed around her pistol.
The boy's smile widened. "Why'd you bring him?"
"You don't get to use his voice."
"You said guns were for cowards."
"I said people who point them at kids are cowards."
"You pointed one at me when you took the Marris job."
That had happened eight years later.
Elias's grip tightened on her arm. "It's pulling from you now."
The boy's head twitched. A second voice came out beneath Kellan's.
"Back up," Elias said. "Slowly."
"You don't give me orders."
"Call it advice."
Nia backed away.
The blue door slammed shut. The alley warped. Brick stretched like heated wire, and the boy's shape unfolded into a tall, jointed mass of black glass.
It didn't wear Kellan's face anymore. Faces flashed across its surface as it moved—an old man, a crying child, a woman with blood on her collar.
"Run," Nia said.
The creature charged on all fours.
Elias turned. His injured leg folded.
Nia fired. The round vanished into the creature's shoulder, where a dozen mouths opened and screamed.
"Gun's useless!" Elias shouted.
"Would've loved that note earlier."
She caught his shirt and pulled. He shoved forward with his good leg, half running and half falling beside her.
"Left!" Tavi barked. "Registry's ahead. White stairs. Gold doors. I can pop them for four seconds."
"Open them when I say."
"Say it soon."
The creature struck a transit pod and threw it across the street. Metal shrieked against the glass.
They ducked behind a cracked support column.
The registry sat across an open plaza. Forty yards. No cover.
The creature climbed onto the overturned pod. Its surface rippled, and Kellan's seven-year-old face pushed through again.
"Nia," it called. "Don't leave me again."
Her stomach clenched.
Elias watched the creature instead of her. "What memory is it anchored to?"
"What?"
"The voice, the door, the crown. One intact memory is holding the shape together."
"Shut up."
"We can break the frame."
"I said shut up."
Elias pulled a metal key strip from beneath his shirt. "The burner can destroy a mnemonic link."
"And the memory attached to it."
"Part of it."
"That's the last clean memory I have of him."
"Then use it before it uses you."
The creature dropped from the pod. The landing fractured the plaza.
It started toward them, slow and certain.
Kellan's face stayed on its head.
"Nia," it said. "I'm scared."
Her fingers went numb around the burner.
Elias stepped from behind the column.
"What are you doing?" she hissed.
"Giving it another memory."
He cut his thumb on the key strip. Blood ran over the Rook crest.
Every screen in the plaza changed at once.
Elias in the core control room. His hand on the lockdown plate. People screaming through the comms. Veyra standing behind him, calm as the city died district by district.
The creature snapped toward him.
"Come on," Elias said.
He ran.
He made it six steps before his bad leg failed. He hit the glass, and the key strip skidded away.
The creature landed over him. Black fingers pinned his wounded shoulder.
Elias screamed.
Nia raised the burner.
"Do it!" he shouted. "Don't wait for permission."
Heat surged from the relic into her wrist. The creature turned toward her, its borrowed face splitting between Kellan's childhood smile and Elias's bloodied one.
"Nia," it begged. "Burn the birthday, and you lose the truth."
Her thumb froze over the trigger.
Elias stared up at her. "It isn't talking about Kellan."
The creature leaned closer to him.
"Tell her," it said in Elias's voice. "Tell her who opened Archive Nine."
Tavi's static cracked through her earpiece. "Nia, the registry doors are live. You have three seconds."
The burner flared in her hand. The creature tightened its grip on Elias's shoulder, and the Kellan-face turned toward her as Elias gasped, "The lockdown wasn't mine—it was—"