Long-press a paragraph to send danmaku
"Move!"
The automaton slammed into the pipe. Metal screamed. Scalding water burst across Nora's boots.
She stumbled back. Samuel grabbed her arm and dragged her forward. His other hand pressed against his stomach. Blood leaked between his fingers, dark and fast.
"You said this route was clear," Nora snapped.
"I said less deadly. Huge difference."
Behind them, claws scraped across broken metal. The sound dragged closer.
Slow now.
Deliberate.
That was worse.
Nora wiped steam off her face. "Where the hell are you taking us?"
"The memory market," Tarin said.
"You've got a market down here?"
"Three. This one's got the best locks."
Samuel huffed a breathless laugh. "That supposed to make me feel better?"
"No. It's supposed to make you keep moving."
Tarin slammed his palm against a brass plate in the wall. A blue line lit up. The plate clicked. A section of brick swung inward.
The gap was barely wide enough for her shoulders.
The automaton screamed behind them.
Not human. Like a saw blade dragged across glass.
Nora dove through. Samuel squeezed in after her, one hand braced on the wall. Tarin came last, slamming the door shut just as a black metal fist punched through the steam.
The fingers snapped shut on empty air.
The door sealed.
For three seconds, no one moved.
Nora could hear Samuel breathing. Too fast. Too shallow.
She reached for him. "Let me see the cut."
"It's fine."
"You're dripping blood on my shoes."
"Then stop standing under me."
"You're six feet tall. Where am I supposed to stand?"
Tarin clicked his tongue. "Save the flirting for when we're not about to die."
Samuel leveled a look at him. "That wasn't flirting."
"Sure. And I'm a respectable businessman. Come on."
The passage sloped down beneath the city. It reeked of wet stone, old smoke, and something bitter that burned Nora's throat. Blue light seeped through cracks in the walls, crawling over Tarin's coat, turning his face pale and wrong.
Nora kept one hand pressed to the wall.
The stone buzzed under her palm.
Like a trapped phone vibrating somewhere inside it.
She stopped.
Samuel noticed. "What?"
"The wall."
Tarin didn't turn around. "Don't touch anything."
"It's moving."
"Everything down here moves. Pipes. Locks. Memories. Rats. Usually the rats are the least dangerous."
Nora pressed her palm harder.
The buzz shot up her arm and into her bones.
For half a second, she saw a room. White lamps. A woman in a gray coat standing behind glass. Someone was crying. A little girl sat on a metal table, wires stuck to her arms.
The girl had Nora's face.
Nora wrenched her hand away. The vision vanished. Her knees buckled.
Samuel caught her around the waist.
"Hey. Stay with me."
She shoved his hand off. "I saw something."
Tarin finally looked back. His face was tight. "What'd you see?"
"A room. A kid. Me, I think."
Samuel's eyes sharpened. "You think?"
"I was there for half a second, Sam. I didn't get a damn guided tour."
Tarin cursed under his breath.
Nora stepped right up to him. "You knew this would happen."
"I knew the wall held old spillover. I didn't know you could read it."
"You knew I could do something. You recognized me the second you saw my face. So stop feeding me scraps and tell me what the hell is going on."
The tunnel shook.
Dust rained down from the ceiling.
Somewhere behind the sealed door, metal slammed into brick.
Tarin glanced over his shoulder. "Not here."
"Then where?"
"Two minutes. Maybe less."
Samuel stepped between them. His hand was still slick with blood. "Get us somewhere safe first. Then you talk. All of it."
Tarin studied him. "You destroyed your badge."
Samuel's mouth pulled tight. "You saw that?"
"The whole underground saw it. An inspector breaks his own seal in the White Tower? That's not easy to hide."
"Good. Maybe the Inspectorate will stop sending me invites."
Tarin's gaze dropped to Samuel's wound. "You won't last long if that keeps bleeding."
"I've had worse."
"No, you haven't. That blade had a charge in it. It's burning through the muscle."
Samuel looked down. The skin around the cut had turned gray.
Nora felt her anger fizzle out a little.
"Can you fix it?" she asked.
"The market has a surgeon."
"A real one?"
"A guy with both eyes and most of his fingers. That's the standard down here."
They reached a steel gate set into the rock. Tarin pulled a chain. The gate rose with a groan.
Noise flooded through the opening.
Voices. Haggling. Laughter. A baby crying. Glass clinking. Machines humming beneath it all.
The memory market spread through an enormous underground chamber. Stalls were thrown together from train doors, old lift cages, chunks of copper pipe. Blue bottles hung from hooks overhead. Some glowed like lanterns. Others pulsed like tiny hearts.
People moved between the stalls with their collars raised and their faces half-covered. A woman offered a vial to a man in a fur coat. A boy carried a tray of silver chips. Two masked men argued over a memory that flashed red inside a jar.
Nora stared.
Tarin caught her sleeve. "Don't stare at anyone too long. They'll think you want what they're selling."
"What are they selling?"
"Depends on the stall. First kisses. Dead moms. The taste of summer. A murder nobody reported. One guy sells three years of military training, but it's mostly bad posture and one useful knife trick."
Samuel leaned against a post. "You bring all your injured guests here?"
"Only the ones being hunted by city machines. The others go to the bakery."
Tarin cut through the crowd.
Nora stayed close to Samuel. His face had lost color, but he kept walking. Every few steps, his fingers tightened against his stomach.
"You should sit," she said.
"I shouldn't be bleeding. We don't always get what we should have."
"You're really annoying when you're dying."
"I'm annoying when I'm healthy, too."
That sounded almost like the old Samuel. The one who'd questioned her in the repair yard, cold-eyed and official. Before the tower. Before he broke the badge for her.
Nora looked at his injured hands.
He'd put himself between her and the blade.
She didn't know what to do with that.
Tarin stopped at a stall covered in black cloth. An old woman looked up from a bowl of silver needles.
"He needs the burn drained," Tarin said.
"He needs a hospital."
"He can't have one."
The old woman sighed. "Everybody says that."
"This one's wanted by the Inspectorate."
She took one look at Samuel. "That makes two of you. Put him down."
Samuel started to object.
Nora pushed him onto a wooden crate. "Sit."
He looked up at her. "You ordering me around now?"
"Yep. It's going badly for you so far."
The old woman cut his shirt open with a small hooked blade. The wound was ugly. Black veins spread outward from the edges.
Nora's stomach twisted.
"That's not normal," she said.
"Nothing about tonight is normal," Samuel muttered.
The old woman pressed two fingers near the wound. Samuel's jaw locked.
"Hold him," she said.
Nora grabbed his shoulders.
"I'm fine," he said.
"You keep saying that. It's getting less believable."
The woman drove a needle into his side.
Samuel swore. Loudly.
The old woman pulled a thin strip of silver from the cut. It smoked in her fingers.
"There. The charge is out. He'll keep the scar."
"I have plenty," Samuel said through his teeth.
"You'll have another."
While the woman wrapped his stomach, Tarin lifted the black cloth at the back of the stall.
"Nora. Here."
She didn't move.
Tarin held a small glass bottle in one hand. Blue light spun inside it, bright enough to paint his knuckles.
"What is that?" she asked.
"The first memory I bought from the old archives."
"Whose?"
"Yours."
The market noise seemed to drop away.
Nora stared at the bottle. The light inside turned slowly, folding over itself. She could almost hear a child's voice beneath the glass.
No. Not almost.
She heard it.
A little girl laughing.
Then a woman's voice, soft and scared.
Liora.
Nora's fingers went cold.
"Play it," she said.
Tarin's grip tightened around the bottle. "You don't know what it will show."
"I know it's mine."
"It might not be safe."
"Nothing has been safe since the White Tower. Play it."
Samuel stood behind her. "Tarin. Do it."
The broker gave him a hard look. "You're very comfortable giving orders in my market."
"I'm bleeding on your floor. That gives me some authority."
Tarin uncorked the bottle.
Blue light spilled over his hand and struck the air above the stall.
A picture formed.
Not a dream. Not a flash against a wall.
A real image, thin and shaking, like an old recording pulled out of water.
A girl stood beside a machine.
She was maybe seven. Her hair was cut short around her ears. She wore a white shirt too large for her shoulders and metal cuffs around both wrists.
Nora knew that face.
She saw it every morning in the cracked mirror above her sink.
The girl stood beside the mechanical heart from the tower.
The same brass ribs. The same round core. The same deep blue light trapped under its glass center.
Nora stopped breathing.
The little girl placed both hands on the machine.
The heart lit up.
Every pipe in the room shook.
A man shouted, "Pull her away!"
The girl didn't move.
Blue lines raced up her arms. Her mouth opened, but no sound came out.
Then the image shifted.
A woman stepped into view. Gray coat. Silver hair pinned at the back. A council seal at her throat.
Evelyn Crowe.
Not the polished woman from the city broadcasts. This Evelyn looked younger, thinner, and terrified.
She stared at the child like the child was a loaded gun.
"The core is responding," someone said.
"She's responding," Evelyn answered. "The machine is only following her."
Nora stumbled backward.
The blue recording shook with her.
"No," she whispered.
Samuel caught her elbow. "Nora—"
"That's not me."
On the recording, the girl turned toward the glass.
For one impossible second, her eyes met Nora's.
The girl smiled.
Not a happy smile. A tired one. Like she'd been waiting.
A voice spoke from behind the machine.
"Subject Liora has reached stable ignition. Begin memory separation at once."
The image snapped out.
The bottle cracked in Tarin's hand.
Blue fluid ran over his fingers.
Nora stared at him. "Subject?"
Tarin said nothing.
"You said my name was Liora. You didn't say I was a damn experiment."
"I didn't know how much of it you could survive hearing."
"Try me."
Samuel stepped closer. "Tarin, who made her?"
The broker looked toward the market entrance.
A bell rang above the gate.
Once.
Twice.
Every conversation died.
The old woman froze with her bandage still in hand.
Tarin's face went empty. "The Inspectorate found us."
A voice rolled through the chamber from hidden speakers.
"By order of the City Council, all persons in the memory market will remain where they are."
Metal shutters slammed down over the exits.
People screamed. Stalls overturned. Blue bottles shattered against the floor, spilling stolen memories into the air. A man laughed as a dead woman's voice called his name. Someone else began sobbing in a language Nora didn't know.
Samuel reached for the pistol at his belt.
His hand stopped.
The gun was gone.
Tarin pulled a narrow black knife from inside his sleeve. "There's a service tunnel behind the surgeon's stall."
The old woman shook her head. "It's sealed."
"Not anymore."
He grabbed Nora's wrist.
A spotlight snapped on above them.
White light burned across the stall.
A woman stood on the iron balcony overlooking the market.
Silver hair. Gray coat. Council seal at her throat.
Evelyn Crowe.
She looked down at Nora.
"Hello, Liora," she said. "It's time to come