Chapter 24 · Nine Minutes Start Now

The car's doing ninety and Lena's not slowing down. My hands are locked on the dash. Ian's in the back with my gun still in his coat pocket. Every red light she blows through feels like another second we don't have.

"Nora's signal dropped four minutes ago." Lena's voice is flat. "If Mira wanted her dead she'd be dead."

"She wants what's in her head." I can barely get the words out. My own voice sounds wrong. Too high. "The memory I don't have anymore."

Ian leans forward between the seats. "You think Mira can extract it? Without killing her?"

"I don't know." I twist around to look at him. "You're the memory engineer. Can she?"

He doesn't answer right away. That's answer enough.

Lena yanks the wheel. We fishtail into the archive district. The buildings here are old city core, granite and steel, the kind that survived the floods. The street's empty. No cops. No perimeter. That's wrong. Mira attacked someone in a government facility and there's not a single patrol car.

"They scrubbed it." Ian's staring out the window. "The official record. It never happened."

"Then we never happened either.