Read Chapter 10: A Taste of Truth

The rain had stopped by the time Luca reached the squat on the Rue des Cascades, leaving the streets slick and silver under the halogen lamps. He climbed four flights of stairs, past the smell of boiled cabbage and burnt wiring, and slid into his studio flat without turning on the lights. The cube sat on his workbench, wrapped in its lead-lined sheath like a holy relic he was afraid to touch.

He was afraid to touch it.

The last time he'd sampled a stolen memory—one of those clean, sellable ones, a financier's yacht party, all champagne and old resentments—he'd spent the night dry-heaving into a bucket, the stranger's hangover grafted onto his own skull for twelve hours. But this one wasn't clean. This one was a murder. Someone else's hands, drenched in someone else's blood.

Maya's voice buzzed in his ear, tinny from the cheap earpiece he kept for emergencies. "You're going to do something stupid."

"Your psychic powers are improving." Luca pulled the cube from its sheath, set it in the cradle, and angled the neural filament toward his temple implant.

"You only call me at four in the morning to do two things: apologize or do something you'll need apologizing for later." Her line crackled. He could picture her, wrapped in that ratty bathrobe she refused to replace, surrounded by server racks that glowed like a haunted cathedral.

"The deadline, Luca. Elodie—"

"I know the deadline." He snapped the filament into place. "I'm not forgetting the deadline."

"Then why are you alone with a murder memory and a neuro-filter you built from a secondhand medical pump? That's not a calibration device, it's a fire hose."

"I need a one-second snippet. Just one."

"That's not how—"

"Does Moreau know she has this memory or not?" Luca's voice was harder than he intended. "That's the whole gamble. If she knows, she's running the greatest con in political history. If she doesn't, someone else fed it to her opponent. But I can't tell which one she is from the outside. I have to see what she saw when she cut it out."

Silence on the line. Then Maya sighed, the sound of a woman calculating whether to save her friend or preserve her own plausible deniability. "The pump delivers ten times the flow you need. If you try to take one second, you'll probably take three. Maybe four."

"Three seconds. Fine."

"It's not fine. It's not like a movie you can pause. Memories stream. The brain releases them in sequence. If you cut mid-stream, you'll get fractures. Fragments. You might get her hands. You might get the floor. You might get the dark."

"I'll take what I get."

"Luca—"

"I found her trace in the memory, Maya. My mother's tattoo, in a murder memory from the woman who's about to become president. Whatever happened in that room, wherever it is, my mother was there. And then she went to a clinic to get something scraped out of her head, and she never came home." He pressed his thumb against the activation stud on the cube's casing. "I need to see it. All of it."

A long pause. Then, quietly: "You remember how to kill the feed if it goes sideways?"

"The emergency purge. Red node behind my ear."

"Good." Her voice softened. "If you see anything that looks like a memory artifact—anything that doesn't belong—you sever the connection immediately. Don't try to power through. Your implant can't handle corrupted streams."

"I won't."

"You will. You're your mother's son." The line went dead.

Luca stood in the dark for another minute, the rain starting up again outside, pattering against the grimy window. He thought about Elodie, whose visits were timed, recorded, monitored. About La Taupe, whose name meant "the mole," and who always kept his word, even the ugliest ones. About the clinic records listing six procedures for Moreau in eight months, as if she kept wiping the same stain and it kept bleeding through.

Then he cracked the shielding on the cube and let the filament drink.

---

The memory hit him like open water.

One second—that's all he'd wanted. The pump, miscalibrated, delivered four.

Luca stood in the middle of a ruined garden.

That was the first thing his senses told him: the smell. Rotting leaves. Wet stone. The particular green damp of somewhere that had once been cared for and had stopped being cared for years ago. High walls of what looked like old brick wrapped around him, half-collapsed in places, the gaps revealing a man-made pond choked with algae.

*Bois de Vincennes*—some part of his hindbrain recognized the shape of the old pavilion, its crumbling cupola, its cracked herringbone paths. The city had abandoned it after the Third Flood of the Seine. Too close to the water. Too ugly to save.

Two figures stood at the center of the pond's edge, near a stone bench. One of them was Catherine Moreau. The other was a man.

Luca knew Moreau from a thousand campaign holo-stills and parliamentary broadcasts—always composed, always warm, always perfectly lit. But this version of her was wrong. Her hair was loose, plastered with sweat to her forehead. Her jacket was gone, her blouse untucked, stained dark at the cuffs. She looked like someone who'd been running for a long time, or screaming.

The man—Christophe, Luca guessed—had his back to him. Broad shoulders. Expensive coat, torn at the shoulder seam. He was talking, but Luca couldn't catch the words. The memory carried no audio beyond the ambient: wind, water, the distant hum of mag-rail traffic. He watched the man gesture wildly, pointing at Moreau, then at something on the ground between them.

A data chip. Small. Silver.

Moreau shook her head. Slow at first, then faster. Her lips moved: *I didn't. I didn't. I didn't.*

The man lunged.

It wasn't clean. It wasn't choreographed. Christophe caught Moreau's wrist and yanked, and she stumbled forward, off-balance, one hand flailing for the stone bench. She caught it—her fingers scrabbling on the mossy surface—and for a moment Luca thought she'd pull herself free.

Then her hand closed not on the bench but on a loose paving stone.

Luca felt the weight of it in his own palm. The sharp edge of it. The *want* in her chest, the terrible clarity of a decision made in a fraction of a second, all the fear and fury compressing into something simple: *make him stop.*

The stone swung.

There was a sound—wet, and then very quiet. Moreau stood over Christophe, breathing hard. The stone was still in her hand. She dropped it. It landed on the grass with a soft thud, and the silence that followed was the loudest thing Luca had ever heard in a memory.

She knelt.

She touched Christophe's face—a gesture that was almost tender, almost grieving. Her lips moved again, but he couldn't read the words. Then she looked up, eyes wild, and scanned the ruined garden. Looking for witnesses. Looking for help. Looking for—

Her gaze stopped.

Behind her, beyond the pond, half-hidden by a collapsed trellis of blackened roses, stood a figure in a long coat. Female. Her face was shadowed, but her right hand rested on the trellis, and the sleeve had ridden up just enough to reveal the tattoo curving around her wrist: a spiral, broken at one point, three segments suggesting a fourth that had never been completed.

Luca's mother's mark.

His breath stopped.

The woman—Camille—didn't move. She watched Moreau kneel over the corpse for another long moment. Then she turned and walked away, through the gap in the wall, disappearing into the trees.

Moreau never saw her. She never even looked in that direction again.

The memory fractured.

Luca felt the stream tear, four seconds compressed to five, to six—fragments flashing behind his eyes: Moreau standing by a window, rain streaking the glass. Moreau in a pristine white room, a masked technician murmuring, *This won't hurt. We'll make it so it never happened.* Moreau's own kitchen, making coffee with steady hands, humming a song from her childhood, utterly unaware that anything was wrong.

The stream cut.

Luca slammed backward against the wall, the filament yanking free of his implant, sparks spitting from the socket. He was on the floor before he understood he'd fallen, his jaw locked, his tongue bleeding where he'd bitten down.

The memory was gone. But its shape was burned into him like a brand.

She didn't know.

He'd been so sure—the clinic records, the deletions, the missing files—it all pointed to a woman suppressing a secret so deep it threatened her entire political existence. But the final image, the last fragment, showed her making coffee. Humming. At peace.

Catherine Moreau didn't believe she was a murderer because she was four seconds away from remembering she was one.

Luca pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes until he saw stars. His mother. His mother had seen the whole thing. She'd walked away. She'd paid for a deletion that she hadn't consented to. And then she'd gone to Sainte-Anne and never come home—because she'd seen Catherine Moreau kill a man, and someone had found out she'd seen.

He pulled the earpiece back on and called Maya.

"You're alive," she said.

"I know where she killed him." His voice came out raw, gravel-thick. "The Bois de Vincennes pavilion. The old one by the drowned garden."

"... and?"

Luca stood up, wobbly, and started gathering his tools. "And nothing. The body's gone. she never went back. But the pavilion's still standing." He paused. "I'm going to need those floor plans you sent for Sainte-Anne."

"You said Sainte-Anne was the next step."

"Sainte-Anne is a dead end. My mother ran. Moreau never went back to the scene." He slid the cube back into its sheath. "But people who kill always leave traces where they cleaned up. I just need to find where she buried Christophe."

The rain hammered the window. In the distance, a mag-rail train screamed past, and the glass shook.