Read Chapter 11: The Pavilion's Secret

The cab dropped him two streets from the Bois de Vincennes, far enough from the tree line that the driver wouldn't think twice. Luca walked through the pre-dawn dark, breath fogging, hands shoved in a jacket that had seen better nights. Paris slept around him—the honest part, anyway. The part that didn't trade in stolen minds.

The pavilion sat at the end of a cracked service road, a squat stone relic swallowed by ivy and neglect. Boarded windows. A faded *DÉFENSE D'ENTRER* sign rusted at the gate. Whatever function this building once served, the city had let it rot into an urban ghost, the kind of place teenagers dared each other to visit and addicts used for shelter until the patrols swept them out.

Luca checked the street behind him twice before slipping through a gap in the fence. The back door gave with a shoulder shove and a groan of warped hinges. Inside, dust lay thick enough to show no recent footprints—not that it meant much. One-second of memory, a flash of movement seen through Moreau's terrified eyes, had been enough to identify the interior. The arched ceiling. The tiled floor with its mosaic border of faded leaves. But what struck him now was the smell—or rather, the absence of it. A space scrubbed clean of everything, including the faint, human residue that clung to most abandoned places.

He pulled out his torch and swept the room. Empty. Gutted of furniture, wiring dangling from the walls like dead vines. Someone had stripped this place bare with intention.

Luca knelt, running his fingers along the floor tiles near where Christophe had fallen in the memory. His palm brushed against a rough patch—something that didn't match the smooth ceramic around it. He angled the torch low. A discolored seam, faintly darker than the rest, forming an uneven rectangle about the size of a torso. Residual staining. Blood that had soaked through grout and stayed there even after the surface was scrubbed. Chemical cleaners could lift most traces, but they couldn't erase what had seeped into the material itself.

This was where Christophe had bled out.

And where his body had been removed.

Luca forced himself to breathe. He pictured the rest of the scene from Moreau's memory: a table, the glint of something in her hand, the desperate panting of a man who knew he was dying. But the room before him offered nothing more. No weapon. No evidence of struggle. Whoever had cleaned this scene had been thorough enough to take the body with them.

He stood, his eyes tracing the wall where, in the memory, Moreau had backed away, hands bloodied. The wood paneling there had been replaced at some point—the grain slightly off, the varnish a shade brighter. Someone had gone to great lengths to make this place forget.

But they'd missed something.

Luca noticed it in the torch's sweep—a section of baseboard that didn't quite meet the floor, a hairline of darkness beneath it. He crossed over and pressed down. The baseboard gave, just slightly. He worked his fingers beneath the lip and pulled. The wood swung outward with a counterweighted mechanism, revealing a narrow shaft descending into blackness.

His heart hammered. This wasn't in the memory. Moreau hadn't known about this place's deeper secret. And that meant whoever had erased the scene had left their own trace behind.

Luca climbed down the ladder, torch clamped in his teeth. The shaft opened into a small, windowless chamber beneath the pavilion—cleaner than the room above. Climate-controlled. A single server rack hummed quietly against the far wall, its cooling fans cycling in a soft, rhythmic pulse.

He approached the rack slowly. Three modules, each labeled with a series of alphanumeric codes. The top two showed status lights flickering in steady green. The third sat dark, its faceplate removed as if someone had been mid-service and walked away in a hurry.

Luca touched the exposed interface. A memory backup server—one of the old models, the kind that predated the implant networks and stored full-spectrum memory files in raw neural formats. Illegal to own. Impossible to find on any legitimate market. And here, beneath a crime scene that had been scrubbed of all evidence, sat at least one memory too dangerous to destroy.

He pulled a comms cable from his kit and connected it to the server's access port, then tapped into his implant. The system's directory unfolded before him like a card catalog of sins. Names. Dates. Procedures. Most of the files appeared corrupted or truncated—blanks where the content had been purged. But one entry caught his attention.

File 07-CM-442. Client: Catherine Moreau. Date: eleven years ago. Status: flagged for deletion.

He accessed it. The file metadata showed it had been marked for permanent erasure, the actual data stripped to a fragmentary shell. But the shell remained—a compressed kernel that the system never fully wiped. Either the deletion had been interrupted, or whoever did it had wanted a spare copy in case the primary extraction failed.

Luca initiated a copy transfer to his implant. The file was large—several minutes of full-spectrum memory, likely—and the download crawled. He watched the percentage tick up, his breath shallow.

Somewhere above him, a floorboard creaked.

Luca froze. He killed the torch and held still, listening. The sound didn't repeat. A settling joist, maybe. The old bones of an abandoned building shifting in the cold. But his hand drifted toward the stun baton in his jacket anyway.

The download hit sixty percent. Seventy.

He thought about Elodie, sitting in that sterile holo-booth, her face all courage she didn't feel. He thought about his mother, who had walked into a clinic to erase something terrible and never walked out. And he thought about Moreau—not the polished candidate on every screen in Paris, but the terrified, blood-stained woman in her own memory, unloading a gun into a man named Christophe.

Eighty-five percent.

The download completed with a soft chime. Luca unplugged and pocketed the cable. He turned to the ladder, his pulse still elevated, and began to climb.

What he'd just copied might be the only version of that memory in existence. Moreau's own file at the clinic had been wiped. Her repeated deletions made sense now—every time she surfaced a fragment of what she'd done, someone pushed her through that clinic again to erase it again. A cleaner at her side, keeping the public face pristine.

But the raw file here predated the cover-up. The original, before any scrubbing.

If it contained what he hoped—Moreau's own mental record of that night, intact with its emotional context and sensory detail—it was a lever that could free Elodie. A memory that proved her past, her true past, was something she didn't even know.

And maybe, just maybe, it connected to the VIDAL tag he'd found at the clinic. To what his mother had been trying to erase.

Luca reached the top of the shaft and emerged into the pavilion's main room. He was sliding the baseboard back into place when the lights snapped on.

Five figures stood in the doorway, their silhouettes sharp against the glare. At their center, arms crossed, expression unreadable, stood Adrian.

"You're harder to track than I expected," Adrian said. "But you're also more predictable." He tilted his head. "You touched her cube, didn't you? You shouldn't have done that. Now you know what she doesn't."

Luca's hand closed around the stun baton.

Adrian smiled—a thin, cold line. "I've known you've been following her since the Palais Garnier. The bug in her office was a nice touch. I let it play."

"Then you know she killed him," Luca said. "You know she's a murderer."

"I know she was a victim," Adrian said. "And I know the man who made her that way sent his pigeon into my city to collect what he lost."

La Taupe. Adrian knew about La Taupe. Which meant Adrian knew more about this than Luca had ever imagined.

Every option was dead except one. Luca pivoted and ran—back toward the rear of the pavilion, toward the shattered back window, toward the woods.

The copy of the memory burned against his implant, a stolen truth too valuable to lose.