Read Chapter 17: Elodie's Choice

The guard’s hand trembled as he palmed the cred-chip. His name was Marcel—Luca had paid triple for that name, plus a fourth share for the risk of knowing it. They stood in a maintenance corridor beneath the Préfecture de Police, where the air smelled of grease and stale coffee, and somewhere above them, Elodie sat in a holding cell that wasn’t supposed to exist.

“Ten minutes,” Marcel whispered. “Camera loop’s dirty for twelve. If you’re not out by then, I’m gone and you’re someone else’s problem.”

Luca nodded, already moving. The cell door was a slab of reinforced steel with a single biometric lock, and Marcel’s thumbprint opened it with a soft hiss. Inside, the light was dim and yellow, and Elodie sat on a cot with her knees drawn up, wearing the same grey synth-wool jumper she’d had on when they took her. She looked thinner. Older. But her eyes were sharp as ever, and they found him the moment the door cracked.

“Luca.” Her voice was flat. “You took your time.”

He stepped inside and let the door close behind him. The hiss of the seal felt like a verdict. “I’m sorry.”

“Sorry doesn’t get me out of this cell.” She unfolded herself slowly, barefoot on the cold floor. “What happened? Last I heard, you were running around Paris with a dead woman in your arms.”

Luca winced. The news cycle had been merciless. *Memory Thief Caught Holding Corpse of Missing Journalist*—the headlines wrote themselves. He’d been lucky to slip through the crowds before the police cordon closed, and luckier still that Adrian’s network had scrubbed his face from most of the footage before the networks could loop it.

“She’s not dead,” he said. “She’s my mother. And she’s alive.”

Elodie’s jaw tightened. She waited.

So Luca told her. Everything. The auction. The proxy dropping dead in his arms. The hospital where Camille Vidal now breathed on machines, her memory stripped bare but her body stubbornly refusing to quit. The fragment he’d pulled from the warehouse archive—his mother’s voice, younger and steadier, saying *protect her*.

“The memory I stole from Moreau,” he said. “It wasn’t her crime. She was coerced. La Taupe—Claude Renard—he forced her to kill a man, and then he wiped it from her mind so she’d never know her own hands were bloody.”

Elodie stared at him for a long moment. Then she laughed, a bitter, breathless sound. “You’ve been lying to me since the day we met, Luca. About what you were stealing. About why. About who you were.” She shook her head. “And now you show up in my cell, ten minutes before a shift change, and you want me to just… forgive you?”

He opened his mouth, but she held up a hand.

“I’m not done.” She stepped closer, close enough that he could see the faint bruise under her eye, the corner of her lip still split. “You want to know why I’m angry? It’s not because you lied. It’s because you lied badly. You thought you were protecting me, but you were really just protecting yourself from having to tell me the truth. And look where that got us.” She gestured at the walls around them. “Me in a box. You running. Your mother in a hospital.”

Luca swallowed. “I know. I was wrong.”

“Yeah.” She sighed, and some of the tension bled out of her shoulders. “You were. But you’re here now. That counts for something.”

Relief, sharp and unexpected, cut through his chest. “Elodie, I’m going to get you out. I have a contact—Adrian. He’s ex-DGSI, he’s been helping me. We can get you to a safehouse, out of the country if you want. Just give me a few more days.”

But Elodie was shaking her head before he finished. “No. That’s not going to work.”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean you’re not getting me out of here, Luca. Not the way you want.” She moved to the wall, pressed her palm against it, and glanced at the door. “I’ve been in here for four days. Do you know what I’ve learned? The guards talk. They think I’m asleep, or they don’t care. And one of them—” she lowered her voice, “—one of them is connected. Not to the police. To an underground network. They’ve been looking for a way to infiltrate the Préfecture for months.”

Luca’s brow furrowed. “What kind of network?”

“Resistance,” she said simply. “People who think memory laws are a tool for the rich to rewrite history. People who’ve been fighting Renard’s little empire long before you ever heard his name.” She met his eyes. “I can contact them. There’s a frequency, a code phrase. I’ll get a message out tonight.”

“And then what? They’ll break you out?”

“No.” She smiled, thin and sharp. “They’ll give me a way to break myself out. A distraction. Something that pulls the guards away from this block for long enough that I can walk through the service exit.” Her gaze was steady. “And while I’m doing that, you’ll be gone. Underground. Where Renard can’t find you.”

“Elodie, that’s insane. You were just talking about me protecting myself. Now you want to play diversion while I run?”

“It’s not a diversion,” she said. “It’s a choice. You need to find out who the girl is. The one my—the one your mother was protecting.” She caught herself, but the slip hung in the air. *My mother*. Because Camille had practically raised Elodie too, hadn’t she? Another child Camille had loved, another secret she’d carried. “You can’t do that from a prison cell or a safehouse. You need to move. Fast. And I’m just dead weight.”

“You’re not dead weight,” Luca said, voice rough.

“Then stop treating me like cargo.” She stepped forward and put her hand on his chest, over the locket hidden beneath his coat. “I’m choosing this, Luca. I’m choosing to fight. You want to protect me? Then let me fight my way, and you fight yours. And when we’re done—when you’ve found the girl and cleared your mother’s name—you come find me. Deal?”

He looked at her. At the bruise on her lip. The fire in her eyes. And he knew, with a heavy certainty, that arguing would only waste the minutes Marcel had bribed for.

“Deal,” he said.

She kissed his cheek, quick and fierce. “Then go. And Luca… your mother. She didn’t stop fighting for you. Not ever. Whatever she did, whatever she lost—she did it because she loved you. Remember that.”

He nodded, throat tight, and turned to the door. Marcel’s thumb was already on the reader, and the seal hissed open.

“Ten minutes,” Marcel said, voice tight. “You’ve got ninety seconds.”

Luca looked back once. Elodie had moved to the far wall, her fingers tracing a pattern against the concrete—marking something, finding her point of escape. She caught his eye and nodded.

He stepped through the door, and it closed behind him with a sound like a tomb sealing shut.

He was halfway down the maintenance corridor when his implant pinged. A message, encrypted, from a channel he didn’t recognize. He opened it without stopping, and the text bloomed behind his eyes in cold blue letters:

*She’s awake. She’s asking for you by name. They’ve flagged her file as a security risk. You have until dawn before they move her to the Memory Annex for processing.*

*A friend of Camille’s.*

The corridor tilted. He gripped the wall to steady himself. The hospital. They were moving his mother in less than ten hours—and the Memory Annex was where memories went to be destroyed.

He broke into a run.