Read Chapter 2: The Silver Locket

The cube sat on the workbench like a black, polished stone. My hands were still shaking—not from the flight across the rooftops, not from the chase. From the memory inside it. I’d seen Moreau’s face, her knuckles white around the handle. I’d heard her whisper, *“This is necessary.”*

I pushed the chair back and breathed. The safehouse was a cramped studio above a shuttered boulangerie in the 11th. The walls were lined with Faraday mesh, and a ceiling fan spun slowly, catching the red glow of the neon sign across the street. Elodie should have been here. Should have been leaning over my shoulder, cracking jokes about my sweat-stained shirt.

I touched my sternum where the locket hung beneath the fabric. My mother had given it to me when I was nine, a week before she disappeared. Silver, tarnished at the edges, inscribed on the inside with *“Pour que tu te souviennes.”* So that you remember. I’d worn it for twenty-one years without knowing what it was for. Now I had a cube that matched the sigil etched into its face, and a stranger telling me the locket was *everything.*

I lifted the chain over my head. The locket was heavier than I remembered. I’d opened it a thousand times as a kid—just a plain mirror inside, my own small face staring back. But the mirror had always felt wrong. Too thick.

My thumbnail found the seam. It gave, not with a click, but with a soft, pneumatic hiss. The mirror swung out on a hidden hinge, and beneath it sat a slot lined with copper contacts, shaped exactly like the cube in my hands.

My stomach dropped.

I picked up the memory cube. Its casing was scuffed, still warm from the drone’s internal storage. I slid it into the slot. It seated with a satisfying *thunk,* and the locket buzzed faintly against my palm—a tremor of data wanting to flow.

I didn’t know what would happen if I closed it. So I didn’t. I held the cube in its cradle and stared at the copper filaments, thinking about my mother’s hands. She’d been a restorer of old things—paintings, manuscripts, and unrecorded data. She’d known locksmiths and forgers and people who didn’t exist. And she’d had a locket that was actually a memory reader built to house exactly one cube.

*Pour que tu te souviennes.*

“Of what, Mom?” I whispered. The ceiling fan did not answer.

I pulled the cube out and fitted the locket back together, closed the clasp, and let it rest against my collarbone again. I checked the cube’s data tag one more time. It had a string of coordinates, a timestamp, and a marker that pulsed in the artificial-intelligence registry as *orphaned memory—no host link.* That was the strange part. The memory of killing someone was in this cube, recorded by whoever had worn it. But Moreau didn’t know she had it. So who had extracted it from her, and when?

For that, I needed to free Elodie. Because she was the one who could trace extraction chains through the black-market archives in an hour flat, and because she was my partner, and because she was screaming my name when the enforcement agents pulled her off the drone pad.

I pulled up my comm panel and toggled through the encrypted contacts. The list was short. Dead clients, burnt aliases, one fixer who owed me a favor from a deal gone sideways three years ago. Her name was V, and she operated out of the basement of a laundromat in the 18th. She answered after three rings, her voice filtered through a voice scrambler so that it sounded like static wrapped around a woman’s throat.

“Luca Vidal. I thought you were dead.”

“Not yet. V, I need a location. One of my people got picked up.”

“One of your people. Elodie?”

I didn’t confirm. She already knew.

“The transport that lifted her came from the *Direction Générale de la Sécurité Intérieure.* They run a holding block under the Palais de Justice. You know it?”

“Everyone knows it,” I said. “Getting in is another matter.”

“You’d need someone inside. Or you’d need a distraction big enough to pull the guards away.”

I smacked the cube against my palm. Moreau’s murder memory. That was bigger than a distraction. That was a bomb.

“V. What’s the going rate for getting an enforcement agent’s attention?”

A pause. “Depends on what you’ve got to throw. Why?”

I thought about the locket’s hidden slot. About the sigil etched into the cube matching my mother’s memory of a silver charm. The stranger on the bridge had said the locket was everything. He hadn’t said what to do with what it contained.

“Just tell me this,” I said. “If you had proof that a presidential candidate committed murder—real, verified proof—what would you do with it?”

The silence stretched long enough that I checked my signal. V’s voice came back, the static crackling with anger. “I’d fucking delete it. Are you insane? You can’t move that kind of data. It’s poison. Whoever has it has a target painted on their forehead. And Luca, you’re already a ghost. Don’t make yourself an easier one to find.”

“I can’t let Elodie rot in a DGSE holding cell.”

“Then find another way. Moreau’s memory is the last thing you want to touch. There are people who have died for incidental knowledge of her affairs.”

I hung up without goodbye, and the comm screen flickered. Then a message appeared, blocked, no sender ID, no encryption key attached. Just words:

*The locket is everything. The locket is the door. Ask what you are protecting.*

I stared at the message. The same phrase from Sainte-Chapelle. Whoever this was, they knew about the locket’s hidden slot. They knew what I had just discovered only minutes ago. Which meant either they were watching me, or they’d known the slot was there all along—which meant they might know what my mother had been hiding.

I opened the locket again. The copper contacts gleamed at me, hungry for the cube. I slid the little black cube in once more, hesitated, then closed the lid.

The room blurred.

A memory flooded over me—not Moreau’s, not the murder. My mother’s voice, laughing, pre-disappearance. A white-sheeted table in a workshop. Her hands, scarred from soldering iron work, fitting a silver locket together over the very cube that I held.

She had sealed it shut with a quiet whisper: *“If you’re reading this, Luc, it means I’m gone. Don’t trust the ones who wear silver chains. And don’t give this to anyone but the Taupe.”*

The memory snapped off. I was back in the safehouse, the neon outside bleeding through the blinds. My hands were shaking harder now, because the final fragment of my mother’s message was still echoing in my skull. A name. A task.

*La Taupe.*

The crime lord who ran the catacombs. The one V had warned me against, the one who had remembered that old debt I thought I’d buried. My mother had given me a destination. But she had not told me how much of me I would have to sell to reach it.

I put the chain back around my neck, the locket resting over my heart like a stone. Elodie was waiting. And now, somewhere in the dark beneath Paris, La Taupe was waiting too—and he knew a secret about a silver locket that even I hadn’t known until tonight.

I climbed out the window and started walking south, toward the catacombs.