Read Chapter 26: Burnt Bridges

The shockwave from the flashbang was still ringing in my skull when the first bullet screamed past my ear. It tore through the concrete pillar behind me, spitting dust and splinters across the back of my neck. I dropped low, scrambling toward the nearest car, my knee slamming into a bumper hard enough to send pain lancing up my thigh.

"Luca!" Elodie's voice cut through the roar of gunfire. She was pressed against the wall near the stairwell exit, her pistol raised, her face lit with a grim determination I hadn't seen since the prison break. "This way. Now!"

A second round punched through the windshield of the sedan beside me, spiderwebbing the glass. I crawled faster, boots sliding on oil-stained concrete. Moreau's words hung in the air like poison—*your mother is alive in Marseille, and I let her live*—but there was no time to process betrayal. Only survival.

Two shooters advanced from the ramp on my left, their rifles fitted with suppressors that couldn't hide the muzzle flashes. The parking garage echoed with the wet thump of rounds chewing through metal and flesh. One of Moreau's men went down with a strangled cry, Elodie's shot catching him square in the throat. He crumpled like a discarded marionette.

The fourth shooter had flanked around a delivery truck. I saw him a half-second before he saw me, his silhouette breaking against the fluorescent bars above. I threw my shoulder into the driver's door of an abandoned courier van, shouldering it open as a burst of fire stitched the ground where I'd been standing.

"Adrian!" I shouted, scanning the chaos for his wiry frame. He'd been behind me when Moreau revealed her hand. He wasn't now.

Elodie grabbed my jacket and yanked me toward the service stairwell. "He's gone. He ran for the north exit when the shooting started."

"He wouldn't—"

"I watched him run, Luca." Her voice was flat, unreadable. "He's not one of us. He never was."

The words landed like a blade between my ribs. Adrian had been my only line to the data morgue, the journalist who'd died investigating the clinic, the man who'd pulled me out of worse scrapes than this. But Elodie had no reason to lie. And I had no time to mourn.

We plunged into the stairwell, boots clanging on iron steps as gunfire echoed behind us. The tactical team was disciplined—they'd take the stairs in pairs, coordinated, moving like a single animal. I'd stolen from people like them before. I knew how they thought.

I just didn't know how to outrun them.

The tunnel entrance was three levels down, a rusted maintenance door that Elodie kicked open with a shuddering crack. Beyond it, the Paris Metro's forgotten arteries stretched into darkness: a service corridor layered with decades of grime, graffiti tags bleeding into one another, the air thick with copper and mold.

"District engineers sealed this line in 2031," Elodie said, pulling a chem-light from her pocket and cracking it. Green light flooded the corridor. "No trains. No cameras. Just rats and the occasional dealer using it as a cut-through. La Taupe's people don't come down here."

"You sure about that?"

She didn't answer. She was already moving, her footsteps sure and fast, as if she'd walked these tunnels a hundred times. Maybe she had. I didn't know Elodie's history beyond the parts she'd chosen to show me—the brother erased from memory, the vendetta against a clinic that had hollowed out her family. But watching her navigate the dark with the ease of a woman born underground, I realized I didn't know her at all.

That was a problem. Because I was about to trust her with everything.

Behind us, the stairwell door slammed open. A shout in French, clipped and professional. Then the chatter of suppressed fire, chewing through the concrete at our heels.

"Go!" Elodie shoved me forward. We ran.

The corridor split, forked, doubled back on itself. Elodie never hesitated. Left, right, through a narrow crawl space that scraped my shoulders raw, past a collapsed section where the ceiling had caved in and metal beams jutted like broken teeth. The gunfire grew distant, then fainter, then stopped altogether.

We burst into a larger chamber, an old platform station stripped of its fixtures. A dead Metro car sat on the tracks, its windows shattered, its interior filled with the detritus of squatters long gone. Elodie leaned against the wall, breathing hard, her pistol still trained on the corridor behind us.

I collapsed onto the platform edge, my heart hammering against my ribs. My implant was still hot, still streaming fragments of Moreau's deleted memory into the back of my skull—a girl, a daughter, a truth she'd surgically buried. My mother's face surfaced, younger, harder, a bodyguard's mask that never slipped. I remembered that face. I'd been looking for it my whole fucking life.

"Your contact," I said, when my breath finally steadied. "The one who runs the resistance cell. Is she in Paris?"

Elodie holstered her pistol and looked at me. In the green light of the chem-light, her eyes were two pale stones. "Anouk. She runs a collective of memory-hackers. They've been hitting memory monopolies for years, scrubbing thefts, exposing the clinics that delete inconvenient pasts. They're the only people in this city who've seen Moreau's playbook before."

"And they'll help me broadcast the memory?"

"They'll want something in return." She pushed off the wall and walked toward me, boots crunching on broken glass. "The resistance doesn't work for free. And I don't know if you're ready for the price."

I laughed—a dry, hollow sound that died in my throat. "I've already lost my mother twice. My father's dead. The journalist who tried to help me is dead. And the woman who might be my sister doesn't know I exist—because the woman who might be her mother had her erased." I stood up, brushing the dust from my jacket. "What else can they take from me?"

Elodie held my gaze for a long moment. Then she nodded once, a gesture that felt less like agreement and more like acceptance—of me, or of what was about to happen, I couldn't tell.

"There's a safehouse in the 19th," she said. "A boiler room beneath a shuttered textile factory. Anouk keeps offices there. If we move fast and stay off the main arteries, we can reach it before dawn."

I thought of Adrian, running toward the north exit as the bullets flew. I thought of Moreau, standing in the garage with her hands folded elegantly behind her back, telling me my mother was alive while ordering her men to kill me. I thought of the girl in the villa, her face half-remembered, a Vidal who didn't know what her name meant.

I had one memory. One piece of evidence that could shatter Moreau's campaign, expose La Taupe, maybe even bring down the whole rotten edifice of memory politics in this city. And the only person who'd help me use it was waiting in a boiler room in Belleville, surrounded by people who'd spent their whole lives fighting the same war I'd stumbled into.

"Let's go," I said.

Elodie led me into the dark. The tunnel swallowed us whole, and the only sound was the rhythm of our footsteps and the distant, fading echo of the men who would never stop hunting us.

We walked for what felt like hours, through corridors that smelled of rust and rain and old secrets. At some point, Elodie stopped, cracked a second chem-light, and looked back at me. Her face was half-shadowed, her expression unreadable.

"You know if this goes wrong, you'll never see your mother again. Moreau will make sure of it."

I thought about my mother—her false identity in Marseille, the life she'd built away from the man who'd raised me, the debt she'd owed La Taupe that had kept her running for fifteen years. I thought about the diary in the villa, the entries she'd written in code, the fear and love braided through every line.

"I've spent my whole life stealing memories to survive," I said. "Maybe it's time I gave one back."

Elodie didn't smile. She just turned and kept walking, and I followed, because there was nothing left to follow but the dark and the girl who knew how to navigate it.

The boiler room in the 19th was everything Elodie promised—a sprawling underground warren of pipes and rusting machinery, lit by a string of salvaged work-lights. The air smelled of oil and brewing coffee, and somewhere in the depths, a radio played a song that was at least twenty years out of date.

Three figures stood near a central workbench, their faces half-lit by the glow of a portable holographic projector. A woman at the center, tall and gray-haired, with the lean build of a former athlete, turned as we entered. Her eyes swept over me once, twice, cataloging my worth in a single appraising glance.

"Elodie," she said, her voice a low rasp. "You brought company. And by the look of him, trouble."

Elodie stepped aside, revealing me fully. "This is Luca Vidal. He's got something you'll want to see."

Anouk's gaze sharpened. "Vidal." The name hung in the air like a struck bell. "Your mother worked for Catherine Moreau."

I met her eyes and didn't flinch. "She protected her daughter. The one Moreau deleted."

A long silence. Then Anouk smiled—a thin, dangerous thing that didn't reach her eyes.

"Then you and I have a lot to talk about, boy." She gestured to a chair beside the workbench. "Sit. Tell me everything. And if you're lucky, we'll figure out a way to burn down the whole crooked house before Moreau has a chance to bury you with it."

I sat down. The chair creaked under my weight. And for the first time since parking level P3, I allowed myself to believe that I might survive long enough to see my mother again.