Read Chapter 29: The Last Surviving Memory

The backup drive's casing was still warm when Luca pried it from the wreckage of the broadcast device. Inside, the crystal lattice had fractured into a spiderweb of dead circuits. He turned it over in his palm, watching the faint blue light gutter and die, and felt something close to grief.

"Gone," he said.

Elodie stood at the vault entrance, her silhouette framed by the emergency strobes pulsing through La Taupe's flooded corridors. "Everything?"

"Not everything." Luca tapped his temple. "I still have the original. But you can't broadcast from a skull."

Anouk stepped past Elodie, her boots splashing through ankle-deep water. She was shorter than Luca had expected, with gray-streaked hair cropped close and eyes that had seen too many failed operations. She took the dead drive from his hands without asking, turned it over, and handed it back.

"There's another way."

Luca waited. Anouk didn't continue.

"I'm listening."

"The memory isn't just in La Taupe's vaults." Anouk pulled a cracked flexscreen from her jacket, its surface flickering with a map of Paris. She zoomed in on the eighth arrondissement, and a golden marker pulsed at the center of the screen. "Your friend here said her mother keeps a private memory bank."

Elodie stiffened. "In the Élysée. It's a vault beneath the private residence. Off the record, off the grid. Only Catherine and her personal security know it exists."

"Off the grid is good," Luca said. "Off the grid inside the most secure building in France is less good."

Anouk's finger traced a route across the map, threading through the Metro tunnels and emerging near the palace's service entrance. "There's a gala tomorrow night. State dinner for the European Data Union. Every minister, every delegate, every journalist who matters."

"You want us to walk into a palace during the biggest political event of the season."

"I want you to walk into a memory bank that's only accessible when Catherine Moreau is the busiest she'll ever be." Anouk folded the flexscreen and tucked it back into her jacket. "Her personal security follows her. Her chief of staff will be managing the press. The vault runs on an isolated network—no external access, which means no remote hacking. You need physical entry."

Elodie took a step forward. "I can get us in."

Luca turned to face her. In the low light, with water still dripping from her hair, she looked younger than her thirty years. But her jaw was set, and her hand rested on the knife she'd used to kill a man not three hours ago.

"Catherine is my mother. The guest list is vetted by her staff, but I know the protocols. I know the security rotations. I know the names of the people who'll be checking credentials." She met his eyes. "I also know what she keeps in that vault. It's not just memories. It's every deletion she's ever authorized. Every person she's erased."

"Your brother."

"My brother. My father. Your mother." Her voice cracked on the last word. "If we don't take this to the network, she wins. She erases La Taupe, she erases whatever's left of her old life, and she becomes president of Europe with a clean slate."

Luca thought of his mother in Marseille, alive but trapped under a false identity. He thought of the locket he still wore beneath his shirt, the one photograph that had survived his childhood. He thought of Jean-Pierre Moreau, dead and forgotten, his entire existence scrubbed from the record.

"She'll expect us," he said. "She knows we have the backup. She knows you know about the vault."

"Then we don't give her a target." Anouk had moved to the vault's rear wall, where a series of sealed cabinets lined the concrete. She pried one open and withdrew a black case, its surface marked with the double-circle insignia of the Paris Memory Authority. "We give her a distraction."

Inside the case, nestled in foam, lay a mask. It was bio-reactive polymer, the kind used for high-end identity theft—able to map the features of a living donor and reshape the wearer's face to match. Anouk handed it to Luca.

"There's a junior attaché in Catherine's office. His name is Baptiste Moreau—a distant cousin, keeps the family name alive. He's been on our payroll for six months. Tomorrow night, he'll be at the gala with a guest." She nodded toward Luca. "You'll be that guest."

Luca turned the mask over in his hands. The polymer was cool and slick, and when he pressed it against his palm, it rippled as if alive.

"And the vault?"

"Baptiste has clearance for the private residence—family privileges. He can get you to the corridor. The vault itself is biometric-locked to Catherine and two others." Anouk's eyes flicked to Elodie. "One of those others is your friend."

Elodie shook her head. "Catherine changed the codes after I left. I don't have access anymore."

"No, but you have something better." Anouk produced a second item from the case: a thin glass vial filled with a pale liquid. "Her genetic signature. We've been collecting her DNA for years—hair, skin cells, coffee cups. This is enough to fake a biometric pass."

Elodie took the vial. For a long moment, she said nothing. Then she closed her fist around it and looked at Luca.

"You realize if this goes wrong, she'll kill us. Not arrest us. Not try us. Kill us."

"She tried to kill us in a parking garage." Luca pocketed the mask and the vial. "Apparently, she's been trying for a while."

"Then we make sure she doesn't get another chance."

Anouk cleared her throat. "There's a condition."

Luca's hand froze on the mask. He'd known the price was coming—it always was with resistance cells—but that didn't make it easier to hear.

"When you copy the vault's contents, you'll have access to every deletion Catherine has ever made. Thousands of people. Some of them powerful. Some of them dangerous." Anouk's voice softened. "We're not asking you to sanitize the record. We're asking you to keep it. To hold it, unhackable, until the time is right."

"Until you decide what 'right' means."

"Until the world decides. But if you give it to the network, you give it to everyone. That includes people who will use it for revenge. For blackmail. For the same cruelty Catherine practices, just in different colors."

Luca thought of La Taupe begging for the death that would empty his mind. He thought of the look on Moreau's face when she'd told him his mother was alive—not guilt, not pity. Calculation.

"I can't control what the world does with the truth."

"No," Anouk agreed. "But you can control what you take. The vault contains everything. You'll be downloading Catherine's entire history of erasures. Some of those memories belong to people who deleted them voluntarily. People who went to her seeking release from trauma, from grief, from lives they couldn't bear. If you broadcast those, you destroy them."

Elodie looked at the vial in her hand. "You want us to cherry-pick."

"I want you to be sure." Anouk stepped forward and placed a hand on Luca's shoulder. "You're about to break into the private mind of the most powerful woman in Europe. Make sure you know what you're stealing—and why."

Luca closed his eyes. Behind his lids, the stolen memory played again: La Taupe's hand on the memory spike, Catherine's voice whispering orders, his mother's face flickering like a bad signal.

"I know why," he said. "She took everything from me. From my mother. From Elodie. From Jean-Pierre. From thousands of people who never got a choice."

He opened his eyes.

"I'm taking it back."

The word hung in the vault's cold air. Elodie slipped the vial into her jacket pocket, next to the knife.

"Tomorrow, then."

"Tomorrow."

Anouk turned to leave, then paused at the door. "One more thing. The man who was with you in the tunnels—the one who ran."

Adrian. Luca had almost forgotten him.

"He's still out there. Still in Catherine's system. If he saw you leave the vault, he'll know where you're going."

Luca felt the mask in his pocket grow heavier. "I know."

"He'll be watching for a face he recognizes."

Luca looked at Elodie. She was already reaching into her jacket for her own identity kit.

"Then we'll wear new ones."