Read Chapter 32: The Edge of the Net

The transmission tower rose from the scrap fields like a rusted finger pointed at God. Luca had seen it from the highway a hundred times, always wondering what kind of signal it carried. Now he knew: everything. Every screen in Paris ran through this relay spine. Every advertisement, every train schedule, every fucking news broadcast.

He killed the hoverbike's engine at the perimeter fence, letting the silence swallow the night. The tower's red beacon blinked in steady rhythm, a heartbeat for the city's nervous system. In his satchel sat the backup drive fragments and the original murder memory—all of it curdled and corrupted from the rush extraction, but enough. Enough to show France what Catherine Moreau had done.

The fence had a maintenance gate, code-locked. Anouk had given him the bypass, scrawled on a napkin like a takeout order. He punched the sequence in and slipped through.

Thirty meters of open ground. Then the ladder up.

His legs screamed on the climb. The gala had taken something out of him—the fight with Adrian, the run through the streets, Elodie's face vanishing behind a wall of security guards. He didn't know if she was alive. He couldn't think about that now. The only thing that mattered was getting to the relay junction box at the top of this tower and jamming the memory into the city's throat.

The wind hit him at the platform, cold and brutal. Below, Paris sprawled in a grid of sodium light and holographic haze. Somewhere down there, Catherine Moreau was probably sipping champagne in the Élysée, celebrating her successful infiltration. And Adrian was somewhere with his mother's locket, a piece of her warm against his palm.

Luca forced the thought down and cracked the junction box.

The virus extraction had done its work in the palace vault—it had pulled the memory into a packet he could inject into any broadcast node. He'd done this a dozen times on smaller scales: pirate feeds, hijacked billboards, a night he'd made every screen in the Marais play a message from a client's dead wife. But never like this. Never full-spectrum.

He plugged the drive in. The tower hummed.

"Don't."

The voice came from behind him, carried on the wind in a way that made it sound almost gentle. Luca turned.

Catherine Moreau stood on the platform's edge, flanked by four security guards with rifles trained on his chest. She wore the same gown from the gala, but she'd added a coat against the cold—a black wool thing that made her look like a mourner at her own funeral. Behind her, ascending the final rungs of the ladder, came Adrian.

Adrian held the locket. His thumb traced its worn edge.

"You're faster than I expected," Catherine said, stepping forward. The guards fanned out. "I had bets on you making it to the tower but not up it. Adrian overestimated the security response. He thought you'd get caught at the perimeter."

Luca's hand hovered over the junction box. The drive was engaged. One more command and the memory would stream into every screen in Paris.

"Your mother is alive," Catherine said. She said it like she was sharing a weather report. "She's in a facility in Marseille. Comfortable, if you can call it that. She doesn't know what she knows—we've kept her in a holding state. But she is alive."

Luca's chest cracked open.

"I don't need her to stay that way." Catherine tilted her head. "You've made your choice already, haven't you? You're up here, your hand on the box. But I want you to understand what that choice costs."

"You're lying." His voice came out raw.

"I don't lie." Catherine stepped closer. The guards didn't move. "I calculate. And my calculation says you'll sacrifice one woman—your mother—to expose a truth that will hurt another woman—me. But that truth you think you have? I've already discredited it. By the time you broadcast, I'll have paperwork showing the memory was fabricated by resistance operatives. You'll ruin my night, but you won't ruin my presidency."

Adrian held up the locket. It caught the tower's red light, glinting like a drop of blood.

"She gave this to you, didn't she?" Catherine said softly. "When you were a child. I know what that meant to her. She talked about it in the briefings—about how it kept you safe. How she'd never take it off." A pause. "She doesn't have it anymore. She never will again."

Luca saw his mother's face. Saw her hands braiding his hair when he was too small to know the world was broken. Saw her smile, crooked and tired, the night she told him she had to go away for a while.

He saw her crying in a Marseille cell, empty-handed, waiting for a son who never came.

Catherine reached the platform's edge, ten feet from him. Her eyes were flat and certain.

"Lower the drive. Walk down. We'll fly you to Marseille tonight. You'll see her. You'll hold her hand. And then you'll disappear—new face, new name. She'll be released, once we're certain you're silent. We can both live. Your mother can live."

Luca looked at the junction box. Then at Adrian, who had stopped holding the locket overhead and was now watching Catherine with something unreadable in his face.

The tower hummed.

Luca thought about Elodie, who had thrown herself into the path of security guards for a memory she'd never seen. About Anouk, who had asked him to curate, to choose, to decide who deserved protection. About La Taupe, who had died empty to settle a debt.

His mother had taught him one thing, above all else. She'd said it so many times he'd stopped hearing it.

*The truth doesn't care if you're scared, Luca. That's why it's true.*

He pressed the command.

The junction box lit up. The tower's signal surged, and below, Paris's screens began to flicker—billboards, apartment windows, the giant holofacades along the Seine. First one. Then a hundred. Then a city's worth.

Catherine's face drained. She lunged for the box, but her guards were already shouting into their comms. The ground was shaking—the sound of sirens rising from the Élysée, from every police node in the city.

"I'm sorry," Luca said, and he meant it. He meant it so deeply it cracked his voice. "But she taught me better."

Catherine's guards seized him. But her eyes were on the screens—on her face flickering there, younger, older, all of her versions—and on the dead man on the floor of the old apartment, who wasn't dead yet in the memory, who was alive and bleeding and about to end up deleted from the world.

Luca let them take him down. The transmission held.