Read Chapter 34: The New Power

The bakery smelled of yeast and scorched sugar, a sweetness that felt obscene against the weight of the last twenty-four hours. Luca sat at a flour-dusted table, his mother across from him, her hands wrapped around a cup of cold coffee. Outside, the morning light filtered through grimy windows, casting pale stripes across the room. The city beyond was alive with sirens—police, state security, the machinery of a government in freefall.

Anne Vidal watched him with the same patient, unreadable eyes he remembered from childhood photographs. She was thinner now, her hair cropped short, lines carved deep around her mouth. Thirty years of absence had aged her into a stranger, and yet she sipped her coffee like she'd never left.

"You're angry," she said. Not a question.

Luca's jaw tightened. "You used me. My whole life—the grief, the searching, the obsession—it was all just you pulling strings."

"I gave you a purpose."

"You gave me a wound."

Anne set the cup down. The porcelain clinked against the saucer, a sound like a closing door. "Catherine Moreau was going to win. She had the memory markets, the police, the media. She was going to erase dissent itself, sell it back to the people who'd already paid for it once. You think I had a choice?"

"There's always a choice." Luca stood, his chair scraping against the tile. "You could have trusted me. Told me the truth."

"I couldn't. She would have found you. Found the memory."

"What memory?"

Anne's gaze flicked to the empty space at his chest, where the locket used to hang. "The one you lost."

Luca closed his eyes. The locket. Adrian had it now, wherever the man was. "You're going to have to be clearer than that."

"Later." She rose, brushing flour from her sleeve. "There's someone you need to meet first."

---

The provisional government convened in the Palais Bourbon, a neo-classical tomb of marble and murals that had somehow survived a century of political rot. Luca stood in the courtyard, watching armored vehicles roll past the gates, soldiers in crisp new uniforms replacing the ones who'd served Moreau's ministry. The air smelled of exhaust and wet stone, and everywhere, there were screens—newscasts replaying Catherine Moreau's arrest on loop, her face frozen mid-protest, handcuffs glinting.

Adrian found him there, cutting through the crowd with the ease of a man who now owned the room. He wore a tailored charcoal suit, no longer the rumpled agent who'd chased Luca through the palace, but something sharper. More dangerous. The locket was gone from his neck, tucked away somewhere, and Luca hated him for that.

"Luca." Adrian extended a hand. "You look like shit."

"I've had a week."

"You've had thirty years." Adrian's smile was thin, professional. "But I'm glad you made it out. The cathedral, the tower—you did what needed to be done."

"Where's Elodie?"

Adrian's expression flickered, a crack in the mask. "She's- safe. In custody for now, but safe. Witness protection. She gave a statement about Moreau's palace security protocols. It helped."

Luca exhaled, a breath he didn't know he'd been holding. She was alive. That was something.

"I'm not here to make friends," Adrian continued. "I'm here because the provisional council wants to offer you a position. Memory Regulation Oversight. You know the black market better than anyone alive. You could help us build a legal framework that actually protects people, not just their wallets."

Luca stared at him. "You're asking a thief to write the laws that put him out of business."

"History's full of odd turnarounds."

"And what do you get out of it?"

Adrian's eyes hardened. "Control. The memory trade is about to explode—Moreau's fall left a power vacuum, and half the cartels in Europe are moving in. Someone needs to regulate it before it becomes a bloodbath. You know the players. The routes. The hiding places. I need you."

"You need a leash for your new dog."

"I need someone who understands the streets better than my analysts."

Luca laughed, hollow and sharp. "I'm not your dog, Adrian. And I'm not interested in wearing a badge."

Adrian studied him for a long moment. "Think about it. The offer stands for forty-eight hours." He turned, then paused. "Oh, and Luca—your mother's records. They've been flagged. Provisional council wants to interview her about the memory war, about her brother's death. There are questions you should know the answers to before she talks to anyone."

Luca's blood went cold. "What questions?"

Adrian was already walking away. "Ask her about Jean-Luc."

---

The vault beneath his apartment was not a vault. It was a tomb.

Luca descended the stairs past his own storage unit, through a false wall he'd walked past a hundred times, down a corroded ladder into a space that smelled of dust and old paper. Anne stood at a steel table, a portable light casting long shadows across the walls. The room was filled with shelves of physical drives, data cubes, paper files—an archive of a war no one had officially acknowledged.

"You never told me about a brother," Luca said.

Anne didn't turn. She was holding a small plastic case, the kind used for preserving biological samples. "His name was Jean-Luc Vidal. He was eleven years older than me. He was a memory archivist for the Resistance, back when the first memory laws were being drafted. He saw what they were building—a system where the elite could buy and sell lives, not just memories. He tried to stop it."

"And they killed him."

"They erased him." Anne finally turned. Her eyes were wet. "Not just his body. His memories. His records. His existence. For thirty years, I carried the only copy of him that survived—the memory of our last conversation, encoded in a locket I gave you the day you were born."

Luca's throat tightened. "You gave me a dead man's memories."

"I gave you proof." Anne set the case down. "Proof that the first memory laws were built on murder. Proof that Catherine Moreau was part of the council that ordered his erasure. Proof that she's been erasing political opponents for decades, not just recently."

"And you used me to carry it around my neck like a goddamn charm."

"I used you to keep it safe." Her voice cracked. "You were the only person Catherine would never think to search. Her own godchild—she watched you grow up, she trusted you. She would never believe I'd hidden the truth in her favorite nephew's jewelry."

Luca felt the floor shift beneath him. "Godchild. Right. She always sent me gifts on my birthday." He laughed bitterly. "I thought it was guilt. For what she did to you."

"It was guilt. But not the kind you thought."

"Then why did you disappear? If you had the locket, if you had the proof, why vanish for thirty years?"

Anne's hands trembled. "Because Catherine didn't just order Jean-Luc's erasure. She ordered mine. She had a virus placed in my implant—a kill-switch that would wipe my memories if I ever tried to expose her. I had to disappear before she triggered it. I had to become a ghost to keep the memory alive."

Luca stared at the vault around him—the shelves of evidence, the backup drives, the careful organization of a lifetime's obsession. "And now? Moreau's in jail. The council's falling. What are you going to do with all of this?"

Anne looked at him, and for the first time, he saw fear in her eyes. "That's the problem. The new government—Adrian's government—they've already started asking questions about the locket. About Jean-Luc. They want the proof, but they don't want it public. They want to control the narrative of what Moreau did."

"They want to bury it."

"I don't know yet." Anne's voice dropped. "But I know this: Adrian didn't find me by accident. He knew my name. He knew about Jean-Luc before I ever spoke it. Someone on the provisional council gave him that information."

Luca turned to the stairs. "Then I need to find out who."

"Luca." She grabbed his arm. "Be careful. The people who killed my brother are still in power. They just changed their faces."

He pulled free and climbed toward the light. "They always do."