Read Chapter 35: The Missing Brother

Anne Vidal’s hands were steady as she poured two cups of coffee in the hidden bakery’s back room, the steam curling into the cold morning light that slanted through the frosted windows. Luca sat across from her, his mother, a woman he’d mourned for three decades and who now sat before him like a ghost made flesh. She was thinner than he remembered from the old photographs, her hair cropped short and grey, but her eyes—those were the same. Sharp, patient, hiding something.

“You asked about your uncle once,” she said, sliding a chipped cup toward him. “When you were eight. You’d found a picture in a drawer and wanted to know who the man was.”

Luca’s jaw tightened. “You told me you didn’t have a brother. You told me the photograph was an old friend.”

“I lied.” Anne’s voice didn’t waver. “I’ve lied about a lot of things, Luca. But that one cost me the most.”

He didn’t drink the coffee. He stared at her, the woman who had let him grieve her death for thirty years, who had built a maze of secrets around him so she could pull strings from the shadows, who had used his own pain as a weapon to point him at Catherine Moreau. Part of him wanted to hate her. Another part—the part that still remembered her humming him to sleep in their Marseille apartment—needed her to have a reason.

“His name was Émile,” Anne said. “He was two years older than me. We grew up in the Tenth Arrondissement, in a two-room flat above a butcher’s shop. He was a courier for the resistance—the real one, not the romantic version they teach in the holoschools. He carried memory fragments between safehouses during the first Memory War. Legal records, stolen testimony, proof of atrocities both sides were committing. He believed the truth would win if it could just reach enough eyes.”

Luca’s throat tightened. “The first Memory War ended before I was born.”

“It has a way of not ending,” Anne said, “when the people who fought it are still alive and holding grudges. Émile was caught in ’08, near Strasbourg. Catherine Moreau was a regional prosecutor then, ambitious, not yet a politician. She was the one who ordered his interrogation.”

“Interrogation.”

“They extracted from him, Luca. They didn’t need to drug him or break his bones. They had grown skilled at pulling memories like teeth, grinding them down until nothing was left but compliance. But Émile was stubborn. He’d hidden the most important fragments where even his own mind couldn’t reach them—in a sealed vault, keys split among three couriers. He died before he could tell them who the others were.”

Anne reached for the chain around her neck—the one Luca had thought held an old key to her apartment, the one she’d only now revealed to him in the hidden bakery. She unclasped it and placed a thumb drive on the table, worn and scarred, its casing dulled with age.

“His death wasn’t clean,” she said. “They made it last. They wanted his memories to surface in his own head as they were pulling them out, to feel every second of losing himself. When the war ended and the amnesty went through, Catherine Moreau walked free. She filed the case under ‘classified’ and went on to her next post. Émile became a statistic. A footnote. A missing brother whose body was never returned.”

Luca’s eyes stung. He didn’t want to feel this. He wanted to be the thief, the ghost, the man who traded in memories without flinching. But this was his mother, and her voice was cracking at the edges, and she was telling him about a man she’d lost before Luca had even been a thought.

“You disappeared after that,” he said quietly.

“Yes.”

“You weren’t hiding from Moreau. You were hiding *him*.”

Anne nodded. She was crying now, though her expression stayed still. “Émile had a backup. A fragment of his own consciousness—kept outside his body, a copy of his memories made in the weeks before he was captured. He knew the risks; every courier did. He stored it with me. Not a copy of a memory the extractors could find. A sealed box, requiring a key and a trigger phrase. The locket you wore wasn’t just a tracking device.”

Luca’s hand went to his chest, as if the locket were still there. It wasn’t—it was in Adrian's pocket, a hostile ghost of a gift. “You mean I carried him my whole life.”

“You carried a memory of him. His last coherent memory, made before the pain took him. He left instructions with me to pass it to you when the time was right. I didn’t know when that would be until Moreau started her campaign. Then I knew it would never be a safe time—only a less awful one.”

“Why me?” Luca’s voice was rough. “Why not give it to the authorities? Why not bury it in an archive until she was gone?”

Anne smiled, but it was the saddest thing Luca had ever seen from her. “Because archives get raided. Authorities get bought. People forget. But a son of mine would be too stubborn to forget, and too clever to be caught. And because Émile asked me himself, before he was taken. He said—god, he was so young—he said, if I ever have a child, I want them to know who I was. Not a dead soldier. A man.”

Luca pushed back from the table. The chair scraped against the stone floor. He walked to the window and stared out at the narrow alley, where the first of the morning commuters was trickling through the grey streets, unaware that the world had shifted on its axis in the last forty-eight hours. A woman with a holographic cat on a leash. A man arguing with his phone. Life going on while his own rearranged itself again and again.

“I can play it,” he said without turning. “The drive. My implant can read it.”

“I know.”

“He was your brother. You’re his sister. Don’t you want to see it first?”

Anne was silent for a long moment. “I was at his interrogation when I was a child, waiting outside the room because they wouldn’t let a teen in. I heard him scream, Luca. I have enough of his memory to last me. But you—you were born after the war. You have no scars from it. You should see what he was when he was whole.”

Luca turned back. His mother’s eyes were dry now, steel-blue and unyielding, her grief banked behind decades of discipline. He felt his anger soften, not into forgiveness, but into something more manageable. Understanding. Not enough to heal anything. But a start.

He sat back down and picked up the thumb drive. It was heavy in a way that had nothing to do with its weight.

“Do I just need to insert it?” he asked.

“The memory will stream through your implant. It’s raw, unedited. You’ll see what he saw as he recorded it. The good and the bad.”

Luca hesitated. He’d spent his life inside other people’s memories—stealing them, selling them, splicing them into narratives for clients who wanted to feel something real. But this was different. This was family.

“I might see things you don’t want me to know,” he said.

“So might you,” Anne said. “But that’s the risk of memory, isn’t it?”

He inserted the drive into the port behind his ear. The world dissolved.

He was standing on a rooftop in Strasbourg, the cold wind snapping at a jacket that wasn’t his, a city of lights spread out before him. A man’s voice spoke in his head, clear and young, accented with the flattened vowels of the border regions.

*If you’re hearing this, I’m either dead or close to it. My sister—you call her Mom—she’ll have kept me safe until you were old enough. I want you to know I knew the risks. I did this because the truth is a weapon, and too many people are hoarding it who shouldn’t. Don’t let them win.*

*Don’t let them bury us.*

The memory ended. Luca blinked, the bakery snapping back into focus. His hand was shaking. His mother was watching him, her expression unreadable.

“He said don’t let them bury them,” Luca said hoarsely. “What did he mean? Who is ‘them’?”

Anne pressed her lips into a thin line. “Émile wasn’t the only one who died like that. The Memory War wasn’t between nations, Luca. It was between people who believed the past should be public, and people who believed it should be sold. Émile was one of hundreds killed to bury the truth. Catherine Moreau was a lieutenant in that war. And now that she’s in custody, her allies are going to burn everything that might reveal what she ordered.”

Luca’s blood chilled. “How many are out there? Still holding the same secrets?”

“I don’t know.” Anne finally reached for her coffee, hands steady as she took a sip. “But the vault beneath your apartment? It’s not a backup of my work. It’s a map. Names, locations, fragments. Everything I could recover from the memory war before they sealed it away. And they’ll be coming for it soon—now that they know you exist, and you’re connected to me.”

Luca let out a breath he hadn’t realized he’d been holding. He was no longer a thief chasing one politician. He was holding a panic button tied to a war that never ended—and the people who fought it were waking up.

His mother tilted her head, almost gentle. “You don’t have to do anything heroic, Luca. You can walk away. I can’t promise you’d be left alone, but you could try.”

“You know I won’t,” he said.

“I know,” Anne said softly. “That’s what I was afraid of.”