Read Chapter 6: The Data Morgue

The rain had stopped falling by the time Luca reached the Ninth Arrondissement, leaving the streets slick with neon reflections that bled across the pavement like oil stains. The data morgue squatted between a shuttered boulangerie and a nightclub that pulsed with bass he could feel through the soles of his boots. It wasn't a hospital. It wasn't anything official. It was a warehouse where the dead's last memories went to rot, sealed in cryo-banks that cost families a fortune to maintain and cost the desperate everything to access.

He'd been here twice before, both times for clients who wanted to know what their loved ones saw in their final seconds. The morgue's security was mediocre—enough to deter grief-stricken scavengers, not enough to stop someone who knew what they were doing. He'd paid a night attendant named Roux six hundred euros six months ago for a backdoor keycode, and Roux had been smart enough to keep taking his money without asking questions.

The service entrance was tucked behind a dumpster that smelled of rot and cheap disinfectant. Luca pressed his palm against the lockpad and fed the code from memory. The door sighed open.

Inside, the cold hit him like a wall. The morgue kept its vault at four degrees Celsius—cold enough to preserve the bio-gel matrices that held neural imprints, cold enough that his breath fogged in front of his face. Rows of polished steel cabinets stretched into the dark, each one tagged with a nameplate and a date of death. Some families visited. Most didn't. The dead didn't care about visitation hours.

Luca moved past the public rows toward the restricted section at the back, where memories classified as evidence or sealed by court order sat under heavier lock. He'd brought Maya's jammer, a palm-sized device that would scramble the internal cameras for exactly four minutes before they reset. He had three chances to find what he needed before the system flagged an anomaly.

He found the terminal for the restricted archive behind a biometric door that took him eleven seconds to bypass. The screen glowed pale blue in the dark, and he pulled his mother's name from the memory of her voice, from the locket that still hung against his chest.

CAMILLE VIDAL. Date of death: UNCONFIRMED. Status: ACTIVE — NO ENTRY.

He ran the search three times, each query returning the same hollow result. No recovery sample. No deceased marker. No sealed file waiting for someone with the right clearance. His mother had no memories in this building because the system had no proof she was dead. She was still active. Still out there. Or her records had been scrubbed so thoroughly that even the morgue's redundant backups had nothing left to find.

Luca stood in the cold and let that sink in. She'd been gone eleven years. He'd grieved her in fragments, in the spaces where a mother should have been. And now the system was telling him she might still be alive, or that someone had erased her so completely that she'd never existed at all.

He shook it off. He didn't have time for ghosts.

He pulled up the cross-reference search instead, typing the name that had been burning in his skull since the memory cube first played: CATHERINE MOREAU. The terminal hesitated, then returned a single hit. A sealed file, marked with a red sigil that made his stomach drop—the same sigil from the memory cube's case. The same sigil from his mother's locket.

The file belonged to a man named Étienne Marchand. Occupation: investigative journalist. Date of death: three years ago. Cause: traffic accident, ruled accidental. Luca knew the name vaguely—Marchand had been a muckraker in the old style, the kind who chased corruption stories until someone decided he was inconvenient. His memory had been sealed by court order six months after his death, which meant no one had accessed it since.

Luca's heart was doing something uncomfortable in his chest. He checked his timer—two minutes left on the jammer. He pulled up Marchand's file details and found the memory catalog: forty-three archived segments, each one a moment the journalist had chosen to preserve before he died. The most recent entry was timestamped four days before his accident. Its title read: RUE CLER — SUBJECT: C.M. — DELETION LOG COMPLETE.

He copied the file index to his retinal implant, compression algorithms chewing through the data in seconds. He didn't have time to review the full memory here—the jammer was already blinking its final warning—but he grabbed the metadata, the location tags, the timestamp patterns. Rue Cler. A clinic. A deletion log that Marchand had apparently accessed or witnessed before his convenient accident.

Luca killed the terminal and slipped back through the vault, past the rows of frozen memories, past the dead who couldn't speak for themselves. The cold followed him all the way to the service exit, and when he stepped back into the Paris night, the rain had started again.

He keyed his comm as he walked. Maya picked up on the second chime.

"You find anything?" she asked. No greeting. That was Maya.

"Not about my mother. Her file's either empty or scrubbed so deep it's gone. But I found something else." He paused, letting the rain drum against his hood. "A dead journalist named Étienne Marchand. He's got a sealed memory file with Moreau's name in it, accessed from a clinic on Rue Cler. Date matches four days before he died in a 'traffic accident.'"

Silence stretched long enough that Luca checked his comm to make sure the line was still live.

"Maya?"

"I know that name," she said finally. Her voice had changed—flatter, more careful. "Marchand came to me about two years before he died. Said he was working a story about memory deletion clinics operating outside legal oversight. I thought he was chasing conspiracies. He sent me a data packet once, a partial log from a clinic on Rue Cler. I never opened it." Another pause. "I was scared of what I'd find."

Luca stopped walking. The rain filled the space between them.

"Open it now," he said.

"I don't have it anymore. I wiped it after he died. But I remember one thing." Her voice dropped, and Luca had to strain to hear her over the storm. "The clinic's director was a woman named Dr. Isabelle Moreau. Catherine's sister."

The street seemed to tilt around him. He gripped the locket through his jacket, the metal cold against his fingers.

"Catherine Moreau's sister runs a memory-deletion clinic," he said slowly. "The same kind of clinic that could have excised a murder from her cortex. The same clinic a dead journalist was investigating right before he died."

"Yeah." Maya's voice was barely a whisper. "And I think I know why your mother's file is empty, Luca. I think Camille went to that clinic too. I think she went there to have something deleted, and whatever she wanted gone was tied to what she saw in that murder memory."

Luca's throat tightened. "You knew this before."

"I suspected. I didn't know how to tell you. I still don't know if I'm right."

A tram rattled past, its windows glowing gold against the wet night. Luca watched his reflection slide across its surface, a stranger wearing his face.

"What's the address for Rue Cler?" he asked.

"Luca—"

"The address."

Maya gave it to him. He didn't say goodbye. He just started walking, the locket warm against his chest, the memory cube burning in his pocket, and the name of Catherine Moreau's sister turning over and over in his mind like a blade.