Read Chapter 8: Elodie's Cage

The call came at 3:47 a.m., a frequency that meant La Taupe was done waiting.

Luca's implant pulsed once before he even woke—a sharp electric sting behind his left eye that dragged him from a dreamless sleep into the cold, sweating reality of his rented room. He reached for the comm unit on the nightstand and thumbed it on.

"Speak." His voice came out cracked.

La Taupe's distorted voice filtered through the scrambler, flat and metallic. "Vidal. You were supposed to be at Sabine's doorstep forty-eight hours ago. Instead, I'm told you've been visiting a clinic on Rue Cler. That's not the delivery route we discussed."

Luca's jaw tightened. He hadn't told anyone about the clinic, but La Taupe's network was everywhere—in bribed cops, in corrupt memory-brokers, in the maintenance workers who changed filters in the ventilation shafts. Of course he knew.

"The cube is ready," Luca said. "I'm handling the final arrangement."

"The cube is irrelevant if you're not moving it. My client has timelines. I have timelines. And your sister—" The word hung in the static for a moment. "—has a value that expires."

Luca gripped the comm harder. "Where is she?"

"Where she's always been. But I can change that. I can change whose hands she falls into. You have forty-eight hours to complete delivery, Luca. Or I'll introduce Elodie to someone who sees her not as collateral, but as merchandise."

The line clicked dead.

---

The black-site prison sat in the 19th arrondissement, a converted industrial warehouse that had been retrofitted for maximum security and minimum legal oversight. The building's exterior was unmarked concrete, but Luca knew the tell: the blank windows, the lack of public access points, the subtle antenna farm on the roof feeding surveillance to a private security firm owned by one of La Taupe's shell companies.

He didn't have clearance to enter physically. That privilege belonged to a small circle. But La Taupe had allowed him something else—a holo-booth visitation, thirty minutes per week, monitored.

The booth was in a separate building across the street, a bodega that sold stale baguettes and a live video feed to the prison between its shelves. Luca paid the clerk fifty euros in untraceable chips and sat in the narrow booth, watching the screen flicker to life.

Elodie's face appeared after a long, static-filled pause.

She was thinner than he remembered. The prison diet had hollowed her cheeks, darkened the skin under her brown eyes. But her gaze was still sharp—that fierce intelligence he'd grown up with, the one that had always seen through his lies.

"Luca." Her voice came through tinny and distant. "You're late."

"I know. I'm sorry."

"You're always sorry." She leaned forward, the angle making her image distort slightly in the holo-field. "What's happening out there? The guards are being weird. More visits being denied."

"Nothing you need to worry about."

"I'm in a black-site prison, Luca. Worrying is the only thing I have left."

The words cut deeper than he wanted to admit. He forced a smile he didn't feel. "I'm working on getting you out. I've got a deal in motion. I just need a little more time."

"What kind of deal?"

He hesitated. That fraction of a second was enough.

"You're hiding something," she said, her voice flattening. "I know that look. You get it from Mom. The way you pull your mouth to one side when you're lying."

Luca felt the phantom ache of his mother's memory stir in his chest. "There's a lead on Mom. About what happened to her."

Elodie's face went still. "She's gone, Luca. She's been gone for ten years."

"I know. But I found something. Evidence that she was involved in something—something bigger than we knew." He stopped himself before he mentioned the memory. Before he said the tattoo, the clinic, the deletion that erased her into nothing. "I'm following it. That's why the delay."

"Following it where?"

"Somewhere dangerous. Which is why I didn't tell you."

Her eyes narrowed. "You're putting yourself at risk over a ten-year-old ghost while I'm sitting in a cage waiting for you to deliver whatever Il faut that La Taupe is squeezing you for. Tell me I'm the priority."

"The cube is ready," he said, dodging. "Sabine will have it within two days."

"And La Taupe? He doesn't wait. He enjoys watching people break when he gets tired."

"There's a deadline now. I know what happens if I miss it."

Elodie was quiet for a moment. When she spoke again, her voice had dropped, softer. Almost fragile. "Listen to me. You can't save Mom's memory if you're dead. Or if I'm dead. Whatever you found—it's not worth my life. You understand?"

"Nothing is worth your life."

"Then make that choice. Stop chasing ghosts and finish the job you were given. Get the cube to Sabine. Buy my release. And then you can dig however deep you want afterwards."

Luca's pulse hammered in his throat. For a brief moment, he almost told her the truth. About the murder memory. About Moreau. About the possibility that their mother had witnessed something that got her erased from the world entirely.

But if La Taupe's people were monitoring this call—and they definitely were—any mention of Moreau's memory would trigger an alert. And Elodie was too vulnerable to carry that burden.

"It's handled," he said instead. "Plan's in motion. I just need you to stay strong."

Her eyes flicked to the side, toward something outside the frame. "They're cutting me off. Time's up." She leaned closer, her voice dropping to something barely audible. "I don't trust you when you're being careful. You're too good at playing dumb. But I trust that you love me enough to make the right call."

The feed cut.

Luca sat in the darkened booth for a long moment, staring at the blank screen that had held his sister's face. She thought the right call was delivering the decoy cube to Sabine, buying her freedom.

But he knew better now. He'd seen what the memory contained. Moreau's fingerprints on a murder, his mother's presence in the same frame, the clinic's deletion that had swallowed Camille whole. Delivering the decoy wouldn't just betray Moreau's rival into a losing play—it would leave Elodie exactly where she was, a pawn in a game whose stakes were taller than the Eiffel Tower.

He pulled out his comm unit and dialed Maya.

She answered on the second ring. "You're late," she said without greeting.

"I know. I need a new angle."

"On what?"

"On the Sainte-Anne hospital. I can't go in blind. I need floor plans, security rotations, and whatever you have on the experimental memory surgery units."

Silence. When Maya spoke, her tone had shifted from irritation to something almost like warning. "I've already told you what I found. The positional marker, the linked records. If you're planning to go inside that place alone, you're walking into something you don't understand."

"I don't have a choice anymore. La Taupe's deadline is ticking, Elodie is running out of time, and every lead I've followed has pointed to that hospital as the center of it all."

"Luca—"

"Just get me the plans."

Maya exhaled. "I'll send them within the hour. But if you don't come back from this, the file I'm holding on Camille Vidal goes to the police with a note explaining exactly who buried her."

She cut the connection.

Luca sat in the booth, surrounded by the bodega's flickering fluorescent lights, his sister's dying image still burned into his retinas. He had two days until La Taupe made good on his threat. One lead left worth following. And a secret he was carrying that could get them all killed.

Sainte-Anne. Whatever they had done to his mother there—whatever Moreau had buried inside those walls—it was the only chance any of them had left.