CHAPTER ONE

The Wrong Reflection

The mag-cup under my left boot makes a noise I don’t like.

A thin electric whine. High, irritated, getting worse.

I shift my weight onto the right foot and tighten my grip on the maintenance cable. Below me, the drowned district waits with all the warmth of an open grave.

From up here the city looks clean. Forty floors down, the rust eats through everything.

Rain needles the back of my neck. Wind jerks at my jacket, pressing the emergency stabilizer between my shoulder blades. I checked it before the climb. Twice. I still don’t trust it, which probably explains why the thing has kept me alive.

Forty-three minutes against this glass and my knees have begun preparing an invoice. They’ll deliver it in three years through an orthopedic surgeon.

Ozone burns my nose. I haven’t slept in thirty-one hours. I blink hard, but the windows across the street keep doubling.

And I am absolutely not stalking Chad.

This is quality control.

Professionals call it post-extraction observation. I call it making sure I didn’t break anything important. The distinction rests mostly on intent, and at two in the morning, soaking wet outside a grieving man’s penthouse, I’m willing to grade myself generously.

Here’s the job.

I enter somebody’s mind while they’re vulnerable enough to let me. Asleep, drunk, halfway through a confession. Then I pull one specific memory out whole.

It leaves them.

I keep it.

A memory carries a piece of the person with it. Most extractions come away with clean edges. Most is where this profession gets expensive.

Names, rooms, sequences. The brain files those neatly enough. Emotion is where the trouble starts.

Emotion has no paperwork.

For two days after a job, coffee may taste like somebody else’s kitchen. A song can hurt over something that never happened to me. I once removed a man’s fear of elevators and spent the following week taking stairs because the closing doors sounded disappointed.

The clinical term is affective carryover.

Whoever named it never woke up missing a dog he’d never owned.

I have rules. Consent before contact. One memory named in advance. No browsing. No souvenirs. I don’t remove pain just because somebody asks me to.

The rules don’t clean the work. They keep me honest about the dirt.

Chad asked me to take the kiss he thought had ended his marriage. He called it their last good kiss. I believed him. That was my first mistake.

One moment on a hospital walkway. Flood sirens testing below. Victoria clutching his coat in both hands. She told him she was scared. He told her she didn’t have to be brave in front of him. Then she kissed him as if a promise might survive what came next.

Victoria survived the treatment. Their marriage didn’t survive what came afterward. Chad said he couldn’t bear remembering the last time she looked at him like she still trusted him.

He signed the release twice. Answered every verification question. Looked me in the eye and said, “Take the part that makes morning impossible.” I asked whether Victoria knew. He looked away. I should have stopped there. His signature gave me permission to enter his head. It did not give me permission to decide what belonged to her. I took the job anyway.

I took exactly what he named.

Now he burns toast every morning.

And every morning, something inside me waits for a woman who is alive and has chosen not to come back.

So here I am. Quality control, if quality control includes watching a man through forty feet of rain while knowing how his estranged wife tasted when she was trying not to cry.

Billy hovers off my left shoulder, half-rendered. Lightning strobes across the skyline and takes a piece of his elbow each time. Seven years dead, and he still can’t produce a convincing sleeve.

When he was alive, he never smoked. He just ended up beside everybody who did. Billy was the guy holding your drink while you cried. The one who drove you home at three without asking what happened. If you got sick, he’d show up with soup and claim he happened to be in the neighborhood, even when the neighborhood was forty minutes away and he’d brought the whole damn pot.

He’s still doing it.

Light and code now. Still laughs at the worst possible time.

His glow looks thin tonight, pale blue-white against the rain. Water passes through him. I hardly notice anymore.

You get used to some things. Your dead brother becoming a hologram. Your own reflection developing separate plans.

That second one is new.

Across the channel, a neon sign flickers out of time with the storm. I remember the rhythm and turn back to Chad Fitzgerald’s apartment.

His kitchen light comes on.

Right on time.

Since I took it, he’s woken at the same hour every night and burned two pieces of toast he never eats.

That’s what I’m watching. Damage assessment. The man has nothing to do with it.

Neither does the piece of Victoria that caught against me during cleanup and refused to leave.

“You’ve been up here forty-three minutes,” Billy says.

“Quality takes time.”

“So does a restraining order.”

Chad puts the bread in the toaster.

My chest answers.

A small pull beneath my sternum. Unwelcome. His.

The rain turns warm against my skin.

It hasn’t changed. Weather doesn’t care enough to perform tricks for me. My nerves insist anyway. Hospital heat presses through the cold, and the glass in front of me becomes a walkway my feet have never touched.

Victoria’s fingers close around Chad’s coat. My fingers.

His coat.

Flood sirens sound below the hospital, one long mechanical note moving through the building. Victoria feels the vibration in Chad’s chest where her forehead rests. Treatment has reduced her world to short distances: bed to bathroom, elevator to walkway, her face to his.

Chad tells her she doesn’t have to be brave in front of him.

She wants to believe him.

She also wants to slap him for saying it kindly enough that she might.

Then she kisses him.

The building disappears.

No cable in my hand. No mag-cups under my boots. No Billy at my shoulder. Chad’s mouth is against mine, except the mouth belongs to Victoria and the argument that will end them hasn’t happened yet. The future still contains treatments they can pretend might work.

Morning still has somewhere to go.

I clutch his coat with both hands.

Forty floors up, my real hands release the maintenance cable.

“Sean.”

Billy sounds far away. Victoria thinks Chad said it.

The wrong name punches through the memory.

“Sean, count your fingers.”

I look down.

Victoria’s hands hold dark wool. Mine hang empty above the drowned district.

“How many?” Billy asks.

“Ten.”

“Pick a hand.”

“Five.”

“The other one.”

“Still five.”

“Good. Victoria had six on the left. Childhood reconstruction.”

“She did not.”

“You knew it was wrong.”

Anger jerks me back into my body.

Billy floats inches from my face.

“You’re here,” he says.

“I know.”

“Say where.”

“Outside Chad’s apartment.”

“Doing what?”

“Quality control.”

“Stalking.”

“Quality control.”

“Good enough.”

I hook one hand through the cable. Cold metal bites my palm. Real enough.

“That’s the third bleed tonight,” Billy says. My thumb rubs the cable clamp. A quarter turn, then back. I catch myself doing it and stop. “Since when do you fiddle with things?” he asks. “Since you started counting my bad habits.” “I’d need a second battery.”

“Second.”

“You called the Mustang Chad twenty minutes ago.”

“I’m tired.”

“You apologized when the toaster burned his bread.”

“Professional empathy.”

“You’re falling into her memory while hanging outside his building.”

“I’m managing it.”

“With finger counting.”

“Highly technical.”

Billy doesn’t smile.

“You took one named memory. Why is the bleed getting stronger after three weeks?”

It shouldn’t.

Carryover peaks within forty-eight hours. By day five, clients quit turning up in my dreams. By the second week, their favorite foods go back to being trivia instead of appetite.

Victoria keeps getting closer.

Every time Chad burns toast, something reaches through the missing place in him. I feel it answer from my side.

“Maybe he’s pulling,” I say.

“Clients can’t pull memories back.”

“Clients don’t wake at the same minute every night and make breakfast for a woman who won’t answer their calls.”

Chad takes the toast out. Black again.

He sets two plates on the counter. One for him. One across from him.

His hand stops above the second plate, as if he has only now noticed what he did.

Inside me, Victoria waits beyond the kiss. I can’t see her. I feel the connection where the stolen moment used to join the rest of her, a closed door with somebody’s hand against the other side.

Chad puts the plate away. The pressure vanishes.

Billy looks from him to me.

“That wasn’t damage assessment.”

“No.”

“Somebody’s using the missing memory as a route.”

The air inside Chad’s apartment ripples, like heat over asphalt.

The apartment lights hold steady, but Chad stops with one hand over the toaster. For half a second, even the rain seems stuck against the window.

Then a woman steps through the distortion.

Tall. Exact. A coat worth more than my apartment. Titanium weave runs through her fingers, Ballast internal-security hardware. That division has a polite name. People still disappear when it visits.

She crosses the kitchen without looking around. Her feet stay hidden beneath the coat. Her eyes land on Chad with the bored certainty of someone checking furniture she already owns.

She rests her hand on his shoulder. A wire pulls tight through my chest.

Chad’s eyes empty.

His face doesn’t sag. His mouth stays shut. Nothing about him changes except the part that was looking back.

Billy cuts out.

Even in low-power mode, he gives off a hum through my implant. A warm frequency I stopped hearing years ago because it was always there.

Now there’s a hole in the sound.

“You felt that,” I say.

Nothing.

“Billy.”

Three seconds.

“Yeah.” His voice comes back flat and thin. “I felt that.”

The woman lifts her hand.

Chad blinks at the kitchen, turns to the toast, and begins scraping it. He throws the first piece away. His hands flatten against the counter. She may as well have never entered.

Then she waits.

My fingers close around the release on my harness.

One turn gets me off the maintenance rail. Two steps across the glass puts me above Chad’s balcony. I could break the window, cross twelve feet of expensive kitchen, and pin her titanium-threaded hand to the counter before she touches him again.

My body likes that plan.

Then I see Chad’s knife.

He’s holding it upside down. The serrated edge presses into his palm while he scrapes the toast with the blunt side. He doesn’t notice the teeth opening his skin.

Blood appears beneath his smallest finger. The woman watches it.

She’s measuring him.

Billy’s voice scratches through my implant. “If you cross that glass, she gets both of you.”

“She already has him.”

“For nine seconds.”

“Long enough.”

“For what?”

“That’s what I’m trying to figure out.”

That keeps my hand on the latch.

People like her build traps out of reflexes. Place something vulnerable in sight. Watch what you’re willing to risk.

Ballast collected seven years of behavioral data on me before I learned there was a file. If she belongs to them, she already knows how much glass it takes to keep me from a bad idea.

Chad adjusts the knife without looking at it. The cut quits growing.

The woman’s mouth twitches. She gives the smallest nod.

That does it.

I pull the monofilament knife from my sleeve and set its dead edge against the window. I mark the angle. If she reaches again, I go through.

Billy sees my hand.

“Sean.”

“Nine seconds is over.”

The woman tilts her head toward the glass.

Toward me.

She never looks up. She shouldn’t know I’m here.

Her lips move once.

Forty feet away, behind three inches of glass and a wall of rain, she says one word.

I can read lips. She says my name.

Mine.

The distortion takes her. The apartment lights return to normal. Rain smacks the glass again. Chad keeps ruining bread.

The woman knew where to find Chad. She knew I was watching. I want to call it a setup, but I still can’t tell what she came to take.

I look at the glass. My reflection smiles.

I don’t.

The woman looking back wears my scars and the chip in my left eyebrow from the time Billy bet me I couldn’t fight a vending machine. Her mouth opens into a patient smile I’ve never used.

She looks almost glad to see me.

I don’t trust hopeful people. I trust hopeful versions of myself even less.

Her movements drag half a second behind mine. Playback lag. She whispers something the rain keeps from me.

The mag-cup under my left boot gives one final whine.

Then it lets go. I drop.

Forty floors.

Gravity doesn’t hesitate. Wind punches the air from my lungs, and the rain turns hard enough to hurt.

Before the fall gets serious, I have three thoughts.

I’m going to die.

The Mustang is parked three blocks north, so if I live, I’ll have to walk back in wet boots.

Then Billy screams my name.

“SEAN.”

He has several voices. The banter voice. The running-commentary voice. The fake British one he should’ve retired before he died.

This is the voice underneath those.

The voice from Room 317 at St. Mary’s. Machines screaming at 3:47 in the morning. Billy looking at me with eyes that still belonged to him while the rest of his body shut down.

Seven years of light and code haven’t weakened what that voice does to me.

The stabilizer fires at the last possible second.

It doesn’t stop the fall. It negotiates.

I hit knee-deep water at an angle that saves my life and rearranges several internal organs. Cold slams through me. The alley smells of rust, burned circuits, and something sweet rotting beyond the reach of the lights.

The water is too warm. A broken pipe, maybe.

The old ’57 Chevy is where it has always been.

Whoever owned it before the EMP killed this block in ’41 left it here and never returned. A salvage crew later rigged the body to a surviving guide rail, suspending it at hip height above the flood. It has waited forty years without moving.

Patient as furniture.

The old engine is dead. The paint is not. Somebody still wipes down the hood, which is either devotion or a spectacular waste of time.

The chrome across the Chevy’s hood remains flawless. Rain beads on it without leaving a mark. That car cut a private deal with the apocalypse.

I respect it enormously.

A clock hangs across the alley on a building that quit being a building around 2043. Neon and graffiti have been fighting over the remains ever since.

The clock reads 3:47. My implant reads 02:13. The colon blinks. Off. On. Off.

On.

A live wire runs through my chest toward the flood channel at the end of the alley. The stabilizer has shut down. This comes from somewhere else.

It feels like déjà vu with a leash around its neck. Like slotting a stranger’s memory and knowing which floorboard squeaks in a house you’ve never entered.

“Sean.” Billy’s voice is quiet now. Worried. “Whatever that was up there, it saw you back.”

“Good.”

“That’s not…”

“I’m tired of being the only one obsessed with things trying to kill me. Nice to share the load.”

“You’re smiling. Stop. You only smile like that before the part that costs us everything.”

He’s right.

I’ve worn this smile since I was nine. It isn’t courage. My face does it whenever my brain sees one route left and hates it.

I follow the pull.

The channel at the end of the alley swallowed the street years ago. Black water reflects Anchor City upside down. Ballast towers point into the earth. Neon writes itself backward across the surface.

A ’69 Camaro glides along the submerged track. The driver doesn’t look up. The end of the world is another Tuesday and he has somewhere to be.

Lightning bleaches the channel white.

For one frame, the reflection looks sharper than the city above it.

The inverted city.

The honest one.

For three years it has tried to show me something in windows, puddles, dead screens. Always at the edge of whatever else I was watching. I never told Billy how often. He would have watched every mirror until neither of us slept.

I crouch and press my palm to the water.

No reason.

My hand already decided.

A cut crosses my thumb. I didn’t feel the glass make it. One drop of blood hits the channel and holds on the surface.

It should spread. Instead, it stays whole. Then it drops straight down. Like it knows the address.

She rises to meet it.

My face comes out of the water.

My scars. My eyebrow. My shoulders held in the exact position they take before I do something I can’t undo. Every crooked detail matches.

Six extra years have worked on her. I can see them without knowing what happened during any of them.

Water runs from her hair and cheeks.

Her eyes are mine until I meet them.

Then they aren’t.

She looks hungry and exhausted. The look she gives me is worse: like I’m someone who promised to come home and never did.

She grins.

“I missed you.”

My thoughts stop.

The water doesn’t.

It climbs over my boots. The surface hardens around my ankles and locks there. Billy shouts behind me, but thunder tears his words apart. His pale light burns white against the channel.

I yank backward. Both arms out, every muscle finally voting together.

Too late.

It’s always too late with things that know your name.

My face grins from the flood as the water pulls me forward. I fall toward the dark, toward her, toward whatever waits in the space between a person and every echo she ever left behind.

The last thing I see is Billy. Still there. Burning the way he promised.

He always said he’d find me.