The Echo Thief

CHAPTER ONE

THE WEIGHT YOU DON’T PUT DOWN

I don't talk about Billy much. People tend to get uncomfortable when you mention a dead brother, especially one who keeps interrupting you.

He's been gone six years. I still catch myself thinking I ought to call him, which is ridiculous for two reasons. One, he's dead. Two, I can just tell him to shut up and he'll answer.

I remember the night he died better than I remember most of the things I've done since. I wish I didn't.

Room 317 had a bad fluorescent light. It buzzed over Billy's bed, and every few minutes it flickered hard enough to make me look up. I'd been sitting there three days, sleeping in a chair that was apparently designed to punish relatives. Billy kept telling me to go home. I kept telling him to mind his own business. The heart monitor chirped beside us. I hated that sound.

A little after three, the lights went strange. The fluorescent tube gave one long, ugly buzz. Then everything stopped.

I mean everything. The fan. The monitor. The footsteps in the hall. For half a second I could hear my own breathing and Billy trying to take his next one.

My teeth tingled. I remember that, of all things. My teeth.

Then something hit the building.

Later they called it a grid event. Then an infrastructure failure. They could have called it a fucking miracle and it wouldn't have changed what happened in that room. The window flashed white, the lights went out, and a sound like a freight train passing through the sky shook the glass.

The monitor stopped mid-chirp.

I'd spent three days wishing the monitor would stop making noise so Billy could rest. When it went silent, I wanted it back so badly I nearly hit it.

People started yelling in the corridor. A nurse ran past the open door, came back the other way, and nearly slipped. Somewhere below us somebody screamed for help. I looked at Billy. He was looking at me.

“Code black! All floors!”

I didn't move. There were people out there who needed help, and I knew that. I also knew that if I let go of his hand, he might be gone when I came back.

His fingers were thin and dry. When we were kids he'd grab my wrist and drag me into whatever stupid plan he'd cooked up. He'd taught me how to throw a ball, change a tire, and keep a straight face when Mom asked which one of us had broken something. I held on harder than I should have.

“Sean.” His voice was thin. Billy never sounded weak, but he sounded far away, like the word had a long way to travel.

“I’m here.”

“You should go.” His eyes slid toward the hallway.

“No.”

“Sean.”

“No.”

His fingers tightened once. “You’re doing the thing with your jaw.”

“My jaw doesn’t do a thing.”

“Your jaw absolutely does a thing.”

I laughed, which hurt. The room smelled like hot plastic. I could hear people running outside the door, but Billy was watching me like he still had all the time in the world to give me shit.

The emergency generators never started. I found out later that the whole city had gone down. Right then I only noticed one light still working: the little amber dot on my extraction kit under the bed.

I dragged the kit onto my knees. Two contacts for the skull, a lead for the port behind the ear, and a battery I'd bought from a man who said it could survive anything. The same man claimed a tiger had bitten his neck. I hadn't believed him about the tiger.

Everybody in Anchor City gets a port as a baby. Medical records, firmware, all the official reasons. People like me use that same little connection to take memories out. Usually the person paying me is alive and wants something gone.

I seated the lead behind his ear. His port took it without a fight.

Billy’s eyes found the wire, then found me. “Sean.” His voice changed. I’d heard that voice maybe three times in my life. “What are you doing?”

“I don’t know.”

It was true. My hands were already opening the kit.

“You always say that right before you do something stupid.”

“And I always mean it.”

“There it is.” He shut his eyes. Talking cost him by then, and he spent it on this. “Whenever you say you don’t know, everybody should start running.”

“That’s not true.”

“The fireworks.”

“That was one time.”

“The motorbike. The neighbor’s trampoline.”

“In my defense...”

“You didn’t have one.”

He smiled. It was barely there, but it was his smile. Even now, with the hospital falling apart around us, he was keeping score of all the stupid things I'd done.

I watched his chest. He'd breathe in, wait, then breathe out. Every pause was a little longer. I started counting them and couldn't stop.

I put my hand on the cradle. I wasn't thinking about a job or a memory. I just wanted to do something. Anything.

I reached for him.

I had no idea whether it would help.

I've spent years inside other people's memories. You get used to the little things that make them themselves. Billy was a thousand little things. He talked to strangers in checkout lines. He tried to repair appliances that weren't broken. He once spent an entire Saturday arguing with a parking meter. He could be a complete pain in the ass, and I loved him so much it made me angry.

I felt him slipping. I could feel his fear too, and that was worse. He hadn't said he was scared. Billy would rather swallow nails.

There was something he wanted to say. I felt it before I heard it.

I don’t want to go.

His next heartbeat didn't come. I waited for it anyway, my thumb pressed to his wrist. Then I checked again, because apparently I thought I could argue with a pulse.

The clock over the door had stopped.

3:47.

I looked at it and thought, Stupid fucking clock. As if that was the problem.

I kept his hand in mine.

Something gave way behind my eyes. I knew what an extraction felt like. This wasn't one. I couldn't tell where Billy ended and I began.

White light.

Black water, flat as a mirror.

A door stood open ahead of me.

Somewhere beyond it, a child was crying. A woman said something I couldn't make out. I tried to listen, and felt a cold tug inside my head, like somebody taking hold of a thread.

Her words went with it.

I wouldn’t know they were gone for six years.

Then the door and the water were gone, and the dark came back with the smell of burned wiring. I was in the chair. The machines were dark. Billy’s hand was in mine, and it was just a hand.

Ten seconds.

I said his name.

Twenty.

I said it again, quieter, the way you say a name in a house where somebody’s sleeping.

Thirty.

I’d sat with the dying for a living. I knew what came next. You stay with the body. You say the thing. You pack up the kit, go home, and find out who you are without them. I put my fingers on the lead to pull it free.

“Okay,” I said. “Okay, Billy. You can go. I’ve got Mom. I’ve got your jacket. I’m going to tell your parrot joke wrong at every wedding for the rest of my life, and you can’t stop me. You can...”

Sean?

Thirty-seven seconds, the cradle’s damaged log said later. Billy still argues it was longer. I tell him ghosts aren’t allowed to audit timestamps, and he says that’s discrimination.

The voice hadn’t come through my ears. It came from inside my own head, the place where my thoughts live, and it wasn’t my thought.

I didn’t answer. I knew what an echo was. I’d pulled a thousand of them out of a thousand heads, the last thing a mind was doing before it quit, looping over and over like a song stuck on a scratch. Billy’s last word had been my name. An echo would say my name.

Sean? Why can’t I feel my hands?

An echo doesn’t ask questions.

“Billy?” I said it out loud. The nurse in the doorway looked at me, but I was listening somewhere she couldn’t reach. “Is that you?”

Who else would it be? Why is it so dark? Why is your jaw doing the thing?

I laughed and sobbed at the same time and made a sound I have never made since.

“You don’t have hands anymore.”

A long pause, which I hadn’t known was possible in there.

Okay, he said. Okay. That tracks.

I laughed so hard I cried, or cried so hard I laughed. At that point they were the same thing. Somebody was shaking my shoulder, a nurse, her face pale in the glow of the emergency lamps, saying words I couldn’t hear. A doctor shoved in beside her and pressed two fingers to Billy’s throat, hunting for a pulse that wasn’t there anymore.

What did you do?

“I don’t know,” I said.

What do we do now?

The honest answers were panic, or crying until I passed out. What came out was, “We figure it out.”

Together?

It hit harder than anything else that night, because he sounded scared. Not hospital scared. Lost scared, like a kid who turns around in a crowded store and finds everyone gone.

“Together.”

Sean.

“What?”

Don’t disappear with me.

“I’m right here.”

I know, he said. That’s what scares me.

The doctor checked his watch and said the time out loud, for the paperwork. People imagine that part comes with music, or a silence that feels important. Mostly it’s a tired man reading off numbers.

Well, Billy said. This is going to be interesting.

“Shut up.”

You shut up.

That’s still more or less how our conversations go.

I left the hospital in his jacket. I couldn’t help it. Everybody keeps something after somebody dies, a watch, a photograph, a voicemail they play too many times. I took the jacket. It hung past my fingertips, and I couldn’t make myself roll the sleeves.

He’s been talking ever since. Some days I think he kept the promise better than I did.

The first year was the worst. Every power outage felt personal. Every flicker, every dead screen, every time I woke to a silent room, I waited for the second loss. Finding out your dead brother lives in your head only gives you a whole new thing to lose. For a long time I thought it was temporary, a grief response, a damaged mind protecting itself. Then the weeks turned into months, and the months turned into years, and arguing with a dead man about groceries and bad television became something I did before breakfast.

Getting used to it scared me almost as much as losing him.

I still haven’t told him that. He’d make it a thing. Billy can make a thing out of a parking ticket and half a bagel.

Which is how, six years later, I end up in a back booth at Gary’s with a cup of bad coffee, while my dead brother critiques my life from the mirror behind the bar and a woman with a chrome arm works the pole.

Gravity finally runs out of patience with Kora. She drops from the pole, and halfway down her chrome hand snaps shut around the steel.

Steel screams against steel. Every glass in Gary’s jumps. Some guy in the next booth spills beer down his shirt and doesn’t even look away.

Kora hangs there, grinning like she planned it, then opens her mechanical fingers one at a time.

Tick.

Tick.

Tick.

Pink neon catches the chrome. Polished knuckles, precision joints, servos that probably cost more than everything I own. In this flood-soaked corner of Anchor City, people would trade a kidney, a lung, and one disappointing relative for an arm like that.

I lean back in the booth. “I bet she could pulp an apple one-handed,” I tell Billy. “One squeeze. Instant applesauce. Pulp all over the walls like a goddamn crime scene. Fuck, that would be sexy.”

“Jesus Christ, Sean.”

My older brother is in the mirror behind Gary’s liquor bottles. Same battered leather jacket, same frayed left cuff, same stupid grin. Nobody else in Gary’s can hear him, and most of them can’t see him either. Most. He isn’t really in the glass. He’s in my head, and the mirror is just where I’ve learned to look when I want to find him.

Six years dead, and the asshole still won’t leave me alone. I’m not complaining. Usually.

“That’s what you’re thinking about?” he says. “There’s a topless woman up there, and you’re thinking about apples?”

“I’m appreciating the engineering. You ever see a hand like that?”

“You’re a weird chick.”

“And you’re a prick. We’ve established this.”

“I’m serious. You need to get laid.”

“Billy, you got dumped by a woman who worked at a funeral home. Even she didn’t want to spend that much time with a dead guy.”

He stares at me. “That’s fucked up.”

“Little bit.”

“At least she called me back. What happened to Forrest?”

“Oh, here we go.”

“That guy dressed way too nice to be dating you. He ironed his underwear. He had more hair products than you had groceries.”

“At least he had hair.”

Billy looks genuinely wounded. “You’re going after my hair now? I’m dead.”

“Doesn’t make you immune.”

He laughs, and I take a drink of coffee. It’s terrible. Gary serves coffee the way this city handles infrastructure, with optimism and very little oversight. I think he adds water every morning and hopes nobody notices.

Billy’s been pulling this since we were kids. Five years older, and convinced that gave him a license to run my life. He once broke up with a boyfriend for me by telling the poor guy I’d left the country. Forrest called my mother to ask when I was coming home. Billy laughed so hard he had to sit down.

Gary looks over from behind the bar. He’s been polishing the same glass for twenty minutes. It could signal ships. He catches me staring at Kora and raises an eyebrow.

“See something you like, Sinclair?”

I lift my coffee. “Professional research.”

Kora catches the exchange. Then she catches me looking at her arm.

She smiles.

Oh, boy. I’ve seen that smile before.

She lets go of the pole, drops to her hands and knees, and starts crawling toward my booth. The entire bar notices.

“Girl-on-girl action tonight!”

“Get her, Kora!”

Kora stops about three feet away. Topless, sweat running down her stomach, the expensive arm resting against her hip. She cups one breast with her real hand. The chrome fingers slide down her side, tapping against her hip.

“You really like these, baby? Or are you more of an ass girl?”

“Oh, fuck yeah. I’ve been watching those fingers all night.”

“I noticed.”

“What kind of grip strength does that thing have?”

Her smile slips. “My what?”

“Your hand. Look at it. I bet you could crush an apple without even trying.”

Kora stares at me. “You’ve been staring at my hand?”

“Well, yeah. Look at that thing!”

She looks down at her chest. Then back at me.

“Honey, I’ve been shaking my tits at you for ten minutes.”

“I’ve got tits too. Mine just don’t have hydraulics.”

For a second she’s speechless. Then Kora bursts out laughing, and the laugh takes her whole body with it.

Some guy behind her says, “What the fuck did she just say?”

“She’s a weird little bitch,” Kora tells him, still laughing.

“I’ve heard worse.”

“I like it.” She winks, crawls back to the pole, and keeps throwing looks my way for the rest of her set.

Billy’s practically falling out of the mirror. “You’re the only woman I know who could get a private dance and ask for the fucking owner’s manual.”

“That’s high-end engineering.”

“You’ve got no game.”

“I wasn’t making a move.”

“Yeah, I think we all figured that out.”

“Fuck you.”

“Love you too, sis.”

On nights like this I can almost pretend we're just hanging out again. We trade insults, I laugh with my mouth open, and for a few minutes it’s only a Tuesday in a bar with my brother. Then he shifts in the glass, the jacket catches the neon wrong, and the math comes back.

Gary’s sits in the Shallows, three blocks from the old seawall and one decent storm away from becoming a rumor. The floorboards warp every spring. The lower bricks sweat salt. The back room smells like mold, old beer, and wiring that survived two floods out of pure spite.

Outside, rain blows sideways through the neon. A kid kicks a broken surveillance drone down the gutter like a soccer ball. Two doors down, a noodle vendor argues with a delivery algorithm about parking rights. The machine keeps repeating the ordinance. The vendor keeps telling it to go fuck itself.

A security camera blinks red over the intersection, and for half a second the rain under it runs backward. Water lifts off the pavement, hangs there, then falls again.

Nobody else notices. The city’s been pulling little stunts like that lately, small enough to ignore, and Anchor City survives by ignoring the right weirdness. I make a mental note anyway.

Behind the bar, Gary feeds his mechanical fish. The thing hasn’t worked in eight years. The motor died, the fins seized, and one eye fell out. Gary still feeds it every Tuesday.

I asked him why once. He said the fish doesn’t know it’s broken, then walked off like he’d solved philosophy. Maybe he had.

I turn back toward Kora.

Then I smell cigarette smoke.

Not the cheap synthetic crap they sell in the Shallows. Real tobacco, hand-rolled. Nobody near me is smoking. A second later I taste saltwater, and my front teeth start to ache.

“Oh, for fuck’s sake.”

Billy looks at me from the mirror. “What?”

“Rosa.”

“Again?”

People pay me to take memories out of their heads. Bad days. Dead spouses. Accidents. The memories don’t disappear when I take them. They come into me, into a place in my head I call the Vault, and they stay there. Thousands of them. Most of them stay quiet.

Rosa doesn’t do quiet.

I carry the last few minutes of her life. A drainage tunnel. Black water. Men shouting behind her. Two broken front teeth and both middle fingers up at the bastards trying to drag her out. She’s been dead four years, and when something gets her going, she leaks. Her smoke in my nose. Her salt in my mouth. Her teeth hurting in my face.

And her voice, right behind my eyes, rough as a gravel road.

“Hot one,” Rosa says.

I follow the ache. It’s pointed straight at the stage.

“Rosa thinks Kora’s hot,” I tell Billy.

He laughs. “She’s got taste.”

“She’s got no business watching a strip show through my eyes.”

“I got eyes,” Rosa says. “I’m using ’em, honey.”

“You’re the one staring,” Billy says.

“Rosa’s making it worse,” I tell him.

“Yeah, we’ve covered that.”

I take another drink of coffee. The salt fades. The teeth stop. That’s usually how it works.

People think a memory is just something you remember. A picture, maybe, or a sound. Try carrying somebody else’s broken teeth around for an afternoon and see how you like it. The name makes the Vault sound like somewhere with locks and shelves. It’s closer to what happens when a person carries more than they were built to carry, and I’ve gotten good at living crowded.

“You made the Vault face,” Billy says.

“I don’t have a Vault face.”

“Like somebody asked you to do math at a funeral.”

“That’s just my face.”

The neon above the bar flickers. A man under the liquor mirror glances up, and his eyes move across the bottles and stop right where Billy is standing.

Billy looks back at him. “Can I help you?”

The man can’t hear him. At least I don’t think he can. He puts some credits beside his unfinished drink and walks out.

Smart man.

“Think he saw me?” Billy says.

“Pretty sure.”

“Was it the jacket?”

“Definitely the jacket.”

“Vintage.”

“Dead guy chic.”

“Bitch.”

Above Gary’s shoulder, the clock reads 3:47. Same as yesterday. Same as every day for six years. It stopped the night Billy died. Gary tried to fix it once and got the hands moving for about nine seconds before they spun backward so hard the glass cracked. He took the batteries out. Didn’t help.

Three forty-seven. Always.

I look away before Billy catches me staring. Anchor City is full of things that don’t work and don’t get fixed, and most people survive by not asking why. I’m doing a decent job of it, too, right up until a stool scrapes near the door and Gary stops polishing his glass.

That gets my attention.

A man in a dark raincoat steps inside, hood up, water dripping on the floor. Nobody keeps a hood up in Gary’s. Gary says he likes knowing who’s planning to rob him. Three conversations stop. A dockworker at the counter suddenly finds his beer fascinating.

The man stands there a few seconds. Then he lifts one hand, long fingers, pale skin, and points straight at my booth.

Then he leaves.

Gary doesn’t move for two full seconds, which scares me more than the hood did.

“Gary?”

“Yeah.”

“You expecting somebody?”

“Nope.” He walks to the far end of the bar, where nobody’s been sitting, and comes back holding an envelope. Thick, cream-colored paper. No name. No return address. “This was on the end of the bar. I never saw him go near it.”

“Didn’t catch his face?”

“No.”

“You okay?”

“No.”

“Good answer.”

Three triangles are pressed into the front, one inside another.

I know that mark. Six months ago somebody offered me a job on a dead woman they’d pulled out of the flood channels near South Lock. She had the same mark on her wrist. I turned it down. Two days later her body disappeared from the morgue. No transfer records. No authorization. I called to ask about it, and I was told to mind my own fucking business.

Billy leans closer to the mirror. “Don’t love that face.”

“I have lots of faces.”

“That’s your this-is-going-to-become-a-problem face.”

“Maybe it’s my free-money face.”

“It is absolutely not.”

I run my finger under the flap. One card. No signature. Three words in black ink.

You found Lighthouse.

I turn it over. Nothing on the back.

“Billy. You ever hear me say that word?”

“What word?”

I hold the card up to the mirror. “Lighthouse.”

He leans in. “No. Why?”

I close my eyes and try to find it. A building. A client. A street. Anything.

Nothing.

I try again, and for a fraction of a second I see a white door. Black water. A little kid crying somewhere I can’t reach.

Then it’s gone, and my hands are cold.

When I open my eyes, Billy isn’t smiling anymore. Billy doesn’t stop joking unless he’s scared, and he gets scared a lot slower than I do.

I’ve spent years taking memories out of other people’s heads. Somebody apparently knows about one I can’t find in my own.

Every light in Gary’s dims. A groan goes up from the customers.

“Gary!”

“I’m working on it!”

“You say that every time!”

“It’s worked eventually every time!”

Billy looks at the ceiling, then back at me. “Oh. That’s bad.”

“Helpful.”

I fold the note into my coat pocket. “Cocksucker,” I mutter, at whoever mailed it.

“Sorry?”

“Sock tucker. Sewing thing.”

Gary has come over, wiping his hands on a dish towel, and I have no idea how long he’s been standing there. He looks at my face. Then at the pocket. Then at the clock.

“You got that look.”

“Apparently everybody’s an expert on my face tonight.”

“Seen it twice before. Both times people ended up in the water.”

“Third time’s the charm.”

He doesn’t laugh. Neither does Billy.

Thom shows up five minutes later. Of course he does. Some people walk into a room. Thom arrives.

People move out of his way as he crosses the floor. Nobody asks them to. They just shift their stools, tuck in their elbows, and find something else to look at. Perfect suit. Perfect shoes. Hair that probably has its own insurance policy.

He sits across from me without asking. “Sean.”

“Thomas.”

“It’s Thom.”

“I know.”

“Then why do you keep saying Thomas?”

“Because it annoys you.”

He considers that. “Fair.”

“Hands on the table.”

“I haven’t moved them.”

“Yet.”

He puts both hands where I can see them. Billy folds his arms in the mirror.

“Lord Touchy arrives.”

“Stop calling him that,” I say, mostly into my cup.

“He touches everything.”

“He touched Gary’s fish once.”

“Twice.”

Thom looks at me. “What?”

“Nothing.”

He straightens his cuff. Fourth time since he walked in.

Billy leans toward me. “Twenty credits says you don’t call him a cocksucker to his face before he leaves.”

“You don’t have credits.”

“Moral victory, then.”

“And if I do?”

Billy grins. “Then I do the sheet thing to Gary.”

“The sheet thing?”

“A sheet ghost. Like the ones we made when we were kids. I’ll scare Gary without even leaving the mirror.”

“Oh, Jesus Christ. Gary’s going to have a heart attack.”

“He will not. Gary’s heart is load-bearing. Strongest thing in this building.”

“You remember the haunted houses?”

His grin gets bigger. “Oh, hell yeah.”

“We got thrown out of two.”

“We got caught at two. Big difference.”

“You put a fucking rat on my shoulder.”

“You wanted to look like staff.”

“Until you scared that woman.”

“She threw popcorn at me.”

“YOU HAD A RAT ON YOUR SHOULDER!”

Billy loses it. I have to bite my lip.

Thom looks up from his cuff. “Is something funny?”

“Nope.”

“Remember the cops?” Billy says.

“Different story, asshole.”

“Oh, right. Golf course.”

Thom looks between me and the mirror. “Are you finished?”

“Are you?”

He sighs and takes a job card from inside his jacket. He sets it on the table and squares it to the edge with two fingers, like it’s a place setting.

“Gary says somebody left you mail,” he says.

“Somebody did.”

“Not me, if that’s your next question.”

It was. I don’t mention Lighthouse. Not yet.

“Client’s name is Chad Fitzgerald.”

“Should I know him?”

“No.”

“Good start.”

Thom lays the job out like a restaurant menu. I watch his hands instead of his face. He keeps them flat on the table, as if nothing he’s about to ask could possibly leave a stain.

“Wedding extraction. Full sensory archive. Ceremony. Reception. Emotional imprinting. Architectural memory.”

I snort. “Architectural memory?”

“Some people remember vows.”

“Some people remember chandeliers.”

“That sounds exhausting,” Billy says.

“It sounds wealthy,” I say.

“Forty thousand on completion,” Thom says.

Forty thousand. For a wedding. That’s an apartment, or a year of medical bills, or the end of my landlord’s increasingly creative threats.

Billy whistles. “Well, that’s not ominous.”

“What’s the catch?”

“No catch.”

Too fast. His left eye twitches.

“There’s always a catch, Thomas.”

“Thom.” He taps one finger against the card. “There is one detail. If the word Lighthouse appears anywhere in the extraction...”

My hand stops. Billy goes quiet.

“...it gets removed. Any memory connected to it. Any emotional association. Anything. Client specifically requested total removal.”

The note is in my pocket. You found Lighthouse.

“What is it?” I ask.

“I don’t know,” Thom says. His hands stay flat on the table.

His voice doesn’t waver, but I’ve pulled enough memories out of liars to know one when he’s sitting across from me.

“Does Chad know about Lighthouse?”

“It’s his request.”

“That’s not what I asked.”

Neither of us says anything for a few seconds.

I think of the card in my pocket. Somebody is offering me forty thousand credits to remove a word from a stranger’s mind. Somebody else went to the trouble of telling me the word first. One of them wants it found and one of them wants it buried, and both of them got to me before I’d finished my coffee. I hate it when mysteries start getting organized. Those are always the expensive ones.

“And if I find it?”

“You erase it.”

“Just like that.”

“That’s the job.” He stands and straightens his cuffs. “Think about it.”

“I was planning to.”

“Try not to think too hard.”

“That’s usually when people start dying.”

He smiles, and for once I think he means it. “That’s why I enjoy working with you, Sean.”

“That makes one of us.”

His eye twitches. Tiny victory.

On his way to the door he passes a table where a woman sits with her daughter. Funny what sticks. Some nights you remember the mystery, and some nights it’s a little girl, maybe six, with dark curls sticking out of an oversized raincoat and boots too big for her feet, swinging her legs because they don’t reach the floor.

Thom stops. Crouches beside her. Says something I barely catch, and she laughs. He takes an old coin out of his pocket, puts it in her palm, and closes her fingers around it.

Then he walks out into the rain.

Gary comes over to top off my cup. “What’d he give her?”

“Some old coin,” I say. “I heard him. Told her it was the kind of money nobody could buy anything with, so nobody could ever take it from her.”

Gary looks at the door. “Complicated man.”

“Yeah.”

Gary doesn’t waste words. When he calls somebody complicated, he usually means dangerous. Thom would sell your grandmother for spare parts if the price was right. I watch the little girl turn the coin over in her fingers like she’s found buried treasure.

Billy waits until Gary’s gone. “You need a catchphrase.”

“What?”

“A catchphrase. Something iconic. I’ll be back. You can’t handle the truth. Multipass.”

“That’s from The Fifth Element.”

“Multipass transcends its origin. What do you have?”

I think about it. “Cocksucker?”

“That’s not a catchphrase. That’s a medical diagnosis.”

“Entropy always wins. That’s why I don’t fold laundry.”

“That’s not a philosophy. That’s a pile of shirts.”

“Fuck you.”

“See? That’s closer.” Then his grin gets bigger. “Oh, wait. He’s still out there, and you didn’t say it.”

“I was being professional.”

“That’s adorable. Your jaw did the thing. You thought it. You never said it.”

“He told me to erase a word out of a man’s head without telling me what it means.”

“Yep.”

“And he acted like it was standard procedure.”

Billy waits. “So how mad are you?”

I look at the door. “Pretty fucking mad.”

I get up and follow Thom as far as the doorway. He’s standing at the curb under the awning, waiting on his driver to bring the sedan around, and the rain is coming down hard enough to bounce.

“Hey, Thom!”

He turns halfway around. “What?”

“YOU’RE A REAL COCKSUCKER!”

His driver, holding the rear door open, freezes mid-motion. Two pedestrians remember important appointments elsewhere.

Thom stares at me. “What did you just call me?”

“I said have a great night!”

“That’s not what you said.”

“Jesus, Thom. Get your hearing checked. Drive safe!”

His left eye twitches so hard I could probably translate it from Morse code. Behind me, through the window, Billy is losing his shit in the mirror.

“You’re unbelievable, Sean.”

He shakes his head, gets into the sedan, and the car pulls away through the water running along the curb.

I head back inside. “Happy?” Billy says.

“Immensely. You owe Gary a ghost.”

Then Billy vanishes from the mirror.

“Billy?”

Gary turns to put a bottle on the shelf. In the dark glass behind him, a white shape rises. Two black eyeholes. A sheet with a crooked hem. One battered leather cuff pokes out beneath it.

I bite the inside of my cheek.

Gary sees the shape and stops moving.

“Sean.”

“What?”

“There’s something behind me.”

“That’s usually where the liquor is.”

“I’m not joking.”

“Neither is the liquor.”

Gary turns. There’s nothing there but shelves and bottles. When he looks back, the sheet is still there, filling the reflection.

His glass slips out of his hand and breaks.

“Holy shit.”

“Gary, you okay?”

“You see that?”

I squint at the mirror. Billy makes the eyeholes widen.

“Could be a stain.”

Gary reaches under the bar for his broom. He points it at the mirror, which is a difficult thing to threaten with a broom.

“Get out of my bar.”

The sheet lifts one corner like a wave.

Gary backs into his mechanical fish, knocking the feed tin off the counter. Pellets scatter everywhere.

“The fish didn’t do anything,” I tell him.

“SEAN.”

“What? I’m trying to de-escalate.”

Gary retreats into the back room and slams the door.

Billy returns to his usual shape in the mirror, faint and grinning.

“You made him threaten a reflection with a broom,” I say.

“He was going to sweep me.”

“You weren’t even on his side of the glass.”

“Details.”

I start laughing. I can’t help it. Billy laughs too, and for a minute Gary’s is the kind of place it used to be, back when we both had bodies and bad ideas.

“That was mean,” I say.

“You bet me.”

“I didn’t think you’d actually do it.”

“You never do.”

Gary opens the back-room door an inch. “Is it gone?”

“Probably,” I tell him.

“Probably?”

“I don’t negotiate with the dead.”

He closes the door again.

I laugh until my ribs ache. Then I look at Billy in the mirror, and the laugh changes on me. I remember doing stupid things with him before the hospital. For a moment I can almost hear the way he used to laugh with his whole chest.

Almost.

“You all right?” he asks.

“Yeah. Just thinking.”

“Dangerous hobby.”

“Runs in the family.”

For a few seconds neither of us talks.

“Had to give you something good to remember,” he says.

I look down at my coffee. There’s a chip in the rim of the mug. Same mug Gary’s been giving me for years. I’ve asked him to throw it out twice. He says it still holds coffee.

I turn the mug so the chip faces away from me.

“I’m pretending I didn’t hear that part,” I tell him.

“I know.”

He leaves it alone. Annoying bastard. Good brother.

Outside, a faded turquoise Corvair floats past on the mag-loop, an inch above the guide rail. Nobody’s driving. Probably quit three exits back, and the track keeps hauling it along anyway. Twenty seconds later a light-rail car rounds the corner, slows, and gives the Corvair a shove with the steel push bar welded to its nose. The empty car slides onto a siding. The train carries on. Nobody inside even looks up.

Welcome to Anchor City.

I smooth the note flat on the table and slide Thom’s job card next to it. Forty thousand credits. Chad Fitzgerald. A wedding somebody wants erased. Three triangles. Lighthouse.

“You sure you never heard of it?” I ask.

“Pretty sure I’d remember.”

“You remember everything.”

“Not everything.”

I look at him. He looks back.

“Billy.”

“What?”

“You know what I mean.”

He doesn’t answer.

I’ve been inside thousands of memories. I’ve watched men die, women kill, kids survive things nobody should have to survive. Somewhere in all that mess, apparently, I found something called Lighthouse.

And somebody knows.

I touch the note.

Behind the bar, the clock ticks.

Just once. A small, dry click.

3:47. The hands haven’t moved.

Gary’s in the back room. Kora’s back onstage. The bass is still thumping through the floor. That clock hasn’t made a sound in six years.

“Tell me you heard that,” I say.

“Yeah.”

I wait for a joke. Nothing.

“Sean?” he says, still looking at the clock. “Don’t take that job.”

“I haven’t said I’m taking it.”

“You’ve got that look. The one right before I have to talk you out of something stupid.”

“You’ve never talked me out of anything.”

“Yeah. That’s been a problem.”

“Somebody knows something about me,” I say.

Billy looks at the clock again. “Yeah. And I think they know something about me, too.”

That’s when the Vault moves.

This time it isn't Rosa. It's all of them. Four thousand memories stirring at once inside my head, like a house full of sleepers who all heard the same noise downstairs. Smoke, salt, broken teeth, a hundred kitchens and hospital rooms and car crashes, every one of them turned the same way.

Not toward the note.

Toward me.

Then something answers from farther out than the Vault goes. Somewhere I’ve never been able to reach. Patient, like it’s been asking for a very long time and only just found somebody close enough to hear.

“Why?”

In the mirror, Billy is still watching the clock like nothing else happened.

The clock holds at 3:47.