Chapter 2
A Memory You Can’t Burn
I waited until I was alone. Three a.m. in a flophouse on the edge of District 9, the kind of place where the walls sweat secrets and the air never loses the stink of regret. The wallpaper peeled like old skin. The mattress was more springs than padding, and the floor stuck to your shoes with invisible grime. The bulb over my head buzzed like it had a grudge, and the silence had teeth.
I laid the envelope on the cracked table and stared at it like it might flinch. The table reeked faintly of old whiskey and burnt coffee. Then I slit it open.
No files. No documents. Just a photo.
It was grainy, but I knew the face. Hell, I knew the scar. Left cheek, crescent-shaped like a broken circle. Tommy Ryland. Dead ten years by my hand. Or so I thought.
My gut folded in on itself. The kind of twist only guilt can pull. I remembered the night I put him down. I remembered the sound—wet and final. The smell of cordite. Blood in the air, sharp as rust and heat. And the hollow ache that followed. Not because I hated him. Because I didn’t. We’d been tighter than blood once. That was the problem.
On the back, a message in red ink. Just four words:
“Meet me. One hour.”
And an address.
Midtown. Below the old pyramid-shaped data tower, gutted during the last blackout riots. The place was a ghost hive. Empty on paper, but New Babylon had a habit of keeping its shadows busy.
My chest tightened like it always did before things got ugly. This wasn’t a setup. It was a reckoning.
I packed heat, slid the photo inside my coat—rough leather worn thin at the elbows, still smelling faintly of sweat and ash. Then I struck a wooden match with the edge of my thumb nail, the flame catching like it knew its place in the ritual. I lit a cigarette, took a drag—deep and soulful, like it was the best thing I’d tasted in years. Better than a shot of whiskey. I exhaled slow, watching the smoke twist up toward the cracked ceiling. A flake of tobacco stuck to my tongue, and I dabbed it off with my finger like it was part of the rhythm. Then I made for the street. Outside, the wind moved like it knew my name. Or maybe it just remembered what I’d done.
By the time I reached Midtown, the city was too quiet. Even the neon signs seemed nervous, buzzing low and jumpy. The silence didn’t sit right—staged, like the whole damn block was waiting for something to break.
The alley behind the tower was lit with a strip of blue neon bouncing off puddles slick as oil. The scent of ozone and rotting garbage lingered, thick enough to chew. A shape waited there.
Tommy.
He looked older, leaner, but unmistakably alive. That scar still smiled at me.
“I watched you pull the trigger, Vale,” he said.
“Yeah, I watched you die.”
He nodded slowly. “And yet here I am. Like a memory you can’t burn. Like a rock in your shoe.”
I kept my hand near the iron at my hip. “You working alone?”
“Not exactly. I’m part of a unit now. Small. Tight. Purpose-built.”
“Government?”
“Not even close.”
He stepped into the light and tossed something at my feet. A shard of glass, about the size of a credit chip. Inside, a flickering image twisted through it like smoke through a prism. Faces shimmered and vanished—mine, Tommy’s, maybe Selene’s—distorted like they were trapped inside memory. It pulsed faintly in the dark, humming with low static.
Something about it made my skin crawl. Not fear exactly. Recognition. Like seeing your own shadow move before you do.
“Welcome to the next phase, Carson. Truth’s just the appetizer.”
Then he was gone. Like he’d never been there. Like my memory had invented him just to stir the ashes.
I stood in that alley, wind slicing through my coat, holding something that felt heavier than it looked. The kind of thing that didn’t end. Just kept changing shape. Like guilt. Like truth. Like me.
And somewhere behind it all, I could still feel Selene watching.