Altaran never truly slept. It shifted. From the desperation of the night market to the sharp, grinding tension of morning in the Heights, the city moved like a machine too rusted to function, yet too stubborn to die.
By the time the fog lifted, I was already threading through the lower districts — shadows still clinging to the alleys like reluctant ghosts. The memory shard burned a faint, steady pulse in my coat pocket, humming against my ribs like a second heart I didn't ask for.
Fragments of my own erased past. Tangible, physical. It defied every law of mnemonic science — which meant either the Order's technology ran deeper than I'd ever known, or someone was rewriting the rules entirely. Rewriting rules in Altaran was a swift death sentence, usually ending with your memory wiped to a blank slate, your body left to rot in the canals.
I navigated through the faded sprawl of Stonebridge — where canals twisted like veins and towers leaned too far into the sky, cracked by time and corruption. The buildings here sagged beneath the weight of forgotten promises. Broken balconies, rust-choked railings, glass windows painted shut with grime.
My destination waited at the edge of the bridge itself — an alcove tucked beneath the spine of an ancient aqueduct, where black-market tech dealers peddled illegal upgrades alongside memory forgers too sloppy for Consortium contracts.
But I wasn't here for amateurs. I was here for one person.
"Ravel," I murmured under my breath.
The name alone carried risk. If the Mnemonic Order were the architects of memory trade, Ravel was the saboteur. A ghost in Altaran's circuitry. A woman who could build, break, or twist memory implants like breathing. Rumors had it she'd once crafted a mind-shield that even Blackwell couldn't crack.
I found her booth half-hidden behind hanging tarps and flickering holo-glyphs — circuit boards, illegal stabilizers, and bio-hacked neural cores stacked like relics from some forgotten war.
She didn't look up as I approached. Long fingers danced over an exposed cortex relay, soldering thin streams of vitae-infused wiring into place. Her hair was pinned back in copper clasps, glinting faintly beneath the dim market lights.
"Ilyas Varin," she rasped, voice flat, eyes never leaving her work. "Took you longer than I thought you'd need."
The sound of my real name on her tongue was enough to stall my step.
"You've been watching me?" I asked, slipping beside her stall, hand brushing the shard hidden in my coat.
"Everyone watches the man who forgets," she retorted, finally glancing up. Her eyes were mismatched — one cybernetic, humming faint teal, the other sharp grey, organic but colder than steel. "But you? You're different. You're losing pieces even you can't trace."
I exhaled slowly. "You know about the shard."
Ravel offered a thin smile, sliding the cortex relay aside. "It's not just one shard, Varin. There are twelve."
Twelve. My pulse skipped.
"They did more than erase your past," she continued. "They broke it. Shattered your memories into fragments, each encoded into crystalline neural glass. Impossible to forge, impossible to steal. Unless you're you."
My hand tightened around the shard's edge. "Why?"
"Because," Ravel said, leaning closer, her voice dropping to a whisper, "whatever's buried in your mind… it terrifies them."
The market noise faded beneath the weight of those words.
"Who?" I pressed, though I already knew part of the answer.
"Blackwell," she confirmed. "The Solis family. And the Order, in their own twisted way. You're a threat. You just forgot how."
A dozen possibilities clawed through my brain. I thought of the ledger, Marwen Solis's name, the fragment of myself I saw in the glass — bloodied, caged, begging.
And now… twelve shards. Scattered. Guarded. Waiting.
Ravel tapped the workbench once, sliding over a data-chip encoded with coordinates.
"First fragment's buried in the Chime District," she said. "Old clockwork ruins. You'll need this."
I pocketed the chip. "And you?"
Ravel's expression darkened. "I'm already marked, Varin. Helping you's a death sentence."
She turned back to her work, soldering circuitry like nothing had happened.
But her final words chased me as I slipped back into the ash-choked alleys:
"Find the fragments," she'd hissed. "Before they find you."
I disappeared into the crowd, shard burning in my pocket, the city pressing close with secrets sharp enough to bleed.
Twelve shards.
Twelve truths.
And the first was waiting in the bones of the forgotten district.
The hunt had only begun.