Dawn in Chicago was like denim washed too many times, stripped of neon, leaving only leaden gray.
Alex and I ran along the steel girders of an abandoned elevated track, seventy meters above dormant freight lines. The drone buzz overhead was a dentist's drill.
"Ten seconds!" I yelled.
Alex hit the EMP trigger—
Snap—*A silent arc of blue-white lightning bloomed in the sky. Tracking lights died instantly. Drones dropped like drunken flies into the river.
We slid down a fire escape, ducking into a bridge abutment. Inside the damp concrete tunnel, graffiti glowed sickly green under UV lamps:
"MEMORY IS A WEAPON."
At the tunnel's end sat a matte-black 1992 Chevy van. Its license plate was caked in mud.
I rapped three times on the rear doors.
They swung open, revealing a face wreathed in blue-tinted e-cig vapor.
"L.K. Been a minute."
"Smoker. Car clean?"
"Cleaner than the Pope's conscience." He grinned, silver teeth flashing.
I shoved Alex inside and slammed the doors. The interior was lined with lead panels, signal-jamming mesh glittering like crushed silver.
"Destination?" Smoker fired up the engine.
"The old slaughterhouse," I said. "Someone owes me a life."
We merged onto I-290. The rising sun sliced through the cracked windshield, scattering diamond-shaped light.
Alex was curled in a fold-out seat, forehead pressed to his knees.
"Episode?" I asked.
He didn't answer. His pupils darted rapidly left-right—like watching a silent film only he could see.
I pried open an eyelid. My tactical light beam caught a sequence of numbers scrolling across his iris.
"48.8584° N, 2.2945° E," he mumbled. "Eiffel Tower... Sophia waits."
Parisian bookstore coordinates.
I noted them. "Change course, Smoker. O'Hare cargo spur. We need a freight flight before sunrise."
The old slaughterhouse sat in the South Side. Its iron gates were rusted the color of dried blood.
The rolling door clattered open. The stench of frozen meat and machine oil hit us.
At a workbench, a woman in a hoodie was drilling into an AK receiver. She looked up. Her left eye was a mechanical iris, cold light gleaming.
"Lena," she said. "Heard you died in Kabul."
"Not thoroughly enough." I dropped my pack. "Alex. He's got NeuroSync's Archive Zero in his head. Need you to take him *offline*."
Ash. Ex-signals intelligence. Now ran a data mortuary for journalists and the black market.
She motioned Alex to an X-ray chair.
"Chip model?"
"NeuroSync Delta-9. Subdermal. Quantum-key encrypted."
Ash whistled. "Mil-spec. Yank it, he flatlines."
"Don't yank." I pulled up satellite maps on a tablet. "Shield it so even God can't eavesdrop."
A robotic arm descended like a spider guarding its eggs.
A laser traced a one-millimeter incision on Alex's neck. A black chip, the size of a fingernail, was exposed.
Ash used tweezers to place a silver-graphite patch over the chip.
"Faraday cage plus phase noise jamming." She pressed a button. The patch glowed faintly blue at the edges. "Five-centimeter radius, silent mode. Electron microscope or bust."
Alex exhaled sharply. Sweat traced his spine into his belt.
"Now," Ash removed her goggles. "You owe me."
I handed her an SD card.
"Full NeuroSync holo-recordings. Memory weapon tests. Syria."
She weighed the card. Her mechanical iris narrowed to a slit. "Deal."
As we left the slaughterhouse, Chicago's first metro train snaked under the elevated tracks, a waking metal serpent.
Alex touched his neck, voice raw. "Next?"
I opened the tablet, expanding the coordinates into a Paris map.
"We find Sophia. If she's still breathing."
"And then?"
I snapped the tablet shut, meeting his eyes.
"Then we make NeuroSync taste what it's like to have *their* memories rewritten."