The interrogation room swallowed sound. No drama lights, no slow reveals — only white bulbs so honest they hurt. Marquez was shoved into the chair like a crate; cuffs clicked twice and the metal sang. The lead set a tablet on the table and let it glow. He spoke as if reading minutes off a clock.
"YOU PULLED THE TRIGGER AT PIER 3," he said. Flat, finished.
Marquez laughed once—a dry scrape of a thing that had been used too long. He smelled of river salt and frying oil and old smoke. His palms were a map of heat scars; he rested them where the cuffs could be seen and watched the room like a man watching a match burn down.
The lead pushed a strip of evidence forward: a frayed cable, a small manual trigger, a strip of corrupted drive with a corner chewed off. One of the techs tapped the drive and a row of garbage characters crawled across the screen.
"WHO SENT YOU?" the lead demanded. Not a question but a hinge.
Marquez tipped his head and let his grin spread slow. "Names get burned," he said. "You want names, you burn people more. You want routes—there's docks, barges at odd hours, a courier with fingers that don't feel heat no more. You want why—money or silence. That's business."
The lead's mouth tightened. He set the tablet to playback a trace. Lines unspooled across the screen like tire tracks. Marquez watched them, then watched the lead watch them, then watched the door.
Footsteps answered. Not Association boots—lighter, quicker, someone used to walking on metal and wet rope. Two men appeared in the doorway and did not wear uniforms. They folded into the shadow like knives sliding into sleeves.
Marquez's smile widened. "They come with clean hands. They come with envelopes that look like nothing. And there are names that never print. S.‑K. buys clean." He spat the initials like a coin thrown away.
A tech leaned in. "You give us actions. Money trails. Accounts. Who is S.‑K.?" He spoke fast. The tablet hummed. The room learned to hold its breath.
Marquez's eyes flicked to the two men in the doorway and back to the tech. He bared his teeth. "S.‑K. doesn't pay me to talk," he said. "S.‑K. pays people to forget that doors ever opened."
He didn't break. So the lead broke the rhythm. He jerked forward and slammed his palm on the table. The tablet jumped. The sound was a small, cheap thunder.
"WE DON'T FORGET," the lead said. "NAMES. ROUTES. HANDLERS."
Marquez's answer was a move: his knee twisted, he used his shoulder to launch at the lead. It was not enough to get free, but it was enough to make bodies react. A tech caught his arm and hit the metal floor. The two men from the door stepped forward like sharks smelling blood. One of them, a tight-shouldered man with a scar under his eye, folded his jaw and spat a threat under his breath in a language Dojin didn't place.
The room filled with noise—metal on tile, curses, someone hitting a table. Marquez laughed in the middle of it, a sound like a match struck.
"You think you can take my hands?" he shouted. "Take the men who hand me money. They will replace me. Take the handlers. You get others. The top is paper and lawyers."
The lead leaned in until his breath steamed. "Give us something usable, or you die quietly in a cell and never see the sun again."
Marquez's eyes went slow, like a man deciding which of his children will live. He gave names of docks and a hand-drawn schedule, he scraped the barge captain's cadence, he spat out a courier's nickname. Each word cost him something, and each word left a shadow of a man who knew how to make men move. He refused what looked like a lie with surety—he would not name the accounts that cleansed money. "Paper burns cleaner," he said. "You get smoke, not the owner."
When they moved him, the two men in the doorway watched Dojin as if weighing a life. One nodded; the other kept his scarred jaw clenched. The lead's eyes flicked to Dojin and something like an agreement was tacitly reached: Dojin would be kept close; she would be used as a witness to link echoes to places, and she would be protected enough that the Association could keep an asset alive.
Outside the interrogation, the docks were primed. Vehicles braided lines of light and shadows into alleys. The raids detonated into motion with all the grace of a fist. Doors were kicked, locks were pried, evidence was pulled and tossed into blue tubs. Men screamed like animals surprised in their sleep.
Dojin moved with the team; she hugged the edge of the action, watching, translating. At the second pier, a man shoved a manifest into a brazier and tried to set it with a lighter. He thought burning paper would erase a ledger—the ritual of the poor. The fire took the edges faster than he expected and he screamed, hands reaching in to save what he could not. A tech hauled the man away, and two Association hands cuffed his wrists while water hissed on ink-smudged paper.
At the far side of the quay someone punched a vendor in a doorway and stole a sealed envelope. Another ran, and a steel toe caught him in the belly; he doubled over, the envelope spilling into the gutter like a small secret. The gang moves threaded through the docks like a predator net. The world of memory commerce, usually slick and quiet, turned noisy and ugly.
On an alley bench a kid who sold skewers reached into a pocket and pulled out a small sealed tube—half-echo in a glass capsule—and pressed it into a buyer's hand. The buyer did not smile. He counted folded bills under the flicker of a lamp, then pushed a tip of something cold across the kid's palm to mark the sale. The kid's face went slack and older.
Word spread faster than the Association's notices. Brokers pulled product, killed listings, called quiet meetings. Prices didn't just rise; they convulsed. Panic sells better than panic buys; supply constricts and the desperation rate climbs.
Dojin thought of the half echo she had bought. The memory sat in her jacket like contraband: a child's breath, a cough that tasted like iron. One IV bag bought, one night paid. The market had turned its face; the thing she could sell to keep Lee‑Hae breathing would now command a price that translated into physical risk. Buyers came with sleeves and belts now; trust had been replaced by danger.
A trader with a rasp for a voice hammered a new sign over his stall: PRICES CHANGED — FULL: TRIPLE; PARTIAL: DOUBLE — NO QUESTIONS. He shouted and the numbers stung across the alley. Two men in plain coats moved through the crowd like judges, marking faces in notebooks. A vendor across the way who had laughed with customers the week before was shoved behind a crate, a knife pressed to his ribs to make him cough up his inventory. The buyer who did the shoving had clean hands and a smile that never reached his eyes.
The violence felt like a transfer fee. Men with burned palms disappeared into Association vans; men with cleaner fingers walked away with money and disdain. Those left bleeding in doorways taught a different lesson: if memory retained value, then people would kill to hold the ledger.
Back at HQ, a field report blinked on Dojin's pad.
_
[SYSTEM: FIELD UPDATE. HANDLERS APPREHENDED. ITEMS RECOVERED: MANUAL TRIGGERS; CORRUPTED DRIVES; PARTIAL MANIFESTS. RECOMMENDATION: TRACE FINANCIAL FLOWS; PROTECT WITNESSES.]
DETAILS: TEMPORARY AID DISPENSED TO USER.
——————————
The Association did what it could. They moved warrants, froze a few accounts, and took statements that would feed into other statements. They placed a modest aid packet on Dojin's desk—two IV bags, a voucher for a follow-up. It was oil on a bleeding machine. It bought oxygen and an extra day of politeness from hospital staff.
S.‑K.'s name had shifted from rumor to a node in a ledger. Marquez's scraps had primed a line to a room that hummed with archived noise. The techs traced enough to find a building at the river mouth with a live handshake seed behind a false panel. They found an operator who said little and had hands that looked like Marquez's—scarred, patient, the hands of a man who opened doors and counted envelopes.
They wheeled Dojin in later to stand over a reader while the tech played a piece of an echo. The lullaby rode the air, a child's single line clipped by a cough. Dojin felt it like a needle: empathy and nausea wired together. She said what she always had said—"That room. That cough." The tech marked the correlation. The log added weight.
Outside, the market recalibrated. Brokers muttered code through closed windows. Deals that had been casual now required muscle or a favored accountant. People who once traded bits of memory like secondhand clothes now bartered with lives.
Dojin kept thinking in sums. One IV bag bought with a half-echo. Two IV bags would need a clean sale and careful hands. Every transaction now required a ledger of violence. To sell was to invite attention. To hold was to risk rot.
That night, Lee‑Hae slept with the drip a metronome. Dojin wrote in the trauma log with a hand that wouldn't stop—entries for exposure, for contact, for the child-cough file that hummed like guilt.
Trauma Log: ENTRY 007 — INTERROGATION VIOLENT; RAIDS; MARKET VOLATILITY. CONTENT: MANUAL TRIGGERS; CHILD FILE MATCH. CORRUPTY +15.
The door that Marquez had named felt nearer. It also felt hotter. Every step toward it scraped at the edges of what Dojin could bear: the ledger flashing numbers, the echo in her chest, and a city where memory had a price and men paid with hands that could hurt.