"The fire escape," Maya whispered, pulling Kai toward the window. "It's our only way out."
Kai grabbed his memory extraction kit and followed her. Behind them, the footsteps had stopped outside his door. A soft click echoed through the apartment—someone was picking the lock.
Maya slid the window open and stepped onto the metal platform. The night air was cold against their faces, and the city sprawled below them like a circuit board covered in light.
"Where do we go?" Kai asked as they began descending the fire escape.
"There's a safe house in the old industrial district. Other memory merchants use it when they're in trouble."
They had barely reached the third floor when the lights in Kai's apartment came back on. Through the window, they could see dark figures moving inside, searching.
"They're fast," Maya muttered.
Kai felt another wave of memories hit him as they climbed down. This time, he saw the same apartment but from a different angle—from the perspective of someone watching from across the street. The memory was recent, maybe an hour old.
"Maya," he said, stopping suddenly. "How did you know they were watching us?"
She paused on the ladder below him. "What do you mean?"
"You said someone had been watching for an hour. But you only arrived twenty minutes ago."
For a moment, Maya's expression changed. Something cold and calculating flashed across her features before returning to normal.
"Lucky guess," she said, but her voice sounded different.
Kai's blood ran cold. "Who are you?"
Instead of answering, Maya suddenly leaped from the fire escape to the roof of the adjacent building. The jump was impossible—no normal person could cover that distance.
Kai was alone.
He looked up and saw figures appearing at his apartment window. They wore dark masks and moved with unnatural coordination. One of them pointed directly at him.
With no other choice, Kai continued down the fire escape. He reached the alley just as the building's front door burst open. Three masked figures emerged, scanning the street.
Kai pressed himself against the wall, hidden in shadow. His mind raced with questions. If Maya wasn't who she claimed to be, then how long had she been lying to him? And what about all the other people in his life?
Another memory surfaced, this one showing him a conversation with Maya from weeks ago. But in this version, she was asking very specific questions about his memory extraction techniques—questions he had forgotten until now.
"She's been studying me," he realized.
The masked figures split up, two heading down the street while one remained by the building entrance. Kai waited until the coast was clear, then slipped out of the alley.
He needed to get to the safe house Maya had mentioned, but he couldn't trust that information anymore. Instead, he headed toward the one place he knew would be safe—the memory archive beneath the city.
As he moved through the empty streets, more stolen memories continued to surface. He saw himself from different angles, at different times, always being watched. How long had this been going on?
Suddenly, a figure stepped out from a doorway ahead of him. It was Maya, but something was wrong with her appearance. Her edges seemed to shimmer, like a hologram that wasn't quite stable.
"You can't run from us, Kai," she said. "We've been part of your life for too long."
"What are you?"
"I'm what you made me. Every memory you've extracted, every thought you've touched, feeds into our network. We are the collective consciousness of every mind you've ever entered."
Kai backed away, but more figures began emerging from the shadows. They all had Maya's face, but with slight variations—different ages, different expressions, different memories.
"The Architect has been building us for years," the Maya figures said in unison. "You memory merchants are the key to his plan. You gather the raw material, and we process it."
"I won't help you," Kai said.
"You already have. Every memory you've ever extracted is stored in our collective. We know everything about this dimension, and we're ready to move to the next."
Kai turned and ran. Behind him, the Maya duplicates gave chase, their movements perfectly synchronized. He could hear their footsteps echoing off the buildings, getting closer.
He ducked into an alley and found a maintenance hatch that led to the underground tunnels. As he descended into darkness, he could hear the duplicates searching above.
In the tunnels, surrounded by pipes and cables, Kai finally had a moment to think. If the Architect had been using memory merchants to collect information about different dimensions, then every memory merchant was a potential threat to reality itself.
But there was something else in the stolen memories—a fragment showing the silver-haired woman from before. She was speaking to someone off-screen:
"The boy doesn't know yet, but he's the key to stopping this. His ability to resist memory integration makes him unique. If we can reach him before the Architect completes the harvest..."
The memory cut off there, but it gave Kai hope. He wasn't alone in this fight.
Now he just had to figure out who he could trust in a world where anyone could be a memory construct in disguise.