Two weeks later, Adrian Blackstone had become my most punctual client.
Every Tuesday and Friday at 8 PM sharp, he arrived at my clinic like clockwork. Same expensive suit, same haunted expression, same desperate hunger for memories of Elena that I fed him piece by carefully crafted piece. He'd paid me four million dollars so far, and I could see in his eyes that he'd pay four million more without hesitation.
But something was wrong.
"This memory feels different," Adrian said, settling into the copper chair for our eighth session. "The one from last Friday. Elena seemed... distant."
I adjusted the neural crown, buying time to think. The memory he was referring to was one of my more complex fabrications—Elena meeting with a source who'd warned her about Victoria's illegal memory trafficking network. I'd crafted it carefully, but Adrian's growing familiarity with my fake Elena was making him more sensitive to inconsistencies.
"Different how?" I asked.
"She didn't laugh the way she usually did. Her voice was flatter." He closed his eyes, but his jaw was tense. "Elena had this way of tilting her head when she was thinking. In that memory, she didn't do it once."
My blood ran cold. Elena's head tilt was a real mannerism, one I shared with her. But in my fabricated memories, I sometimes forgot to include those tiny details that made her uniquely herself.
"Memory extraction isn't perfect," I said, initiating the next sequence. "Sometimes the emotional nuances get lost in translation."
"Maybe." But he didn't sound convinced.
Tonight's memory was especially cruel—a fabricated scene of Elena researching memory trafficking victims, growing more frightened as she realized how many people had disappeared. I watched Adrian's face as the false experience took hold, seeing him flinch at Elena's manufactured fear.
"She knew she was in danger," he whispered. "In this memory, she's talking about getting evidence to someone safe. Someone she trusted."
"Who?"
"She doesn't say. But she's scared. Really scared." His hands gripped the chair arms. "Luna, I need to ask you something."
My finger hovered over the pause button. "What?"
"These memories... they're changing how I remember Elena. When I think about her now, I see the woman from your memories instead of... instead of how I actually remember her."
"That's normal. New memories can overwrite—"
"No." His eyes snapped open. "It's not normal. I've been having my own memories deleted, and now yours are filling the gaps."
The admission hung between us like a confession. Adrian had been deleting his own memories of Elena while buying mine to replace them. The psychological implications made my head spin.
"You've been deleting memories of Elena?" I kept my voice carefully neutral.
"Not deleting. Editing. Removing the parts that hurt too much to remember." He sat up, pushing the neural crown away. "There's a private clinic in Pacific Heights. They specialize in selective memory modification for... for people like me."
"People like you?"
"People who can afford to forget."
The bitter self-awareness in his voice caught me off guard. This wasn't the cold billionaire I'd expected to manipulate. This was a man so destroyed by grief that he was literally editing his own mind to survive it.
"What parts are you editing out?" I asked.
"The last conversation Elena and I had. The way she looked at me when I didn't believe her about Victoria." He rubbed his temples. "The guilt, mostly. The memory of her saying she'd prove it even if it killed her."
"Adrian—"
"I know it's cowardly. But I can't... I can't live with knowing that I failed her. So I pay Dr. Reeves to take away the worst parts, and I pay you to give me better ones."
Dr. Reeves. I filed the name away for later investigation.
"How long have you been doing this?"
"Since a week after her funeral. I was going crazy with the guilt, so I had that last conversation erased. But then I missed her voice, her laugh, so I had more sessions. And more." He laughed bitterly. "I've probably forgotten half my real memories of Elena by now."
The tragedy of it hit me like a physical blow. Adrian wasn't just grieving Elena—he was systematically destroying his authentic memories of her while replacing them with my fabrications. In trying to escape his pain, he was erasing the real Elena from his mind.
"What happens tomorrow?" I asked quietly. "After I give you all of Elena's supposed memories? What then?"
"Then I'll have her back. Not the real Elena, but a version of her that I can live with. A version that doesn't remind me of my failures."
"That's not Elena. That's just a beautiful lie."
"Sometimes beautiful lies are all we can afford."
The raw honesty in his voice made my chest tight. I was supposed to be manipulating him, using his grief to get information about Elena's death. Instead, I was watching him systematically destroy his authentic memories of my sister to replace them with my lies.
"We should continue," he said, settling back into the chair. "I don't want to waste your time."
But as I prepared the next memory sequence, all I could think about was how wrong this felt. Elena would hate what I was doing to Adrian's memories of her. She would hate that her death had driven him to this desperate self-mutilation of his own mind.
The session ended an hour later with Adrian paying me another half million dollars for the privilege of forgetting more of the real Elena. After he left, I sat in my clinic, staring at the money and feeling like I'd just robbed a grieving man's grave.
My phone buzzed with a text from Maya: Need to see you. Found something big.
Twenty minutes later, I met Maya at our usual spot—an all-night diner in the Mission District where the coffee was terrible but the surveillance was minimal. She looked more paranoid than usual, checking the exits twice before sitting down.
"Adrian Blackstone isn't the only one buying Elena memories," she said without preamble.
"What do you mean?"
Maya pulled out her tablet, showing me a series of financial transactions. "I've been monitoring memory broker networks, looking for anyone else trading in Elena Hayes experiences. Found three separate buyers in the past month."
My blood went cold. "Who?"
"That's the problem. The transactions are laundered through multiple shell companies, but they all trace back to the same source." Maya highlighted a name on the screen. "Neurex Corporation."
The coffee turned to acid in my stomach. Neurex Corporation was the company that had perfected memory extraction technology. They owned the legal Memory Exchange and controlled most of the legitimate memory trade in North America.
"Why would Neurex want Elena's memories?"
"That's what I've been trying to figure out. But Luna, there's more. They're not just buying Elena memories. They're buying memories from all the dead investigators."
She showed me more transaction records—payments for memories from Maria Santos, James Park, Linda Crawford. All the investigators who had died mysteriously in the past six months.
"Someone is collecting the memories of dead investigators," I said slowly.
"Someone with serious resources and government connections. Neurex has contracts with every major intelligence agency." Maya closed her tablet. "Luna, I think Elena stumbled onto something much bigger than corporate fraud. I think she found evidence of a memory-based intelligence operation."
"What kind of operation?"
"The kind where they extract memories from targets and use them for blackmail, espionage, or assassination." Maya's voice dropped to a whisper. "Think about it. If you can extract someone's memories, you can learn their secrets, their contacts, their plans. You can steal state secrets from diplomats, corporate secrets from executives, personal secrets from anyone."
The implications made my head spin. If Neurex Corporation was running a memory-based espionage network, then Elena hadn't just been investigating memory trafficking—she'd been investigating a threat to national security.
"There's one more thing," Maya said. "I've been monitoring your clinic's security feeds. You're being watched."
She pulled up surveillance footage from the alley behind my building. A man in a dark sedan, sitting in the same spot for hours, photographing everyone who entered or left my clinic.
"Government?" I asked.
"Probably. But here's what's interesting—they're not trying to stop you from operating. They're just watching. Like they want to see who comes to you."
"They're using me as bait."
"Or they're waiting to see what you find before they make their move." Maya reached across the table, grabbing my hand. "Luna, you need to disappear. Tonight. Whatever Elena found, it got her killed, and it's going to get you killed too."
I stared at the surveillance photo, thinking about Adrian's desperate need to forget, about the mysterious buyers collecting dead investigators' memories, about Elena's final warning about Victoria.
"I can't run," I said finally.
"Why not?"
"Because Elena died trying to expose this. If I run now, her death means nothing."
"If you die, her death still means nothing."
"Maybe. But Adrian's destroying his real memories of Elena to replace them with my lies. Other people are buying memories from dead investigators to cover up their crimes. Everyone is profiting from Elena's death except Elena." I pulled my hand free from Maya's grip. "I'm going to find out what she discovered, and I'm going to make sure the people responsible pay for it."
"How?"
"By following Adrian to his memory clinic. If he's having memories deleted, then Dr. Reeves has access to the authentic memories of Elena that Adrian is trying to forget. I need to see what Adrian's real memories contain."
Maya shook her head. "That's breaking into a medical facility to steal patient records. That's federal crime territory."
"Elena was murdered. The people who killed her are trying to erase every trace of her investigation. If that's not federal crime territory, I don't know what is."
"What about Adrian? He trusts you now. Are you going to keep lying to him?"
I thought about the pain in Adrian's voice when he talked about editing out his guilt, about his desperate need to replace his authentic grief with my beautiful fabrications.
"I'm going to give him something better than lies," I said. "I'm going to give him the truth."
"Even if the truth destroys him?"
"Especially then. Elena always said the truth was worth dying for. Time to find out if she was right."
We left the diner separately, Maya heading home to her encrypted computers and surveillance equipment, me walking the dark streets of San Francisco with Elena's necklace heavy around my neck. Somewhere in this city, people were collecting the memories of dead investigators to cover up crimes that went all the way to the top of the memory industry.
Elena had died trying to expose those crimes. Now I was going to finish what she started, even if it meant breaking into medical facilities, lying to federal agents, and betraying the trust of a man whose grief I was beginning to understand too well.
But first, I needed to see what Adrian Blackstone's authentic memories of Elena contained. The memories he was so desperate to forget might be the key to understanding why she died.
Tomorrow, I would follow Adrian to his memory clinic and steal the real memories he was trying to erase. The memories that contained Elena's true last words, her real final warning, and possibly the evidence that got her killed.
The fact that stealing those memories would mean seeing Elena through Adrian's eyes—the real Elena, not my fabricated version—was both my greatest fear and my deepest desire.
I'd spent two weeks feeding Adrian lies about my sister. Now I was going to discover the truths he couldn't bear to remember.