The enforcers poured into the chamber, their weapons raised. Elias and Lena retreated deeper into the archive, using the server racks for cover.
"There's another way out!" Lena shouted over the gunfire. "Thorne's notes mentioned an emergency exit!"
Elias followed her, returning fire with the weapon she'd given him. The enforcers moved with mechanical precision, their armor deflecting most shots.
They reached a narrow maintenance shaft just as a grenade landed near them. The explosion threw them forward, the world dissolving into noise and heat.
When Elias's hearing returned, he found himself in a different tunnel, Lena dragging him to his feet. The archive chamber was sealed behind a collapsed ceiling.
"Did you get it?" she asked, her face smeared with dust.
Elias patted the drive in his pocket. "I got it. But what now?"
"Now we find someone who can help us use it." She checked her weapon. "There's a resistance cell in the manufacturing district. They've been waiting for this."
The manufacturing district was the city's underbelly—a sprawling landscape of factories and worker habitation blocks where the Council's control was weakest. They moved through crowded markets where the air was thick with the smell of synthetic food and sweat.
Lena led him to a seemingly abandoned textile factory. The pattern she knocked on the door was complex, a code of some kind.
The door opened to reveal a woman with cybernetic eyes and a network of scars across her face. "Petranova. You're late."
"We had Council trouble," Lena said, pushing past her. "This is Elias Vance. Elias, meet Kaela. She runs the local resistance."
Kaela's mechanical eyes scanned Elias. "The memory trader. I've heard of you. You authenticated a memory of the blue sky."
News traveled fast in the underworld. "You know about that?"
"Everyone who matters knows." Kaela led them deeper into the factory, which had been converted into a makeshift headquarters. "The question is, what are you going to do about it?"
Elias looked at the faces around the room—men and women who watched him with a mixture of hope and suspicion. These were the people the Council had failed, the ones left behind in Neo-Arcadia's relentless progress.
"I have something," he said, holding up the drive. "A key to restoring the memories the Council has stolen."
Kaela took the drive. "The Genesis Memory. We've heard legends. How does it work?"
"It's not a memory itself," Elias explained. "It's a neural pattern that can reverse the Council's edits. But we need to broadcast it through the city's memory network."
"That's suicide," one of the resistance members said. "The Council controls the network hubs."
"Then we take control of one," Lena said. "Just long enough to broadcast the pattern."
Kaela studied the drive. "There's a primary hub in the Council spire. Heavily guarded, but it has the range to reach the entire city."
Elias felt the weight of what they were proposing. This wasn't just about revealing a historical truth—it was about challenging the foundation of the Council's power.
"If we do this," he said quietly, "there's no going back. The Council will hunt us forever."
Lena placed a hand on his arm. "Some truths are worth that price."
Kaela inserted the drive into a terminal. "Then let's see what your godfather left us."
The screen lit up with Thorne's face once more, but this time his message was different.
"Elias, if you're seeing this, then you've chosen the difficult path. But know this—the Genesis Memory will not just restore what was lost. It will reveal what the Council has become."
The image changed to show a familiar face—Councilor Valerius, the public face of the government. But as the memory unfolded, Elias saw something impossible.
Valerius wasn't human. Beneath the human facade was a complex machine, its workings visible through occasional glitches in the projection.
"The Council aren't just manipulating memories," Thorne's voice continued. "They're not human at all. They're the custodians of a dying species, preserving humanity in a cage of its own history."
The resistance members stared at the screen in horrified silence. The truth was worse than any of them had imagined.