“It is you,” Jessica said. She was inside his memory, standing at his feet and beaming. “Hall did it.”

  “Did what?” Cassidy asked. “Jessica, this can’t be happening.”

  “I know this is strange, Cass,” she said. “I know it probably seems impossible to you. I’ll explain everything. I promise.”

  “You were just a little girl,” Cassidy said.

  “A little girl who grew up,” she replied. “Who’s spent her entire adult life searching for the truth.”

  “What truth?”

  “Our experience in the Hell Motel. A piece of a terrifying puzzle.”

  “How do you know about that? You should have been scrubbed.”

  “I was. It’s a long story.”

  “We have all the time in the world here.”

  “It’s too risky. I’ll tell you more when we’re finished.”

  “Too risky for what?” Cassidy said. “What are you going to do with me?”

  “Stay calm, Cass. Neither one of us wants you to corrupt. We need you.”

  “For what?”

  “To save the world.”

  Cassidy stared at her. Was she crazy? Before he could ask what she meant, the memories began to fast-forward, replaying everything he had experienced from the moment he had woken up in Hall’s repo. Her ability to see everything left him feeling angry and violated. It was one thing for his handlers, fellow members of the UDF, to watch Hall’s ex-wife and child die, to see his contact at the Mines, to know Brie was still in his hotel room at the Agora, or to hear his conversation with Dorne at the end of another successful mission. It was something else entirely for a group of hackers to seize him to do the same.

  He had to fight against the anger. He had to relax. He couldn’t stop the process. Jessica wasn’t trying to kill him, she was trying to extract him. He didn’t know what that meant for him right now, but he knew he needed to survive.

  He also knew she wasn’t scrubbing anything. Not a single memory was being marked for deletion. Not a single experience would fail to transfer with him. But she didn’t have his master. How could she? There was no delta to copy back. Was she going to make a full duplicate? He couldn’t think of anything more illegal or immoral.

  “I’ll see you when I see you, Cassidy,” Jessica said as they reached the moment he had been moved between the two electrodes.

  Cassidy died for the forty-ninth time.

  Chapter 33

  20 YEARS EARLIER...

  Salem Dorne stood over Lead Scrubber Guarav Singh as his blood pooled on the floor beneath him, hands clutching at his stomach. She had caught the technician fully unaware, ending his life with the calculating coldness that being captain of the Shadow Initiative demanded. That Unity demanded.

  She could feel Singh’s eyes on her as she stepped away from him, moving to where the repo lay still on the table, positioned between the electrodes and ready to have her memories of Cassidy’s mission wiped.

  The orders were clear. No loose ends, and knowledge of the anomaly was a loose end. She hadn’t wanted to kill Singh, but he was too damn worried about what Cassidy had seen and experienced. She didn’t blame him for that either. He cared about what happened to the Shades assigned to him, and Cassidy especially. As the longest tenured Shade, he was the most valuable of them all.

  Dorne didn’t know why the anomaly was so important. It seemed like a simple glitch to her, something the Shades experienced often enough they didn’t even report it one hundred percent of the time. But as soon as she had entered the mission report into Hades, the system had reacted with strict finality. It was an unexpected reaction from Unity. One she had never experienced before, even after years as the head of the city’s Underworld. One she wasn’t about to question.

  At least, she didn’t plan to question it. Not even after she had put two rounds into Singh’s gut and watched him drop, fully accepting that his life was less important than the cause. They saved countless lives every day by inserting Shades into situations nobody else could infiltrate, putting an end to child trafficking rings, drug smugglers, weapons dealers, illegal manufacture of firearms, illicit hit squads and other bad actors that would otherwise operate within the confines of the seawalls. What was the life of one scrubber compared to that?

  She stood in front of the repo, gun pointed at the girl’s unconscious body. She had always considered the people they picked up off the streets as tools to be used. Shells for occupation. Repositories, like their nickname suggested. They weren’t human beings with thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams. They were either criminals themselves or the discarded and forgotten of society.

  So why was she so hesitant to pull the trigger?

  The girl had blonde hair, a supple figure and a cherubic face that reminded Dorne of herself. Her original self. She looked so peaceful lying there. And…she was just a child. It was one thing to put her back out on the street or drop her off at an orphanage or a home for runaways. It was another to put a bullet in her unsuspecting chest and murder her in cold blood.

  Her orders were clear. No loose ends.

  Dorne looked down at the cylinder in her gloved left hand. Cassidy’s master imprint, a petri dish of DNA encoded with everything that made the Shade who he was, including his own thoughts, feelings, hopes and dreams. It was incredible to think about the technology that allowed that same data to be written into another body, imprinted onto their primal brain like a stamp that allowed one consciousness to seize full control of another. It still amazed her how easily they could create, update or delete memories. How easily they could play God.

  Her attention turned back to the repo. She watched the girl’s chest slowly rise and fall, her breathing easy and undisturbed. Her eyes shifted downward to the bandages wrapped around her feet. She didn’t know exactly where Jessica had come from, only that an agent had grabbed her off the street, drugged her and brought her in. The girl would wake up as soon as she was shot. She would see her murderer, and her imminent death would combine with memories she was too young to process, things she had done that she couldn’t understand. Dorne couldn’t imagine a more frightening or painful death.

  She lowered her gun. She also couldn’t imagine being the cause of it. She was the head of the city’s branch of the Initiative, but she wasn’t an executioner. Not of an innocent child, whose life had already been filled with hardship. Not of a girl who reminded her so much of herself at that age.

  Her orders were clear. No loose ends.

  Jessica knew what had happened, but she was already set up to be scrubbed. The memories, and the anomalies, could be deleted. She could change the girl’s entire life. Her orders were clear, and Dorne could follow them without resorting to murder.

  She looked back at Singh, regretting only that she had killed him before he could finish the scrub. She hadn’t realized there was still some warmth left in her heart. It was a weakness Unity would never understand or share. A weakness she wanted to overcome.

  But couldn’t.

  “Today is your lucky day, Jessica,” Dorne said. “I’ll come back.”

  She pocketed her gun and left the room, traversing the empty corridors from the transfer station to the elevator that led down into the Freezer. Her heart pounded as she walked, her chest tight with nervous energy.

  Or was it excitement?

  Whatever it was, she hadn’t felt this way in a long time. She just couldn’t decide if the sensation was positive or negative.

  She boarded the elevator, holding Cassidy’s master tight in her gloved hand as the cab dropped nearly five hundred feet. It opened into a small room surrounded by thick glass, through which the interior of the Freezer could be seen.

  Keeping with the tight security and separation of concerns that guided Underworld protocol, only the Captain of the Underworld and the Lead Technician had security clearance to the Freezer. Only a very privileged few knew the reason the clearance was kept so limited. It wasn’t because there was anything overtly mysterious about the area. It didn’t take a genius to guess that the Freezer was cold, or that it was used to store the masters. Rather, there were two important observations anyone could make as soon as they stepped out of the elevator and into the room.

  For one, there were a lot more canisters like the one Dorne held in her hand than anyone would guess. Thousands upon thousands of them hung from individual rods mounted to rows of metal bars that stretched dozens of feet into the distance, surrounding the room. Each one was another Shade who had successfully completed the training program and had been accepted into the Initiative. Each one, another soul imprinted to strands of DNA, waiting for their opportunity to return to life.

  The majority had signed ten mission contracts and completed nine. Others had scored poorly after Hades reviewed their mission reports and were marked for full hibernation, regardless of how many jobs they had finished. Only about a hundred or so were considered in active status, though Dorne did have the leeway to choose from quite a few more when assigning Shades to missions. But there was little point. If you had a plate of the best, why would you choose from the trash bin instead?

  The other thing anyone was sure to notice wasn’t what they saw in the Freezer. It was what they didn’t see. The same deep freeze that kept the masters intact was also supposed to provide security and longevity to the original bodies of the men and women who joined the Initiative, to be thawed and re-implanted with the master at the culmination of the Shade’s contract.

  Except both Hades and the Captain of the Underworld were compelled to ensure that a Shade never, ever completed a contract. As a result, the original bodies were an unnecessary waste of space. Their owners would never get to occupy them again.

  A small touchpad rested on a pedestal attached to the front wall of the room, a collection tube just beneath it. Dorne approached the pedestal, the system AI activating when she neared.

  “Captain Dorne. Deposit or withdrawal?”

  “Deposit,” Dorne said. “Shade Cassidy.”

  The lid over the tube slid aside. “Deposit accepted. Contract status?”

  Dorne stuck the canister into the tube. The lid closed over it. A pneumatic system pulled it through an airlock to the other side, where a wire-mounted robotic arm collected it and placed it on the rod hanging front and center in the Freezer.

  “Unchanged,” Dorne said, dismayed. She had tried to get Cassidy to commit to a longer term contract. Without that commitment they would only be able to use him one more time. It might be years before she chose him again. He was too valuable to waste on second-rate cases.

  “Deposit confirmed,” the AI said.

  Dorne stared at Cassidy’s canister for a long breath before returning to the elevator. Once she returned to U9, she made her way back to the transfer station.

  She stopped at Jessica’s feet again, staring at the girl as her heart raced. She remained that way for nearly two full minutes before stepping behind the large display to the left of the transfer unit and opening the scrubbing interface.

  As Captain, she had been trained to use the machine, though it had been years since she had done the job herself. She initiated the process, reversing to the moment they had taken Jessica off the street and brought her to the Underworld. Unlike during the review of the Shade’s version of the memories, there would be no avatar insertion or bi-directional interaction. She had free reign to make whatever cuts and edits were needed to put Jessica’s life back together.

  Dorne moved the memory forward, marking everything for deletion. She slowed the scrub at the point where Cassidy entered the restaurant and spotted the UMI on the table. She froze the frame there, advancing in milliseconds, watching as the device appeared and disappeared as if by magic. Fractals had artifacts around them. Distorted pixels in the digital frame. Larger fragments contained ghosting. This was neither.

  Still, there was something about the glitch that made her uncomfortable. Unity’s reaction hadn’t helped. It wanted this evidence destroyed. No loose ends. It wasn’t her place to question. She had never questioned before.

  Dorne looked toward the door to the room, even though she knew she would never be interrupted. There were no other eyes or ears in here. She could do whatever she wanted and nobody would be the wiser.

  Her eyes drifted back to Singh. She had killed him because he had seen the same thing she had on the display now. She was never supposed to see it either. Was this why? Did Unity know how she would react? Could any human review the memory and not become curious or concerned?

  She knew how the program worked. Unity would have her imprinted to a new repo after this, just to be on the safe side. The scrubber would see what she had done and take away this memory. And then they would die, just like Singh. It was the only way to close the loop.

  Because she couldn’t kill Jessica. Because she had looked. Because Pandora’s Box was now open.

  She turned her attention back to the display. She couldn’t leave Jessica with the memory. It would be kinder to put a bullet in her now than to have Unity send agents after her. But memories were tricky things. Sometimes they hid in places where even their technology couldn’t find them. Even after deletion, sometimes all it took was the right trigger, the right experience, the right motivation to restore them.

  A single frame could turn into a spark, which could turn into a bonfire. And only the most attentive scrubber would ever notice.

  She didn’t know if it would ever amount to anything to preserve this tiny shred of evidence. But there was something here Unity didn’t want them to see. As an agent of the system, there was nothing she could do about it.

  But maybe one day, Jessica could.

  She settled in front of the display, her decision made.

  It was going to be a long night.

  Chapter 34

  Intense pain again coursed through Cassidy’s body, every nerve ending burning and tingling as though it were on fire. Eyes closed, a million thoughts raced through his mind, an entire lifetime and then some streaming past in less than a second. The sudden awareness sent a shockwave of fear and panic through him, adding to the physical pain until he realized what was happening.

  Imprinted. For the fiftieth time.

  But something was different.

  The physical pain eased a moment later, fading away almost as quickly as it had come. Only the mental anguish remained, as his imprint fought to sync with his new repo. There was no evidence of an integration test. No checks and balances to ensure the transfer had been clean.

  Something else.

  He remembered everything, from the moment his eyes opened and the new technician, Mensah, had been hovering over him to the moment the shipping container opened and he had laid eyes on Garrett.

  What had happened to him? He had gone to talk to Garrett, but as soon as he had seen the man, he lost control. It was as if his body were operating under an entirely different set of instructions. It was as though his mind had ceased being his own. He had attacked Garrett.

  And lost.

  Badly.

  Hall was too old and slow to win that fight. He had known as much from the moment Nevis showed him Garrett’s image and record. Without the element of surprise, he had never stood a chance.

  “Cassidy, can you hear me?” Vanessa asked. Only it wasn’t Vanessa, was it?

  He opened his eyes. She was standing over him, along with Garrett and another woman. Leiana. That’s what Jessica had called her.

  “Jessica,” Cassidy said, staring up at her face. There was no way he would ever recognize her visually. As a Shade, he went out of his way to never see his repo. He had only ever seen her in accidental glimpses through reflective surfaces. “What did you do to me?”

  “Can you sit up?” she asked, holding out a hand. “How do you feel?”

  He realized he wasn’t strapped down anymore. He reached up, taking her hand in his and letting her pull him into an upright position. “I feel good,” he said, realizing he wasn’t dizzy. The sync had already completed. “I didn’t know it was possible to imprint to the same repo twice.”

  “Our equipment is rudimentary at best. It’s the only way we can do it right now. But we cleaned you up and restarted the clock.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Cassidy,” Garrett said, pulling a gray slab from behind his back. “What does this look like to you?”

  Cassidy’s eyes locked on the object, his heart beginning to pound. “That’s a UMI. Where did you get it?”

  “I stole it from the Dome,” Garrett replied.

  “The important part is that you can see it,” Jessica said. “An hour ago, it would have been something else. A holo projector. Or maybe even a blank space. It depends on how the archon decides to alter your perception.”

  “Archon?” Cassidy asked.

  “It’s part of your imprint,” Jessica said. “A sub-process that filters everything you experience.”

  “Sub-process? The imprint is me. A copy from my source.”

  “The imprint is you-plus,” Jessica corrected.

  “Do you really think Unity would send an agent out into the world without the ability to keep you in check?” Garrett asked. “Especially when it already controls everything else.”

  Cassidy considered it for a moment. “The archon forced me to attack you.”

  Garrett smiled and nodded. “Yes. Exactly. You’re a dangerous man, Cassidy. You need to be on a leash, even if it’s a long one.”

  “I don’t feel very dangerous right now,” Cassidy replied.

  “I was ready for you. We expected what happened when you saw me, since you didn’t have a personal intention to take me in. At least, not at that point.”

  “What else can the archon do?” Cassidy asked.

  “Whatever it needs to do to keep you from going out of mission parameters,” Jessica said. “Or to keep you from seeing things it doesn’t want you to see.”

  “Like the UMI?”