Page 12 of The City Of Fractured Memory

Oops.

“I’m sorry, it won’t happen again.”

She looks at me like she doesn’t believe me, but thankfully she doesn’t press the matter. Instead, she stands and grabs my cloak, pulling the phial out of the pocket and shaking it in her hand. “So, are you going to show me what was so important it was worth hurting yourself for?”

I smirk. “I think we might have a serial killer on our hands. Pass me the other phial and we can watch both the memories back at the same time.”

The table between us is cluttered, scraps of parchment, smudged quills, three empty mugs of Stryx’s favourite bitterleaf tea. But my eyes fix on the two glass bottles nestled in their iron stand in the middle of it all. They glow faintly, threads of light writhing inside like caught glow worms. My head still aches deeply from pulling the last of them free, but I can’t stop staring. Answers lie in there somewhere. Or at least pieces of them, anyway.

Stryx shifts beside me, her ears flicking back and forth in eager anticipation as she reaches for the nearest phial, the scattered braids in her silver hair falling into her eyes. Her touch on the glass is delicate, reverent almost, like she’s afraid the thing might shatter and spill its contents into the floorboards.

“You ready?” she asks softly.

“As I’ll ever be,” I murmur, though my stomach knots. Whilst I’m eager to crack this case, I’m not fond of replaying memories. They’re too real, too easy to lose yourself in.

Stryx tilts the phial and unseals it with a careful twist of the stopper. At once, the light unfurls, spilling upward in a slow cascade. Wisps of memory pour into the room, curling and folding like smoke until we’re no longer sitting in our threadbare apartment, but standing in the middle of the crime scene again.

The memories fade in and out around us in a glittering haze of fog, like stepping into a cloud full of light and colour. The walls shimmer, edges fraying into sparks. The floor beneath us is both solid and translucent, flickering with veins of light. The dead seer’s body reappears in between us, ghostly pale, frozen in that same awful sprawl.

I swallow hard. Even knowing it’s an echo, my chest tightens.

Stryx lifts her hand, fingers tracing sigils in the air, and the memory bends to her will. The scene shudders, pauses, rewinds, allowing us to see everything through my past eyes with perfect detail. Once we’ve examined the first memory, Stryx opens the second, the two converging around us, ghosts within ghosts, overlapping until there are two bodies on the floor between our feet.

“There,” I mutter. “The brands on their temples, both their memories were siphoned before death. There must be a reason.”

She nods, and my pulse thrums as I watch her shape the air. She gestures again and the memory halts. Sparks scatter where her fingers slice through the projection and the air grows thick with shimmering motes, like dust catching moonlight.

Stryx moves between the overlapping projections, eyes narrowing as she rewinds them both in tandem. She points at the faint silvery glow around each victim’s temple. “I imagine a seer’s memories would be quite useful to some people, or damning. That could be a motive?” She flicks her fingers, freezing the memories.

I wrap my arms around myself, staring as the two images blur and twist together. If I solve this, it could be my ticket back into the Division. I could get my life back. The motes of magic drift around us, brushing across my skin like sparks of static, making every hair stand on end. I almost forget the horror of it because it’s so beautiful, too. Like standing inside a constellation.

But then my eyes find the victims again, their hollow faces overlaid in flickering light, and the beauty collapses back into something jagged. Something cruel.

“This doesn’t just feel like murder, does it?” I whisper. “It’s like…harvesting?”

Stryx glances at me, her expression grim. “We need to figure out why their memories were taken. It’s the only lead. We need to see if they’re salvageable.”

I nod in agreement. “I need to examine the bodies again. No doubt the second victim has been moved to the Division morgue by now, though, which means dealing with Maevick.”

“We can go tonight,” she pushes, a fire sparking in her eyes at the thrill of the mystery. I bite my lip, tapping my fingers together three times as my heart starts to race at the idea of her coming with me. Her eyes narrow as she seems to sense the direction of my thoughts, and the memory projections suddenly drop from around us, jarring my vision for a moment. “You’re not leaving me behind Octavia. I’m going mad cooped up in here.”

“I’m just trying to keep you safe, Stryx,” I remind her gently, but she shakes her head, stubborn as ever. Guilt floods me as I consider what it must be like for her to be locked in here day and night, and I find myself quickly relenting, despite my reservations.

“Fine, you can come,” I sigh. “But only if you assure me you can maintain a full illusion on yourself the entire time. And you need to wear shoes.”

She laughs before using her magic to coax any lingering memories back into the phials, then directing her hands in front of her face, tracing patterns in the air as her blue aura starts to escape her. Her hair starts to float on an invisible breeze, before gently dropping back down as the illusion falls over her like a waterfall, her hair slowly turning from silver to yellow, her ears and eyes shrinking and reshaping to copy that of a mortal’s. I step forward to help her into her overcoat to hide the silvery tattoos that spiral up her arms, and when I step back, she’s almost entirely unrecognisable.

“Good,” I nod. “Let’s go.”

“To the morgue?” she asks, hurrying out the door behind me as she pulls up her hood and drums her fingers together excitedly.

“Not yet, there’s somewhere I need to go first.”

Eight

The nightly activities of the mortals are in full swing as we step out onto the street, the lamps glowing faintly, leaving shadows amongst the cobbles. The distant sound of music wafts from the tavern a few streets away, and the scent of cinnamon makes my mouth water as the bakers next door prepare their loaves for the morning. Stryx peers hopefully through their window at the sight of the bread baking in the big ovens, but I gently grab her arm and tug her along, steering us towards the rickety sky bridge that leads out of Dhakira.

The bridge groans under our boots, the wooden planks warped by mist and time, the iron chains straining as the wind hisses through the gaps. Below us yawns the lake, black and endless, its surface so still it looks more like dark glass than water. I try to avoid looking down. Beneath the surface, the Voyd waits, hungry to claim any drunken mortals unlucky enough to fall in.