The city never slept. It was always hungry. Xander was acquainted with the hunger in the city.
Xander was leaning against the wall of the alley and gazing through the window of the Extraction Booth to the opposite side of the road. A woman was inside the booth. She must have been about thirty years of age. Her eyes looked old and empty. It was during this period that this week she had sold her memories and Xander knew this when she had the bruise on her temple.
He knew what that look meant. He had watched it on the face of his fathers every day until there was nothing left to take. The booth. The woman stumbled out. She was holding some bills in her hand and looked about her bewildered. She walked away then a little, a little herself.
Xander sighed and slowly exhaled. It was a different night of his thought. Somebody has something restored to him to-night. Xander was walking along the streets of Lower Mnemis. This was the place where the Blanks resided in this part of the city. The Blanks were individuals whose Echo scores had sunk low that they were not recognized by the system any more. They were jobless, had no rights to a home and identity.
Xander was a ghost to the Blanks. He was the child who had broken into Vaults and caused stolen memories to come back to the Blanks. Xander did not consider himself to be a hero. Heroes had something to lose. Xander had already lost everything that was important to him. At the age of nine, he had lost all he could lose standing in a hallway of a hospital as his father gazed at him with a horrible blankness.
During that day, his father had apologized. His father had told him that he could not recall the name of Xanders. His father had sold all their memories such as the one of Xanders birthday and about his first steps. his father had sold by degrees every memory of Xanders life by twenties and hundreds, to keep them alive both... It had not worked.
This is what Xander had been doing since then with his name. The -tier Vault that was about to be hit was the Vault Xander. It was a storage facility of the area between Upper and Lower Mnemis. The Vault was not the safe but neither it was the most perilous one. It was the memory in the Vault that Xander had been following in three weeks.
it was a recollection of a mother, which had been stolen out of a Blank woman called Sera. Sera is the one who had sold the memory of her daughters word on her lowest point six months ago. Xander had seen Sera sitting in front of her shelter at night after night with a photograph of a girl crying without understanding the reason. She was aware of the fact that she was lacking something. It wasn't something she could recall.
This was the component of this system. The system simply did not steal peoples memories. It gave them the form of the loss the silhouette of something that once was important. It took Xander four minutes to reach the Vault by way of the maintenance panel. The Vault buzzed near him with its thousand memories vials that were mounted on the floor to ceiling.
All the vials were faintly glowing of some gold, some blue and some a bruised purple. The purple vials were to indicate that the memory was obsolete and full of emotion. Xander discovered the Seras memory in twelve minutes. It was a vial warm gold. And put it into his pocket. Then he noticed that there was a vial in the restricted area. The vial was not dark blue, not purple, but black.
Xander had never encountered that color. The label Xander was signed in handwriting, which he could not identify, and his name was assigned to it. The highest score of Xanders Echo was in Lower Mnemis. He had never sold a memory. then how could a Vault, with which he had had no previous acquaintance, bear a memory upon his name?
His brain could not prevent the movements of his hands. He took the vial. Three blocks on, he paused in a doorway and took the vial in his hand and put it to the street-light. All his instincts warned him that he must not open it without knowing what was in it not by himself.
He opened it anyway. The memory struck him as a blow on the breast. The memory was of Xander who was five years old. He was in a room and men in suits were around him making notes. His father was sitting on a different table with tears oozing down his face and signing a document that he evidently did not want to sign.
At the window her side toward the room was a woman and her shoulders shaking. Xander could not see her face. He could not identify what in the manner of her pose made his chest ache. It was some voice speaking, calm, institutional saying that there would be no treasure to the city like Xanders memories.
The voice added that the extraction would start tomorrow and Xander would not recollect any of all this by morning. The memory. Xander was standing in the dark, gasping in his trembling hand the empty vial.
Xander had not been born poor. He had been made poor. His past had been stolen by someone earlier than he could defend it... Somewhere a man was living on the memories of the childhood of Xanders.
This time Xander had a reason to cease running and begin to hunt.