Chapter 1: Dead Drop

I stripped the encryption lock off the dead drop box at 23:47, which gave me a margin of thirteen minutes before Dov's next proximity check. The box sat in the service crawl behind the old HVAC unit in sub-level 12, exactly where Dov's message said it would be. The message itself had been burned forty minutes ago. I'd memorized the coordinates, the time window, the warning flags—three vertical dots, which meant caution, not alarm.

Caution I could work with.

The lock came free with a magnetic pulse from my wrist rig. The indicator light on my tap flickered amber—active, drawing power from my neural core. I'd had the rig for four years, ever since I'd decided that brokering memories was more profitable than selling my own. The amber light was aesthetic. The real security was the encryption cipher running underneath, layered with redundancies Dov's people had never figured out, and she'd stopped asking about two years ago.

I'd timed my approach from the stairwell to account for the surveillance blind spot at the sub-level 12 junction—a four-second gap where the camera array looped back on itself, something the facility's maintenance crew had never bothered to flag. They didn't expect traffic down here except for authorized climate-control techs. The margin had held: I'd come down the access stairs at 23:44, which gave me the window. Dov's protocol was rigid about these things. Proximity checks every fifteen minutes, rotating through four different entrance vectors. She was methodical. Paranoid in the way that kept people breathing.

Inside the box: a standard neural core in a matte black case, small enough to fit in my palm. Unmarked. No serial numbers visible. The core itself was old-model hardware, the kind pulled from busted street rigs five years ago, repurposed. Next to it: a data chip the size of a postage stamp, printed with a wipe marker.

I stopped moving.

Wipe markers came from one source and one source only: SILKSCREEN division. Wipe Bureau. The government division that handled stolen neural data, corporate IP theft, black-market trafficking in classified memories. The kind of liability that made gray-market brokers disappear from the city roster and reappear as data points in Meridian PD's quarterly reports.

I'd never touched a wipe marker before. The rule was absolute. Consented data only, or I didn't move it.

My first instinct was to leave the box where it was. Walk back up the stairs, close the blind spot window behind me, burn my contact with Dov, and find some other corner of the black market to work in. The gray market was already walking a knife's edge—Bureau oversight was getting tighter every quarter, and the last three brokers who'd been picked up on wipe-marker possession were looking at federal time—the kind where you disappeared into a Bureau facility and came back with scrambled memories, if you came back at all.

But Dov wouldn't have sent me down here with a marker unless she'd already calculated the angle. She didn't send people to die. She sent them to work. The question was what came after the work was done.

I'd never touched a wipe marker before, but I'd touched plenty of other things that weren't supposed to exist.

The crawl space was tight enough that my shoulders brushed both walls. The concrete was cold and damp—ancient infrastructure, pre-syndicate construction, the kind that didn't get regular maintenance because nobody important came down here. The air tasted like mineral deposits and old electrical insulation, layered with something else, something organic and faintly metallic. Above my head, the HVAC system hummed, maintaining the temperature gradient for the server farms sixty levels above. Down here, "climate control" was a courtesy to the machinery, not to the people using it. The vibration came through the walls and floor, a subsonic pulse that made my teeth ache if I stayed in these spaces too long.

I'd brought a light, battery-powered, pointed at the box. The core caught the edge of the beam and threw back a flat black reflection. The metal of the case was matte, brushed steel or something close to it. Professional work. The kind you got from someone with access to manufacturing equipment.

I didn't touch it yet. My ears were working, tracking the ambient noise. The HVAC cycle. The distant hum of power distribution somewhere deeper in the sub-levels. My own breathing, which I'd regulated into a pattern that wouldn't echo. The crawl space was maybe four feet high and two and a half feet wide. If someone came down from either end of the service corridor, I'd have exactly two seconds before they'd have line of sight on me.

The wipe marker's serial number was etched on the data chip in microprint. I leaned closer, my light tracking across the surface. Standard Bureau cipher—the kind you saw on official extractions, the ones that came with authorization and federal seals. The marker had been issued 127 days ago. That was April 28th. Flagged for the Seoul district, cross-referenced to a memory extraction recorded in sub-level 14, which meant the source was somewhere in this building, or in a building just like this one. An ownership claim, not a theft report. Someone Bureau-affiliated had extracted a memory, locked it with a wipe marker, and then... what? Lost the case? Had it stolen from them? Sold it to a fence too stupid to check the metadata?

That last option didn't fit. Anyone moving Bureau property through the gray market knew the risks. They knew they'd lose their clearance, their position, maybe their ability to walk around the city without a Bureau interceptor on their tail. You didn't move marked data by accident. You moved it because the risk was worth the payoff. Which meant someone was desperate, or someone was working an angle I couldn't see yet.

I pulled my own scanner from my jacket pocket—a decryption rig the size of a pack of cigarettes, built from library components and black-market firmwares I'd sourced over two years. It could read standard Bureau markers without triggering alarms, as long as I didn't try to crack the cipher. Just read. Just look.

I powered it on. The screen came alive in tight green text.

WIPE MARKER DETECTED BUREAU CLASSIFICATION: LEVEL 2 EXTRACTION AUTHORITY: [ENCRYPTED] ASSET DESCRIPTOR: [ENCRYPTED] CLEARANCE REQUIRED: LEVEL 3+

The clearance was a federal thing. Meaningless. But the extraction authority shouldn't have been encrypted. Standard markers listed the authorized extractor's ID. This one was locked. Which meant whoever had issued this marker had the kind of access that went beyond standard Bureau operations. Which meant this was someone with dirty hands, or someone with very clean ones. Either way, she'd have reasons to hide her identity from the records.