The Extraction

The client arrives at eleven, the way they always do — late enough to seem important, early enough that I haven't started drinking.

She's young. They're always young when they come here for the first time. The older ones know better, or they've already spent everything they had worth spending. She sits across the exam table with her coat still on, which tells me she hasn't decided yet whether she's leaving.

"I was told you do discreet work," she says.

"I do all kinds of work." I pull on my gloves. The latex snaps louder than I intend. "What are you looking to lose?"

She reaches into her bag and produces a photograph — actual photographic paper, the kind you'd have to print yourself or find in a dead person's drawer. A man. Fifties, salt-and-pepper at the temples, the particular softness around the jaw that comes from decades of good meals and no consequences.

"His name is Arvind Cortes," she says. "He's a memory broker."

I set the photograph down. "I know what he is."

Everyone in the Trough knows what Arvind Cortes is. He runs the largest memory exchange in the lower city — not the one on Falconer Street with the tasteful lighting and the staff who've had their disgust surgically removed, but the real operation: the warehouse off Pier Eleven where people queue before dawn to sell the last good things their minds contain.

"He bought something from me," she says. "Something I didn't consent to sell."

I look at her more carefully. There's a quality to her stillness that I recognize — not calm, but the performance of calm. The kind of stillness you learn when you can't afford to let people see you scared.

"When?"

"Three weeks ago. I went under for a voluntary extraction — my mother's funeral, I wanted it gone. I woke up and two years were missing. Not just the funeral. Two years."

I pick up my light and lean toward her left eye. She doesn't flinch. The capillaries in the sclera tell a story: someone has been in here, and recently, and not gently.

"What do you want me to do about it?"

"I want you to go in and get them back."

The rain against the skylight gets louder. Down in the street, someone is arguing about money, which is the only argument anyone has in the Trough anymore — everything reduced to its liquid form, traded and spent and borrowed against before it's even happened.

"Retrieval isn't surgery," I say. "It's theft."

"Yes," she says. "That's why I came to you."

I should send her away. The smart move — the safe move — is to write her a referral to someone with fewer outstanding debts and a cleaner extraction license, someone who doesn't owe Arvind Cortes the kind of money that makes men into permanent furniture.

But there's something in what she said that snags. Something she doesn't know she told me.

She said Cortes bought something from her. Not stole. Bought.

Which means he had a buyer lined up before she arrived at Pier Eleven. Which means someone, somewhere, has been placing orders for specific memories — not the usual commodity grades, not nostalgia or first-love or the warm catalogue of small happinesses that the exchange trades in bulk.

Something targeted. Something valuable enough to justify two stolen years.

"I'll need a deposit," I say. "Half up front, half when I have something to show you."

She opens her coat. The wallet underneath is thicker than it has any right to be.

"I know what your rates are," she says. "I know what you owe Cortes. I'm prepared to cover both."

Now I understand the stillness.

She came here knowing exactly what she was buying.