Lifting a Memory

The trick to stealing a memory is that you must not, under any circumstances, look at it. Nessa had learned that early, and she had learned it the hard way, which is the only way the lesson sticks. A memory is not a thing like a necklace. A necklace you can lift and pocket and never think about until the fence weighs it. A memory you have to carry, briefly, through the space between the mark's head and your own — and in that space it is open, and bright, and if you look into it you will not steal it, you will live it, and the living of another person's life will leave a smudge of them on you that never quite scrubs off. Nessa had a few of those smudges. She did not want more. So the rule was iron: get in, find the memory, lift it sealed, get out, and never, ever look. The Hollish job looked like an easy one. She had cased it for nine days, which was thorough even for her, because Castellan — her broker, the woman who matched thieves like Nessa to clients like the ones who hired thieves like Nessa — had been unusually particular about it. The client wanted one memory removed from the head of Lord Emun Hollish: a single evening, eleven years ago, a dinner, a conversation. That was all the brief said. Lift the dinner, leave the man otherwise whole, deliver the sealed memory to a dead-drop in the cloth district. The fee was generous. The fee, Nessa had thought at the time, was a little too generous for a dinner. She went in on the tenth night, over the east wall, up to the second storey, the way she always did — Nessa worked the upper floors, never the ground, because people guard their doors and forget their windows, and a thief who understands that one fact will never starve. The Hollish house was asleep. Lord Emun was asleep. She stood over his bed in the dark, and she did the work, the quiet patient inward work of finding the one memory the client had paid for among the thousand thousand others, and it was there, exactly where the brief said it would be, eleven years deep, a dinner, an evening, a conversation. She closed her hand around it. She felt it come loose, clean, sealed, the way a ripe thing comes off the branch. And then she made the mistake. It was not carelessness. She wants that understood, on whatever record this is — Nessa was not careless, she had lifted four hundred memories and looked into none of them. But a sealed memory, in the instant it comes free, gives off the faintest impression of itself, the way a closed letter still shows the shape of what is folded inside if you hold it to a candle. It is not looking. It is just the edge of a thing brushing past. And as Lord Emun Hollish's stolen dinner came loose in her hand, the edge of it brushed past Nessa's mind, and in that edge, for less than the length of a heartbeat, she saw the people at the table. There were four of them at the dinner eleven years ago. An older man she did not know. Lord Emun, younger. A grey-faced woman she did not know. And a girl of about fourteen, dark-haired, sharp-faced, sitting very straight in a chair too big for her, listening to the conversation with the particular hungry attention of a child who has understood that the adults are discussing something that will decide the rest of her life. The girl was Nessa. She stood in Lord Emun Hollish's dark bedroom with the sealed memory of a dinner clenched in her fist, and her own face — eleven years younger, but unmistakably, undeniably hers — looked back at her out of it. She had never met Lord Emun Hollish. She had cased his house for nine days specifically so that she would know, beyond doubt, that she had never met him, because that was the discipline, you never lifted from someone you had a history with, histories made you look. She had no memory of this dinner. She had no memory of this man, this house, the grey-faced woman, the older man at the head of the table. She had been a fourteen-year-old street thief eleven years ago, in the cloth district, hungry, alone, with no business anywhere near a lord's dinner table. And yet here was a memory, lifted clean from a stranger's head, with herself sitting in the middle of it. Nessa did the thing her four hundred jobs had trained into her bones. She finished. She sealed the memory properly, she did not look again, she went out the window and over the east wall and down into the streets, because a thief who stops to feel things on the job is a thief who gets caught, and the feeling could wait until she was somewhere with a locked door. But two streets from the Hollish wall, in the dark, she stopped, and she stood very still, and she made herself think it through the way Castellan had taught her to think things through. Cold. In order. Someone had paid a generous fee to have one specific evening cut out of Lord Emun Hollish's head. That evening had her in it. And the client — whoever the client was, hidden behind Castellan and a dead-drop in the cloth district — had hired, out of every memory-thief in the city, her. Specifically her. To lift, and deliver, and never look at, a memory that she was inside of. Nessa looked down at the sealed thing in her hand. It would fetch a generous fee at the dead-drop. It would also, she understood now, with a cold and total clarity, answer a question she had not known until tonight that she had — which was the kind of question a careful thief, holding the only copy of the answer in her own fist, does not simply hand to a stranger and walk away from.