In this part of the city, even the light was second-hand.

It reflected in the oily rainbow surfaces of snow-melt puddles and poured from the storefronts of stubborn, open businesses. Here and there an apartment window might glow, yellow and pale, before it was banked behind curtains or cut off for bed. Old-timey streetlights glowed intermittently, incongruous against the grimy cement buildings and pot-holed roads that signified the outer edges of the city. The streetlights had been the beginning and end of a district improvement plan, and now they only served to create little islands of light in a dark sea of mid-winter gloom.

From the inside of her tiny shop, Miranda watched snowmelt run along the gutters as she listened to the gentle hum of memories neatly arranged on the shelves behind her. The tip of her stylus made the softest of noises as it was dragged across the smooth plane of her screen, and beneath the glass the image of the tattoo she was designing slowly came to life.

“We need to make a drop,” said Jack quietly, carefully picking up the copper memory conductors and placing them into a cotton-padded crate. “Memories sell high this time of year, and we’ve been holding onto the ones our regular collectors might like to see.”

Sometimes it was easy to forget that this little shop, the place that felt so much like home, was meant for more than creating art. Tattoos had been the perfect front: the buzz of the needle masked the rumble of the extractors. The jars of inks mingled seamlessly with the memory batteries. And for both, the chair was the same: jointed and black, with a heavy steel frame and thick, comfortable padding.

“Not Ingram,” said Miranda absently, feathering a shadow into the bold linework of her drawing. “I won’t work with him again.”

Private memory collectors were almost universally odd. They had enough money to buy anything they could possibly want, and they chose to sink their money and time into the recollections of others. A few collectors specialized in oddities: the memories of someone with synesthesia, or someone who could feel no pain. Plenty of people (plenty of men) bought memories of sex, and relived them over and over again.

Some wanted pleasure. Some preferred pain. But they all were chasing an escape.

“Not Ingram,” Jack agreed, crossing the little room to stand behind her chair. “What are you working on?”

Miranda shivered as the tips of his fingers drifted over the nape of her neck. “Just sketching.”

It was the only way she could consider the decision she’d been approaching all day: laterally, and with feigned disinterest.

If she looked the idea in the face, she’d lose her courage for sure.

“It’s beautiful,” said Jack quietly, leaning over Miranda’s shoulder to get a better look at her tablet.

Miranda fought the instinct to hunch over it protectively. On her screen, a woman was sinking beneath storm-driven waves, one arm outstretched to the surface above. She’d just slipped to the place where the storm could no longer reach, and the expression on her face… it wasn’t longing or fearful or distressed. She looked peaceful, like the dark waters into which she was sinking.

“Who is it for?” Jack asked.

Miranda made a non-committal noise. It had started as a design for Carmen, but had grown far too large for what the redhead wanted. This design would start on the right shoulder, so the waves would move and arch over bone and muscle, before descending along the spine to stop over the left hip.

“It would look good on you.”

It would. “We’d make more if we keep it for the right customer; someone willing to pay for a piece this big.”

Jack dropped a kiss to her hair before crossing the room to resume packing the memories. “So practical. There’s more to life than money.”

Now or never. “Wait,” said Miranda, as Jack nestled the last of the memory batteries in the shipping crate and moved to hammer on the lid. “There’s one more.”

“I got them all,” said Jack, his eyes skimming over the cluttered shelves.

“No,” said Miranda, moving woodenly to the chair. She’d sat in it a hundred times, she told herself. This was just like all those others.

“Miranda, if you need money—”

“Are you going to hook me up, or are you going to make me do it?”

Jack watched her for a few silent heartbeats as a muscle worked in his jaw. “Tell me,” he said. “I’ll do it. But tell me what memory you’re selling.”

Miranda flicked her gaze up to his and held it. Fury sizzled between them, mixed with worry and exhaustion and resignation. This was going to happen, one way or another. It could happen tonight, or it could happen a year from now, but they both knew it was inevitable. The city wouldn’t become less corrupt or expensive or dangerous. Nobody was coming to save them.

Taking a slow breath in through her nose, Miranda started to tell the story.

“It’s Christmas Day,” she said slowly, leaning back into the black leather of the chair. Jack still hadn’t looked away from her face. “And I’m fourteen years old. My parents and I are coming home from my grandmother’s house in the waterfront district, and the streets in that part of town are decorated. Garlands and lights and big, shining windows.

“I remember the red,” said Miranda absently. “All of the bows on shop doors, and the displays in the windows. The glow of the plas-fires out by the tram stops, and the taillights of the magtrams still out on the roads.”

“What were you wearing?” Jack asked, his voice soft and low. He was moving around her now, carefully plugging in the transfer equipment and testing each connection.

Miranda tilted her head back onto the padded cushion and closed her eyes, trying to sink into the memory the way she’d once been able to sink into a hot bath. “A green sweater, and new shoes my parents gave me. They were black leather, and they pinched my heel.”

“You walked?”

He’d asked the question even though he knew this part of the story. He was walking her through this, moving through the memory with her for the last time, like wandering through the rooms of an empty house minutes before you turn over the keys.

“We were in a transport,” said Miranda softly, trying to remember how it had been slightly too hot for her to keep her coat on, but not warm enough for her to take it off. She’d been overfull and sweaty and absolutely, unquestioningly content. “I was sitting in a seat with my mother, and my father was across the aisle with the bag of presents and leftovers Grams sent home with us.”

Miranda tried not to shudder as the transferer hummed to life. Her fingers were clamped tightly around the arms of the big black chair, and a cold sweat was beading along her hairline.

“Were you talking?” Jack asked, peeling the plas-wrap off of a fresh bite guard. “Or listening to music?”

“There was music playing,” said Miranda, trying to find the calm of the memory again: the gentle rocking motion of the tram, the pretty lights of the city blurring by, and the lingering scent of her mother’s lilac shampoo hanging in the air. “But I didn’t notice the songs at the time. My mother and I were talking about the new year. Dad had to work, so mom and I were going to stay in. She said I could try champagne, and we were going to do our nails and watch the silly dramas he always teased her for…”

Jack was standing beside her now, his eyes shadowed and sad, with the completed transfer unit held loosely in his free hand. The other was holding hers, his thumb gently swiping back and forth across the top of her clenched fingers.

“Almost there,” he said, and Miranda’s heart cracked a little then; split with love for him. He was respecting her in this: her memory. Her decision. Jack knew she wouldn’t want arguments or tears. He was stoic, bearing witness to this last piece of herself that she had yet to sell.

“The inspectors said another tram came loose from its track. It was old, and the connections were worn, and there was just enough ice to skid it along. It hit our transport broadside. I didn’t see what happened to dad, but mom—”

Miranda swallowed back the nausea churning acidically beneath her breastbone. “Mom was right next to me. The porter had flipped onto its side, so her body was partially over mine. I remember—” she swallowed hard, and blinked back the tears that threatened to spill onto her cheeks. “I remember waking up, and I still had the ginger candy we’d been eating tucked in my cheek. And her head was against my ribs, and—”

“And what?” Jack asked, smoothing away one of her tears with the pad of his thumb.

“And everything was red,” Miranda whispered.

Her blood, and her mother’s, smeared over the glass window that Miranda’s head was pressed against.

Jack held the bite guard against her bottom lip, patiently waiting.

“It was the last color I saw,” said Miranda slowly. “I woke up again, in the hospital. Damage to the parietal and occipital. An unexplained, but ultimately non-threatening phenomenon. Because after that, everything I saw was in black and white.” She finished the story in a whisper, just as Jack slipped the bite guard into her mouth and smoothed his big hand over her hair.

The metal conductor pressed into the roof of her mouth, completing the circuit between her head and the empty copper vessel waiting to be filled. Jack raised an eyebrow, tacitly asking her permission to initiate the transfer, and Miranda paused, trying to breathe through the sensation that she was choking. A little desperately, she looked up into his familiar face.

She’d never know what color his eyes were. They were pale, lighter than his skin tone. Blue, maybe, or grey, or even green. She could imagine them, but she’d never know. His hair was darker, and had gone slightly shaggy over the dark slashes of his eyebrows.

She knew his back was dotted here and there with moles, night-dark constellations embedded in his skin. His teeth were white, and when he took off his shirt the paleness of his torso contrasted with the dark ink that twined around his arms and over his sides.

Like every one of her drawings, like all of her memories after that fourteenth Christmas, she would only remember Jack in black and white.

He squeezed her hand, and Miranda nodded, gripping the arm of the chair and biting down hard on the plastic and rubber guard.

Electricity sizzled between her teeth, and for one timeless, over-bright moment Miranda experienced it all again: the warmth of her coat, the brightness of the lights, the green and gold and red displays. There was her mother’s floral shampoo, floating on the air; and that was the rich, tenor timbre of her father’s laugh, spinning out into infinity. 

Her shoes were black, her sweater was green, and she had a ginger candy in her mouth, sticky and spicy and sweet. She was fourteen, and her world was color and and light and love.

And then there was the crunch of polysteel, and the gravity-shifting tilting of the ‘porter, and the sticky warmth of blood seeping into her clothes and pooling in her hair.

And as the world faded, the last thing she saw was red.

~*~

There was a rem-link in her mouth, and the sound of her own heartbeat thundering in her ears. Jack was standing over her; beautiful, reliable Jack, and his too-symmetric face was etched with worry.

He helped her disengage from the transferer, and then those big hands she knew so well were cradling her face. “Are you alright?” he asked, smoothing away half-dried tear tracks with the warmth of his thumbs.

Miranda pushed herself up a little straighter, looking around the shop that had been her home for as long as she could remember. The air smelled like cold, damp weather, and in their packing crate, stored memories sang. In her mouth, the taste of ginger faded, spicy and sweet.

“Yeah,” said Miranda, watching the way the incongruent, old-timey streetlight shone outside the shop window. “I’m alright. Why wouldn’t I be?”