Chapter One: Twelve Witnesses

His mother pushed a silver data key into a crack and said, “Count to thirteen. Never tell anyone you saw me.” Gu had no memory of the key. He remembered being told to wait, the laboratory burning, and his mother never returning. “Generated video proves nothing.” “Hippocampal salt match: 99.96 percent,” White Elm said. “You also produced an olfactory echo: ozone, wet lime, her cedar disinfectant. Images are easy to fabricate. Cross-region physiological echoes are not.” The second pane lit. In White Elm's memory, Gu Lan lay on a kitchen floor teaching her seven-year-old son to resuscitate her. Falcon remembered her leading him through a parking garage under gunfire. Sumi remembered learning his first lie on the night before the fire.