The Girl in the Yellow Dress

The rain fell in neon ribbons across New Lisbon, painting the cobblestones of the upper wards in streaks of electric blue and amber. Adaeze Okafor pulled her collar higher against the damp and kept her stride purposeful—just another professional navigating the glittering tiers of the city's cognitive elite, nothing to see, nothing to remember.

The lie tasted familiar. Most of her best ones did.

Tower Seven rose ahead of her, a monolith of glass and chromium that caught the city's light like a needle piercing the sky. The doorman—a man whose expensive restructuring had frozen his face into permanent hospitality—nodded her through without a word. He'd learned not to ask questions when Adaeze came calling. The wealthy residents of the upper wards preferred their transactions silent, and she preferred their money clean.

Forty-third floor. The lift whispered upward, and she watched the city spread itself beneath her through the transparent shaft. From up here, New Lisbon looked almost beautiful—the crumbling colonial spires of the old quarter softened by distance, the neuroscience towers of the waterfront pulsing like synapses in the dark. You couldn't see the memory parlors from this height, couldn't see the hollow-eyed figures slumped in velvet chairs in the lower wards, paying fortunes to crawl inside strangers' lives. From up here, you could pretend the whole city wasn't slowly losing its mind.

She adjusted the slim case under her jacket. Inside, nestled in shock-resistant foam, three crystalline vials caught the light—memories harvested last week from a dying industrialist who'd wanted to die clean. His first kiss. His daughter's birth. The moment he'd won his first contract. Clean memories, bright and whole, worth more than most people earned in a year. The client on the forty-third floor had paid double for all three.

The doors slid open onto a corridor of polished marble and diffused golden light. Adaeze checked her reflection in a darkened panel as she passed—tall, angular, close-cropped silver hair damp at the temples. She looked tired. She was always tired these days. Sleep had become another thing she couldn't quite trust.

The client was already waiting in the penthouse foyer when she stepped through. Marguerite Ferreira—sixty-something, immaculately preserved, draped in silk the color of old wine. Her smile was warm in the way that money could purchase but never quite perfect.

"Adaeze. Punctual as always."

"I try." Adaeze produced the case with practiced ease, flipping it open on the low table between them. The vials shimmered—each one a captured moment, a sliver of someone's existence rendered in crystalline amber. "Three memories, quality-verified. The birth scene is particularly vivid."

Marguerite's fingers hovered over the vials with the reverence of a collector. "You do remarkable work for someone without a license."

"I do *reliable* work. The license is just paperwork." The deflection came automatically, smooth as muscle memory. "Shall we proceed with the implantation, or will your usual technician be handling—"

"No." Marguerite's voice sharpened. "I want you to do it. I trust your hands."

Adaeze hesitated only a fraction of a second. "Of course."

The implantation suite occupied a corner of the penthouse—all sterile white surfaces and equipment that cost more than most New Lisbon citizens would see in a lifetime. Marguerite settled into the reclined chair with practiced ease, her silver hair fanning against the headrest as Adaeze calibrated the neural interface.

"You've done this many times," Marguerite said, watching her work. "Have you ever... sampled them yourself? The memories?"

Adaeze's hands didn't falter, but something tightened behind her ribs. "That's not my business."

"No, I suppose not." Marguerite's smile turned knowing. "You're just the courier."

The interface hummed to life, and Adaeze positioned the crystalline vial—the birth memory—into the induction cradle. "You'll feel pressure behind your left eye, then a brief disorientation. The memory will integrate over the next thirty seconds. Try not to resist it."

"I never do, darling. That's the whole point."

Adaeze activated the sequence. The vial's amber glow intensified, and Marguerie's breath caught—that sharp, involuntary gasp that always accompanied the moment a foreign experience took root. Her pupils dilated. Her fingers curled around the armrests. And then—

—Adaeze wasn't in the penthouse anymore.

The memory came without warning, without consent. Not the birth scene, not anything from the vial in her hands. Something else entirely, rising from a place in her mind she hadn't known existed.

A room. Dim light through curtains. A child on the floor—a little girl in a yellow dress, the fabric bunched and dark with blood spreading in a widening stain across the tiles. Small hands—*her* hands, she knew they were hers even as the recognition curdled in her stomach—gripping something heavy and wet. A weapon. She couldn't see what. Couldn't look away from the girl's face, those sightless eyes staring at the ceiling, that small mouth frozen mid-word.

*What did you do?*

The yellow dress. The blood. Her own hands, so much smaller than they should have been, a child's hands, steady and terrible—

Adaeze's vision fractured. The penthouse lurched back into focus in broken pieces: Marguerite's alarmed face, the interface screaming error codes, her own knees hitting the polished floor. Pain detonated behind her left eye—white-hot, blinding—and she was somewhere else again, back in that room with the yellow dress and the blood and the terrible weight in her hands, and she couldn't breathe, couldn't think, couldn't—

"Adaeze!"

She surfaced. Marguerite stood over her, expression caught between concern and the sharp calculation of a woman protecting her investment. The interface had auto-terminated. The vial sat dark in its cradle.

"I'm fine." The words came out ragged. Adaeze pressed her palm flat against the floor to stop her hand from shaking. It didn't work. "Just a—spasm. Occupational hazard."

"That was a seizure." Marguerite's voice had cooled considerably. "If you're compromised, I need to know. I will not have an unstable handler working in my home."

"I said I'm fine." Adaeze forced herself upright, swallowing hard against the nausea clawing up her throat. The child's face lingered behind her eyes—those blank, staring eyes. "The implantation was successful. The memory integrated before the episode. Check your neural readout if you're concerned."

She gathered her equipment with hands that wouldn't stop trembling. Marguerite watched her, arms crossed, the warmth thoroughly gone from her expression.

"Get out. And don't come back until you've sorted yourself out."

Adaeze didn't argue.

The lift ride down felt infinite. She braced herself against the transparent wall, breathing through her teeth, trying to contain the tremor that had spread from her hands to her shoulders to her jaw. The child in the yellow dress. The blood. *Her* hands.

She didn't remember that. She *didn't*.

Her fingers found her temple without conscious thought, pressing against the ache behind her eye—and stopped. Traced backward along the curve of her skull, behind her left ear, where her fingertips found something that made the floor drop out from under her.

A scar. Thin and precise, curving in a crescent along the temporal bone. Surgical. Healed, but not old—not childhood-old, not accident-old. Deliberate. Someone had cut into her skull, and she had no memory of it.

The lift opened onto the lobby. Adaeze walked out into the rain on legs that didn't feel like hers.

The descent through New Lisbon's tiers unfolded in a blur of worsening light and deepening shadows. Upper wards gave way to mid-level commercial districts, then to the tangled streets of the old quarter where colonial architecture crumbled beneath the weight of neon and desperation. She didn't take the main roads. Her feet followed the route automatically—back alleys and covered passages, the geography of someone who had long ago learned to move through the city without being seen.

She couldn't stop touching the scar. Her fingers returned to it again and again, tracing its curve like a tongue probing a broken tooth. Someone had opened her skull. Someone had cut into her temporal lobe—the region where memories lived, where the self was stitched together from the accumulated weight of experience. Someone had been inside her head, and she couldn't remember when, or why, or what they'd done in there.

The gaps in her past had always been there. She'd grown accustomed to them the way you grow accustomed to a chronic ache—learning to work around it, to build a life on the solid parts and simply not look at the holes. Three years missing here. A year and a half missing there. Faces she should have recognized but didn't. Places she'd apparently been with no memory of going.

She'd told herself they were just stress gaps. Trauma. Everyone in New Lisbon had them, after the Revolution. The city had collectively lost its mind and then lost its memories of losing its mind. She wasn't special.

But the scar was special. The scar was proof.

Her building rose from the end of a narrow street where the streetlights had been broken for months—a crumbling colonial townhouse carved into six apartments, each one too small and too expensive. The door was unlocked. She was certain she'd locked it.

Adaeze paused on the threshold, one hand drifting to the hidden vials beneath her jacket. The hallway was dark. Silent. Nothing moved.

She climbed the stairs without turning on the light, her eyes adjusting to the familiar gloom. Third floor. Her door hung slightly ajar—the lock splintered, the frame cracked where something had been forced against it.

The apartment had been torn apart.

Furniture upended. Drawers emptied onto the floor, their contents scattered in careless piles. The mattress slit open, stuffing spilling like gray intestines across the floorboards. Her equipment—the calibration tools, the induction cradle, the carefully assembled kit of a professional handler—smashed beyond recognition. Even the floorboards had been pried up in places, revealing dark gaps where she'd hidden... what? She couldn't remember stashing anything under the floor. But someone had thought it was worth looking.

Adaeze stood in the wreckage and felt nothing. The numbness was almost a relief after the chaos of the evening—until she walked into the bedroom and saw the wall.

The message had been scratched directly into the plaster, gouged deep enough to expose the brick beneath. The letters were jagged, frantic, the pressure uneven—someone writing fast, writing desperate. Writing in her handwriting.

She knew her own hand the way everyone knows their own face. The particular slant of the D. The way she crossed her T's with a sharp downward stroke. The strange truncated S's she'd never bothered to correct. All of it, unmistakably hers.

DON'T REMEMBER. HE'S WATCHING.

Adaeze's legs gave out. She sat down hard on the ruined mattress and stared at the words until they blurred, her own handwriting staring back at her like a message from a self she'd never met—a self who knew something terrible, something she'd tried to warn herself about, something she'd carved into the walls of her own bedroom in a moment of clarity that had since been cut out of her skull.

Behind her ear, the scar pulsed.

And the girl in the yellow dress waited in the dark behind her eyes, patient and silent and dead.