The dead drop was a maintenance hatch on the underside of the Sixteenth Street monorail, nine meters above street level and reachable only by a kid willing to climb the support strut in the rain. Kael was no longer that kid, but Nyx routed him a path through the service walkway anyway, three blocks east, where a corroded ladder dropped him into the same dark.
The fragment was in a brass-cased cartridge no bigger than his thumbnail. The casing was a tell. Nobody used brass anymore. Brass meant pre-2087 manufacture, which meant whoever had set the drop wanted him to know it was old, or wanted him to think it was.
He slotted it into the reader Nyx kept partitioned in his cortical implant. He felt the familiar warmth at the base of his skull, then the cold opening of the encoding handshake. Then he was nine years old, in a kitchen he had never set foot in, and a woman he had never met was telling him she loved him.
The cascade hit half a second later.
[Three pages of prose continue here in the writer’s draft. Promote scene to draft to mark this section ready for review. — author]