Trigger warning: This chapter briefly mentions a sexual assault that another character witnessed. No specific details are given.

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In her small procedure room, Solara inspected the black cap in her hand, ensuring the recording chips and infrared light emitters were secure on its soft material. It still amazed her that something as simple as shooting light into the brain, scattering the particles, and recording the signal allowed her to capture the human experience. She fastened the knit memory cap on her patient's balding head, careful to avoid the bruises and fresh cuts on his forehead and around his eye.

"Did you hear about the crew at the docks?" Mr. Benito asked through a cracked lip.

Even though most of the crew were former schoolmates of Solara's, they rarely crossed paths anymore once Mem-Stem had recruited them as full-time creators. Messita was the only exception.

"Another scandalous romance?" Solara chuckled as she picked up her tablet to monitor his vitals.

Sometimes the company would leak the Lowers clips of the memories they sold to the Uppers for more dozis than a Lower could ever dream of. Snippets of an adrenaline-filled adventure to lure more active and attractive teens and young adults into this shady business. Not that Solara was shady.

In the beginning, she intended to help the blind see their first sunset, the paralyzed to experience running a marathon, and the elderly to feel the joy of youth again. Yet these days, she was a puppet to the sadistic whims of the Upper consumer base, feeding their need for memories of sex and violence.

She failed to understand how virtual experiences of that nature helped the Uppers balance their lives in the fight against the Ferron, an enemy the Uppers had protected their societies from for centuries. At least that was what the Lower teachers had taught them in school.

She couldn't believe the Uppers' claims that violence was to expose them to fighting techniques and sex was to fuel their desire to procreate. The Uppers had made enough technological advances with memory capturing that Solara imagined they would rely on more advanced weapons than brute strength. Plus, the Uppers deemed themselves superior to the Lowers in every respect, so it was odd that they would want to learn from them.

Her dream of helping her people in an innovative way, much like the memories she sold, had been fabricated.

Her grip tightened on the device as she noted Mr. Benito's usual elevated heart rate.

"The Zaridi girl died," he said.

Solara's hands shook, and a loud crash drew her eyes to her tablet, now lying on the dark floor tiles.

Her voice trembled. "Messita Zaridi?"

Solara couldn't have heard that right. Her friend was twenty-seven years old and such a natural on the water.

Mr. Benito nodded. "There was an accident on the river."

Solara shook her head as she bent down to pick up the tablet with shaky hands.

He had to have misheard. Messita was so confident and calculated in her risks. Just last month, she'd sat downstairs in the restaurant with Solara, sharing creative ways to make more dozi to help her brother with the family farm debt.

"Are they sure she won't recover?"

"My wife's friend's daughter was there. It was..." Lines burrowed into his forehead. "There's no coming back from it."

Solara's throat choked up, and the sensation travelled up to her eyes.

Last month couldn't have been the final time they'd ever speak again. Messita had so much she wanted to do. She'd already been through hell as a teen. She didn't survive it just to perish all so Uppers could watch her memories.

It wasn't right.

None of this was right.

How would Runan handle this? First, his parents perished, and now his sister. No one remained in that man's life. The man Solara used to call her best friend.

She stood beside Mr. Benito in the reclining patient chair.

"How did it happen?"

"She fell out of the boat and struck her head."

That didn't sound like Messita at all unless there was foul play or a storm. But then wouldn't more people be injured?

"It makes you wonder if this is worth it." His eyes rose to the infrared cap.

Her tablet app showed Mr. Benito's heart rate had spiked even higher, although his trembling hands told her that too.

Was one's safety worth the material possessions whose prices inflated every year, unlike their wages? Mr. Benito's participation in the guard-sanctioned fighting league with the sole goal of selling his memories wasn't any safer than what Messita had done. It was only a matter of time before he'd suffer a tragedy too, and Solara would be complicit for being the memory conduit.

Caldozza, she could say the same for not trying to talk Messita out of doing more for Mem-Stem. If she had discouraged Messita or challenged her plans more, she might still be alive.

She couldn't change the past, but perhaps the present.

"We do not have to do this if you don't want to."

"None of us wants to, but we have to."

Mr. Benito closed his eyes, and his arms quivered as usual.

He was right. Many fed their families and kept roofs over their heads with the funds from these memories. As much as she wanted to step away, her company would replace her with someone else who cared less about people's humanity. At least she showed them some kindness in a cruel world.

"I'll make you some tea before the procedure, Mr. Benito."

"You should brew one for yourself too."

His usual joke had a more serious tone today, and their eyes met. His gaze held the same sincerity and caring as her father's.

How many more years would she keep doing this?

"I will, only because it's rude to make you drink alone." She grinned, likely fooling no one.

Solara left the room to find the kettle in the back of her main office. She took out two mugs and a container of crushed Leisho root her father had taught her to harvest as a girl.

When she returned to the procedure room with the tea, Mr. Benito was looking at his phone. He tucked it away as she approached.

After accepting the cup, Mr. Benito asked, "Did you know the Zaridi girl?"

Solara wrapped her hands around the warm mug and nodded. "When I was younger, her brother was a close friend, and so was she." Though she hadn't spoken to Runan in ten years.

And until now, they'd been through the hardest parts of each other's lives together. That horrible year his parents passed, when he dropped out of school to take care of the farm and a hostile sister. And a few years late,r when Solara's mother suffered an incurable illness that had her in agony for months. Neither of them would have survived without the other.

Her gaze drifted to the painting of a tree silhouette basking in the glow of sunset rays. Red, orange, pink and purple hues only rustled up the warm chestnut eyes of a man who'd lost everything and would hate to see his work hung in a place he associated with evil. Despite his disapproval, she still pictured his bright smile the day he hopped off his motorbike with the large canvas strapped on the back.

Other than Messita's stories, that was the only piece she had left of a person she imagined would be by her side for life. But he'd shown no interest in reconnecting after she began memory capturing.

"Messita and I both got into the memory industry around the same time."

"I'm sorry for your loss."

"Thank you." They sipped their soothing tea in silence. "How are your daughters doing?"

"My oldest passed her exams and was recommended for the Queen's Award of Excellence, and my youngest is doing well too."

"That's wonderful! She'll be taking medical courses in no time."

As Mr. Benito finished his tea, his vitals settled into a safer rhythm, and she placed his mug to the side. She opened her memory-capturing app, which showed the image of a brain with several sections lighting up.

"Mr. Benito, you know how this goes. I'd like you to picture what you were doing before the memory we're recording today. Imagine what you heard, smelled, saw and felt."

Her patient closed his eyes, and on her screen, the hippocampus and neocortex lit up, and so did the amygdala, meaning he had a strong emotional connection to the memory. Solara tapped the screen's hippocampus, and a video of a person hugging two school-aged girls played. As he kissed both on the head and told them to be good for their mother, four stars appeared on the screen. It was the company's signal that memory was appealing to various senses and worth more on the market.

Some memory technicians captured these little lead-in moments, glimpses of happiness people clung to before the main event, and sold them without their patients' knowledge, but Solara would never dare. She used the lead-in to keep her patients calm, as many relived events they wished they could erase. If anything, the horrible memories grew more vivid as they experienced them again.

The memory's strength carried through as Mr. Benito reached a boxing ring set up under the cover of some trees in a more affluent Lower's backyard. Solara began her recording there. A young man half Mr. Benito's age or younger sat on a stump and spat into the clay earth as he wrapped his gloves.

"I thought I was fighting Yarran. Who is this kid? Is he old enough to fight?"

The coordinator hardly glanced up from his phone. "We need fresh blood. The guy says he's fought before."

"But you haven't trained him. He could be fatally injured."

The coordinator stepped close to Mr. Benito and crossed his arms. "You fight him, or you go home, and I find someone else permanently."

The fear and shame icons lit up on Solara's screen. After some time, Mr. Benito agreed, and they entered the ring. Adrenaline took over in a vicious fight where the opponent landed a few powerful punches. Her client connected his fist with the man's jaw, eye, ear, and face. Unsettling cracks, blood and flying teeth made Solara squirm in her seat, the volume on her headphones just loud enough to ensure the audio was recording.

There'd been once or twice when she'd shut it off, accidentally ruining the recording. The man who'd come to her had a memory of him and a woman who did everything in her power to escape his sexual advances. Solara had kicked him out and called the police, but they laid no charges without the audio. To her horror, the man walked free, claiming they were acting because rougher memories earned a higher commission. Solara had been so distraught, she nearly closed her practice until her sister reassured her she could still do good and knew how to catch the next one.

Mr. Benito was nothing like that man. Both participants entered the fight knowing its purpose. The winner would earn more for their memories, but the loser would turn a small profit too. By the end of the fight, the opponent was face down, and Mr. Benito declared the winner. The screen went blank, and he rose from Solara's chair. He tore off the cap and sighed.

"That boy will be in the hospital for months," Mr. Benito muttered. "He'd never trained, just attacked; however, he knew how. I should have walked away."

He slipped her a piece of paper with a name on it. "Give the money to his family."

The man left without another word.

As the door clicked shut, Solara let out a shaky breath. Mr. Benito was her last client for the night. She steeled herself to rewatch the memory, trimming the video at the appropriate spots, artificially heightening the adrenaline, excitement, and desire to win, while erasing the shame at the end.

The Uppers wanted to experience what they perceived to be Lower lives: the ruthlessness, the strength, the danger. Including humanizing emotions like shame and regret only tainted the memory's market value. The entire process left her nauseous as she sent the memory to the Upper Cloud, where it would be processed again by the Upper agents and dispersed into their society.

Leaving her office, she ventured down the creaky wooden stairs that faced the alley for a cup of her sister's tea in the restaurant. Sneaking in through the kitchen door, she set the kettle to boil and searched through the glass containers of loose tea, plant leaves, and blooms for her favourite floral yet sweet variety.

Two warm, familiar hands rested on her shoulders. "Sola, someone's here to see you."

Solara turned to her sister, Lunita. "Who?"

Were the guards here to talk about Messita even though they didn't work together? Or had they heard about that weird occurrence where her patient froze for two agonizing minutes last week?

"It's Runan," Lunita whispered.

Solara gazed through the gap in the navy curtains to the dining room. The man hunched over a bowl with his dark brows knit together. His hair was dishevelled, his linen shirt wrinkled, and worry lines had taken up residence on his forehead and bloomed in the corners of his eyes.

He wasn't even thirty, but he looked like he'd been through life twice.

Solara's stomach churned worse than before.

There wasn't a chance in Caldozza that he was here to rekindle their friendship.

And she wouldn't make it through the evening without unintentionally adding salt to the gaping hole in his heart.

But she had to try, as after everything they'd been through, she owed him at least that.