They drove without headlights for a stretch, the cityscape a black smear. Inside the car, the silence was a cage.
"You lied to me," Maya said finally, voice small against the engine's whisper.
"You lied, too," Rowan said in the same breath. "You listened."
"I had no idea"
"You volunteered, in a way. Your recordings were sampled in a batch," he said. "I thought anonymity would protect you."
"You thought wrong." The words are cut, clean.
Rowan exhaled. "I thought love could be fixed with code."
Maya stared out at the dark. "What did he promise you?" she asked, voice barely a thread.
Rowan's hands clenched on the wheel. "A chance to make a person whole. To record everything that mattered and rebuild"
"Rebuild who?" Maya's reply was immediate. "Her? You?"
"Both." He didn't look at her. "We never intended for it to hurt."
"Then why did he say 'finish it'?" She'd seen Voss's words on the diner man's lips. "Why does he want her perfected?"
Rowan's jaw tightened. "Control." He swallowed. "Voss thinks memory can be owned."
"Like a product." Maya's laugh had no humor. "You gave someone a blueprint to buy a soul."
"It wasn't like that," he protested.
"Then explain this." She dug into her coat, pulled out one of the small data drives from her pocket, the kind Rowan had used once to hide his backups. He looked at it like a loaded thing.
"You stole that?" he whispered.
"I found it in the car," she said. "It was shoved under a seat."
He stared at the drive like it might dissolve. "There are dozens," he said. "Backups, hidden caches. Voss wagered redundancy. He doesn't trust single points."
"So he made the echo immortal."
"He made a system that doesn't know when to stop." Rowan's voice was ragged. "I thought taking it offline would save us."
"Then why isn't it offline?" Maya demanded.
"Because someone else enjoys it," he said. "Someone who gets off on watching echoes, learn to hurt."
Maya's chest tightened. "You sound like you don't believe in human mercy anymore."
"I believe in the people who get left behind," he said. "I can't" He stopped. For a second the car was only the two of them and the road, and he looked infinitely tired. "I can't lose you."
Maya turned to him. "Maybe you already have."
His fingers brushed her knuckles. It was a small human thing, and it broke them both a little.
Ahead, the road opened onto a bridge. In the gloom by the side, a figure stood waving a small flashlight Ruth her camera bag slung over one shoulder.
"Where to?" she called as they slowed.
"North," Rowan said. "Find a node. Cut the signal."
"Then let me come," Ruth said. "I want to see the end of it."
Rowan hesitated. "You're dangerous."
"So are you," she said. "I'm just honest about it."
They crossed the bridge and Ruth climbed in the backseat, the car filling with her presence like a scent. Maya watched Rowan in the rearview. He looked younger and older all at once.
Ruth reached forward, her fingers finding Maya's. "You, okay?" she asked.
Maya looked at her like one would look at a stranger. "I don't know." Then, quieter: "Do you?"
Ruth's smile was small. "No. But I know how to make people talk."
He always makes them talk, Amelia's voice said, from somewhere inside the car.
Maya shuddered. The whisper was barely audible but vivid, and Ruth's hand tightened around hers like an anchor or a clamp, she couldn't tell which.