Beirut glowed like a wound at dusk.
The city bled orange over its own skyline, the rooftops jagged with satellite dishes, bullet-pocked water tanks, and the hum of unfinished prayers. In the harbor, cranes moved like skeletal birds. Broken towers cast long shadows over mosques, cathedrals, and condominiums wrapped in black cloth.
Alon stood beneath a streetlamp near the Corniche, a scarf wrapped loosely around his neck, his face half-lost in the press of moving bodies. To his right, a child sold counterfeit cigarettes from a box painted to look like Marlboros. To his left, an old man muttered into a transistor radio tuned to a frequency no one claimed anymore.
He waited without moving, the burner phone in his pocket pulsing with a single heartbeat.
Then it vibrated.
Once.
He answered without lifting it to his ear.
A voice, low and dry as paper, spoke through the line.
“They took the boy at sunrise. Seven years old. Eyes like oil. He carries the key.”
Alon didn’t speak.
“They’ll move him tonight. Through the old Quarter. Under Saint George. Before the call to prayer.”
Then silence.
No goodbyes. No origin trace. Just static and sand.
He slipped the phone into the gutter.
Behind him, Nora leaned against a parked motorcycle. Her hair was darker now, cropped shorter. Sunglasses reflected neon and exhaust. She looked like she belonged in every city and none at all.
“Well?” she asked.
“They have the child,” Alon said. “And he’s not just a hostage. He’s a carrier.”
Her brow furrowed. “What kind of payload?”
“Memory.”
“Whose?”
He looked toward the east, where the old Quarter swallowed light and language.
“His own. But not only.”
They moved through the city without maps, slipping between markets and checkpoints, across alleys where silence held tighter than breath.
Nora moved ahead, cutting a path with her body. Alon followed three steps behind, scanning rooftops, doorframes, faces. The city whispered in a thousand dialects, and all of them were warning.
They reached Saint George just after the last call to prayer. The church stood solemn, flanked by shadowed ruins and a mosque lit from within. The intersection smelled of incense and diesel. Children played football under broken streetlights. A woman sold warm bread from a dented cart, singing a lullaby beneath her breath.
In the shadows beneath the nave, a figure emerged.
A boy.
Alon’s breath caught.
Seven, maybe eight. Thin. Eyes too old for his body. He wore a jacket two sizes too big and clutched a plastic bag filled with bread crusts.
He looked directly at them.
And ran.
They chased him through a narrow passage of stone and shadow, through hanging sheets, splintered doors, and the ghosts of civil wars painted over with fresh slogans.
He darted left, through a hole in a fence, over a drainage canal.
Nora leapt it clean.
Alon vaulted after.
The boy stopped finally in a courtyard overgrown with jasmine. He turned, panting, cornered.
But he didn’t cry.
He reached into his jacket and pulled out something small.
Metal.
Cylindrical.
A data tube.
Not military.
Medical.
Alon stepped closer.
The boy’s eyes narrowed.
“I know you,” the child said. “You’re the one they forgot.”
Alon froze.
“Who told you that?”
The boy held up the tube like a torch.
“She did.”
Nora stepped closer. “Who?”
The boy’s voice softened. “The woman in the black room. The one who sings when the lights go out.”
They took shelter in a concrete flat above a shuttered pharmacy. The windows had no glass. The power was off. The water came in slow bursts, like breath returning to a dying body.
The boy, name unknown, sat on a cot with the data tube clutched in both hands.
Alon lit a single candle. Its flickering light made shadows climb the walls like silent watchers.
Nora crouched in front of the boy, voice low and even.
“What’s your name?”
The boy shook his head.
“They erased it,” he whispered.
Alon sat beside him.
“They can take names. But not truth.”
The boy looked up. “Then why do you look so empty?”
That night, Nora cracked the data tube.
Inside: biometric sequencing. Encrypted memories. Cortical overlays tied to Regenesis.
But it wasn’t from Nora.
It was from her.
Yael Rimon.
Dated six months after her death.
A message encoded in the synaptic data:
“They used me to map the next generation. He’s not a child. He’s a backup drive.
And he remembers everything you were never meant to survive.”