The Orchard Under Glass

Lina Kest kept the rain in jars. Not the wet that dripped off the eaves, but the kind that stuck to senses: neon aftertaste, ozone scraped off a transformer, the metallic tang of solder and old grief. Her shop took the corner where Gate-9 folded into the service alleys, a narrow glass box patched with carbon mesh and thrifted holo-frames. The sign above the door blinked a tired glyph: MNEM•MEND. Inside, the light smelled like citrus battery and burnt paper; the workbench hummed with soft blue coils.

Patch — a squat service drone with one scarred photoreceptor and a habit of purring when lonely — balanced on a stack of salvaged memory wafers. Lina moved around him like someone who knew every dent in the floor. Her hands were steady: long-fingered, scarred where a splicer had once misread the wiring of a child's laughter. She threaded a hairline filament into a shard under a loupe and watched, as she always watched, for the moment the image would open.

A customer came in with the rain still on his jacket, the kind of man who kept his head down and his debts up. He pierced the silence with a nervous laugh.

— Can you fix it? he asked, voice rubbed thin by sleep pods.
— I can try, Lina said. Her voice was a low instrument. You know the rules: no restoration beyond what the shard holds. I don't gamble with ghosts.

He set a small hexagonal wafer on the mat. Its micro-etching drew light like a cold eye. It was old tech, a hand-cut retro core; someone had gone to trouble to hide it from automated scans. Lina glanced at the mark. Corporate tracers didn't usually bother with hand-cut cores. Whoever had made this had either been sentimental or terrified.

She slipped the shard into the reader. The screen washed blue, then folded into sound: a child singing, wet footsteps, a voice that smelled of lemons and the afterglow of a market. The image resolved: an orchard beneath a glass dome, little trees wired with filaments, lights like trapped fireflies. A child's hand, smaller than Lina's remembered hands, reached for a fruit and a face turned — and for a breath she felt dizzy with recognition. The face was almost hers, but wrong: younger, raw, braided with a thin scar along the jaw.

The customer reddened. He tapped the wafer.

— That's not mine, he said. He wanted it back.

Lina looked at the image again, at the braided hair and the scar. The rain on the street seemed to step in closer, listening. In the memory, a tag blinked in the corner of the child's vision: HΞLIX / ARCHIVE-9. The letters had no weight in that moment; they were a bell under water.

Patch shivered and pressed his single photoreceptor to the glass like a cat wanting to see the thing that isn't there. Lina felt a small, old heat at the base of her skull — hunger, or the echo of it. Something that used to be a family had been carved into somebody else's archive. She had known the archives existed. Everyone did. You paid and you forgot; you paid and someone else kept your pieces. But she had never seen her own name in the ledger.

The customer wanted his shard back. He held out a hand. Lina hesitated, then tapped the screen and set the image to sleep. It answered with a soft, discontented whisper like a clock disappointed by stopped time.

Outside, the city burned its advertisements against the rain. Inside, Lina kept looking at the orchard in the shard, and for the first time in years she felt the old form of panic tighten her throat — not for money, not for safety, but for a missing thing whose edges had begun to show.