Each trade rearranged them. Tara severed a memory and gained the ability to sleep and decode blueprints with machine precision. Omar received a ledger of chance—his hands found routes he had forgotten how to see, safe combinations unlocked by muscle memory grafted from possibilities he’d never lived. Lila tried to buy silence and instead acquired a future in which she published the perfect story and then refused to write again. Jax turned his paint into a public phenomenon; his exhibitions taught others to weep without cause. Mara asked for something smaller: a building in which memories could return to their owners as objects to hold, a place that could accept a traded fragment and restore it with the subtlety of a curator.

The core remained an absence. People began to suspect NeonX wasn’t a machine but a kind of mirror—one that cleaned reflections by taking away parts of the viewer. Someone realized the taken memories had to go somewhere. The answer was not in the city but in the sign itself. NeonX had become a collector, a library of stolen fragments that hummed behind its metal ribs.

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