Chapter 18: The Names Buried in Code
Paris, dusk. The sky bled pale amber, a quiet kind of fire.
Linh stood outside a building that didn't belong on any tourist map. No plaque. No official name. Just a silver keypad and a camera eye that followed movement like it had seen everything, but remembered nothing.
She hesitated. Then entered the code sent to her by a journalist she had only met through encrypted messages.
#472-MAI-01
The door buzzed. Opened. Air rushed out—cold, metallic, like old machines breathing.
Inside, she descended a narrow stairwell lit only by vertical red bars. They cast her shadow long and broken across the wall, as if her body were fracturing with each step.
At the bottom: a room of silence.
One man waited. Gray coat. Round glasses. His French was formal but clipped.
"You're the girl from Vietnam?"
"I'm Linh."
"You're not here to find her," he said. "You're here to find yourself in what she left behind."
They called it the Archive of Erasure.
Not because it contained names—
But because it remembered the act of forgetting.
Folders lined the wall. No labels. No order.
Only thread-wrapped boxes, stacked like coffins without corpses.
The man handed her a file. Not a document. Not a printout.
A piece of cloth.
Stiff. Burnt around the edge. Stitched in black:
M-07 / Code Name: "Mai"
Linh's hands trembled.
"Where did this come from?"
Recovered in 2009. From a site burned to ashes. We only salvaged thirteen cloths. Only two were legible."
She stared at it.
"Was she alive?"
The man was quiet for too long.
Then:
"We don't think she died in the fire."
Later, she was left alone in the room.
She opened a new box.
Inside: transcripts. Partially decrypted, some lines still blurred by digital decay.
"Subject M-07 reported multiple unauthorized subcontacts."
"Refer to case file H-01 — subject may experience memory reactivation when exposed to original environment."
"Recommendation: relocation outside the system."
Linh's blood chilled.
H-01.
She traced the sentence again:
"Subject may experience memory reactivation when exposed to original environment."
She closed the box. The air felt thinner.
As she exited the archive, she glanced at the sky—now deep navy, pierced by a single cold star.
Something flickered behind her.
She turned.
A woman across the street—coat too large, face hidden.
She looked. Didn't move.
Then disappeared.
Linh stood still. Eyes on the alley. But it was empty.
She's being watched again.
Not like in China. Not with bars or locks.
This was a different kind of cage.
One made of attention.
That night, back at her rented flat, Linh sat at the desk.
The cloth labeled M-07 beside her.
She wrote in her notebook:
"If M-07 survived…
If H-01 was real…
Then maybe the girl with the embroidered H wasn't just another survivor.
Maybe she was the one Mai risked everything for.
Maybe Huyền isn't just her descendant.
Maybe she was the child."
She closed the book.
Sleep didn't come easy. But when it did, she dreamed of a room made of threads.
And every thread had a name.
Some erased.
Some waiting to be spoken aloud for the first time.