The Spindle

Juno Farrant robs the dead for a living, prying memory cores out of corpses on the flats where a fallen orbital tether lies rotting across a continent. One core holds an hour that should not exist: a rich woman's murder, thirty-six years buried, with a five-year-old watching from the doorway. Reading it tells the killers exactly where she is. Now Juno and her nephew are running up a broken cable toward the towers of the people who threw their memories away — and toward the reason the poor keep dying of other people's dreams.