Violent crime didn't end.
It became inefficient.
That was the phrase analysts liked to use. Inefficient. As if murder were a business model that no longer turned a profit. As if people simply looked at the numbers and decided it wasn't worth the trouble anymore.
Mara Kade disagreed with that framing.
Crime didn't vanish because of fear or morality. It vanished because certainty removed the final hiding place. Once, killers could lie. Once, they could shape narratives, exploit doubt, bury truth beneath time and noise.
Now the dead spoke.
Witness Echo technology captured the last conscious moments of a dying brain—those fragile seconds between the final heartbeat and neural silence. Sensory data, memory fragments, emotional impressions. Not testimony. Experience.
The Echo didn't ask questions.
It showed.
People learned quickly that you couldn't outlive the truth. That even if no one saw you pull the trigger, the victim would. That realization didn't make humanity better.
It made it quieter.
Mara stood in the Echo Chamber as another life ended.
The body on the slab was still warm. The room smelled faintly of antiseptic and ozone, the lingering scent of machines doing something intimate and irreversible. A thin ring of light embedded in the ceiling pulsed once, then stabilized.
"Recording locked," a technician said. "Neural integrity at ninety-seven percent."
Good. Clean.
Mara folded her hands behind her back and waited.
She never rushed this part.
The chamber dimmed, and the world dissolved.