Colonel Doan Trong Kien returns from war with a wooden leg, profound deafness in one ear, and a hand still steady from his days carrying a rifle. He opens a private detective office in an old Hanoi alley, taking cases that no one else considers worth investigating: a woman who vanishes after a storm, a child declared dead before birth, and a nameless body pulled from the Red River. With former military doctor Nguyen Ngoc Yen and a disgraced young policeman at his side, Kien follows each crime to the buried corners of the city—and learns that a man can stand even after losing half his body.
In 2038, Nguyen An sits before the ECHO machine in an abandoned Morrow building and sends her neural state back to June 1, 2025. For thirteen years, the conviction that she killed Khai has consumed her life, and she returns to prevent his death. Waking beside Khai, still breathing, she has seventeen days before the day he dies. But messages from an unknown number keep reminding her that last time she told him everything, and Khai died four days early. The more she pieces together her memories, the more she realizes she may be joining them with guesswork. The room where she remembers him dying was built only after the seventeenth. If memory can be planted, who wrote those thirteen years?
