The Drafter

  Her heart was pounding. Sitting up, Peri put her elbows on the table and hid her face in her hands. “I dreamed about Jack. I shot him. I shot him at Overdraft. I killed my own anchor.” I don’t want to remember this. But if I don’t, I’m going to go crazy.

  Silas shifted, his shoes scuffing the faded linoleum. “It was a dream, not a fragment. Peri, please let me render something back before this gets worse.”

  Maybe he’s right. Peri wiped a hand under her eyes, exhausted and drained. But what if she had been the corrupt one and she’d killed him to keep it quiet? Sniffing, she wiped a hand under her eye again. Doesn’t this place have any tissues?

  Silas reached across the table and took her hand. “Let me help you remember.”

  His fingers among hers were rough, and she jerked away when they were suddenly red with blood, her mind painting them with a memory she didn’t want to realize. Silas stared at her as her heart thudded. She was hallucinating, and he knew it. She couldn’t work like this. She had to find out, no matter how much it scared her.

  “You’re right,” she said suddenly. “I need to go to Overdraft.”

  “Now?” Silas leaned back, a hand running over his hair in worry.

  “Yes, now. You’re the one who just said I needed to remember.” She had to go now, before she chickened out, and she stood, striding over to snatch up the coat Taf had picked out for her.

  “I meant with careful exploration techniques, not dumping your psyche into a morass of confusion. I don’t know if I can defragment something that emotionally charged all at once. You might get nothing back, or I might fix something that really didn’t happen.”

  Pulse racing, she checked the safety on Allen’s Glock, then the one on Taf’s rifle. “If we’re going to find that list, I need to know what happened last week. I need something real.” She looked over the room for more assets, finding only Silas. Breathless, Peri peeked through the blinds: people walking, Sity bikes weaving through cars, the homeless man on the corner playing music, two low-Q drones monitoring traffic.

  “And you’re right. I need to render something, or I’m going to go crazy,” she said, still scanning the street. “And then how will you get your damn list? You can text Howard and Taf where we are. It’s Sunday. No one will be at Overdraft until tomorrow. Coming?”

  Silas stared at her. Her stomach was in knots, the feelings of fear and exuberance a tight slurry of emotion. She was going to get some answers, whether she liked them or not.

  Finally he gestured helplessly and stood. “Okay. I get Taf’s rifle, though.”

  CHAPTER

  TWENTY-THREE

  Cold, Peri shoved her hands deep into the pockets of her coat with the sour realization that the black jacket was the fourth one she’d had in as many days. Silas was working at the lock of Overdraft’s rear door, and she wished he’d hurry up about it. They were in back, where the deliveries came in and obnoxious drunks went out, since it was less obvious than the main door. The CLOSED DUE TO ILLNESS sign at the front was better than the cops’ DON’T CROSS banner she’d expected. Opti was good on details.

  “Are you sure there’s no alarm?” Silas’s brow was furrowed and his fingers were red from the cold. She thought they should just kick the door in, but they could try it his way.

  “There wasn’t one three years ago.” Peri leaned back against the Dumpster wall and scanned the service area. The security lights were coming on, humming just off her hated 741 MHz. She was getting the weirdest sensation. She knew that she’d been here only a few days ago, but her last memory was of summer. The snow flurries and gray nothingness were disconcerting. The gas station across the street was a different vendor than she remembered, and the coffee place at the end of the strip was new. Sometimes it was easier to pretend that she’d been gone for the time she’d lost and was coming back after an extended trip.

  “Got it,” Silas finally said as he picked up Taf’s rifle, and she pushed away from the wall, toes cold and dread filling her. Tense in anticipation, she followed him in.

  It was dark, the door to the huge walk-in cooler to one side, an unused time clock on the other. The smell of beer-soaked wood was strong, and she shivered when Silas closed the door behind them. Allen’s Glock was an uncomfortable bump in her sock, easy to reach if she was pinned to the floor.

  Silas pulled, then pushed on the fire door, grunting in surprise when it shifted four inches and clanged to a padlocked stop. “It’s illegal to chain fire doors like that,” he said, but Peri stared at the cold gray links as if they were important. Her nose wrinkled, and she thought she smelled gunpowder. It wasn’t coming from their borrowed weapons.

  Silas reached inside to find the lock, and Peri impatiently pulled him out of the way. “Give me a second,” she said, wedging a crowbar in place. Her hands fisted, and then she smacked it with a side kick that expended all her frustration. Shock reverberated up her leg and she stumbled, but the lock snapped and the door swung inward. Her entire leg had gone numb, but she didn’t care.

  Silas grabbed her elbow as she regained her balance. “Feel better?” he said drily.

  “We don’t have time for you to pick another lock,” she muttered, and with a last look at the dangling chain, she limped into the bar.

  The glow from the Juke’sBox and lotto console made weird shadows, and the gaming lounge was a pit of darkness that somehow still reeked of testosterone. She passed it, feeling odd being here when no one else was around. The automatic floor cleaner was stuck against the stage, clicking as it tried to reset. Peri’s gaze lingered on the mirror behind the bar, but she didn’t know why. Her chest hurt as the need to remember became an ache.

  “Cold in here,” Silas said, his nose wrinkled as he set down Taf’s rifle.

  “And dark,” she added, frowning when she realized her hands were in her pockets so she wouldn’t leave prints. With a resolute frown, she went to the Juke’sBox screen and planted a big kiss on it, making sure all her fingers and thumbs pressed the glass.

  Silas was staring when she turned around. “I assume there’s a reason for that?”

  “I want Allen to know I was here.” She kept looking at the front door. No . . . not the front door—the solitary chair sitting beside it. Frustration made her antsy. She knew what she had to do, but not how to start. It was like the first time in bed with someone, awkward and having all the urgency of needing to get on with it before someone’s parents walked in. It would probably be as satisfying as that, too—as in not at all.

  Silas swung a chair from a table and set it before the black hole of the fireplace in invitation. Peri’s heart hammered. “Give me a second,” she said, scanning for something that spoke to her other than the padlock and the chair beside the front door. The scratched floor before the stage pulled her. It was a trigger. She’d seen it in her dream.

  The image of Jack, white from blood loss and pressing a red scarf to his gut, surfaced. Peri stared at the parquet. It would be hard if she lay down on it, like a gym floor. There’d be a layer of wax that she could rub aside to find the smooth finish below. Her stomach knotted, and she turned away. Did she want to remember?

  “Peri?”

  “I can’t believe I’m trying to render a memory with a memory knot,” she said, feeling ill.

  Feet scuffing, he crossed the room to her. “I’m sorry. If you don’t want to—”

  “That’s why I’m here, Doctor,” Peri said sharply, not liking that he’d baby her. She was an Opti agent, damn it. She could take it.

  But her grief had grown heavy. She had to find the root of the corruption to clear her name. The answer was here—somewhere between the scratched floor and dark timbers. I need more triggers, she thought as she closed her eyes. She needed the smell of gunpowder, the feel of a smooth rifle stock in her grip, the sticky sensation of blood on her hands. Stiffening, she rubbed her fingers together. She’d been cold that night. Her coat had been on the bar.

  Her eyes opened, and she looked at the b
lood in her cuticles as the disorientation of a fragmented memory trying to reassert itself wafted through her.

  “Don’t force it,” Silas said, looking helpless and glum. “Take your time.”

  “I don’t have time!” she exclaimed, then gasped, dropping to a kneel and fumbling for her Glock when Allen walked in the locked front door. There was snow in the parking lot behind him, and lights from the traffic. Nodding to her, he sat down in the chair beside the door and brushed the snow from his black curls before pushing his glasses back up his nose.

  Hallucination, she thought as she started to shake, unable to drop her gun or look away.

  “Peri?” Silas hadn’t moved, his cautious glance at the door convincing Peri it was her imagination, even as Sandy set a cup of coffee on the bar and tossed a rag over her shoulder.

  “We’re going to have to get that furry orange mouse-eating bug back into your apartment. We could have lost you on your ‘evaluation mission,’ ” the small woman said, and Peri stood, shifting her aim to her. Frank was there, too, and her face twisted in pained confusion.

  “Here you go, sweet pea,” the huge man said as he set a cup of coffee on the bar. “Something to warm you up.”

  Trembling, Peri closed her eyes. They are not here. I am hallucinating.

  Her eyes flashed open when Silas put a hand atop hers, holding the Glock. “You okay?”

  The bar was empty, the apparitions chased away by his touch. Scared, Peri turned the weapon upside down and extended it to him. “I don’t care what I find out, I’ve got to try.” She looked at Silas. “Unless Allen really is sitting by the door and Frank and Sandy are tending bar.”

  “No.” Silas set the pistol on the low stage. “Sweet Jesus. You should have—”

  “What?” Peri said flatly as she pushed her fingers into her forehead. “Come to you sooner, Dr. Denier?” How can anyone get a clean defragment from this? Arms around her middle, she paced to the chair he’d pulled out and sat down in a huff. “Do your thing,” she said belligerently.

  Silas frowned. “Your attitude is counterproductive to success.”

  “You think?” she said as he came up behind her. Scared that this would work, and terrified it wouldn’t, she closed her eyes. Immediately they began to dart from side to side. Her mind was desperate for her to recall, pushing for it. A sliver of fear colored everything. If she had enough triggers to open the gates, everything might pour through unchecked. It would be up to Silas to make sense of it, order it into a logical flow. If he couldn’t, she might never recover.

  “Oh, Peri,” he whispered, his fingers cold as they found her temples. “We waited too long. Can you give me a few solid things to work with?”

  “Other than blood on the floor and Jack with his stomach spilling out?” she said sarcastically. “I’m going to go out on a limb and say Allen was here. Frank and Sandy, too.”

  The tension in her shoulders hurt when Silas moved his fingers there, following the lines of muscle and nerves, using pressure points to overstimulate the endings and make them relax. “I don’t know Frank and Sandy,” he said. “Who am I looking for?”

  Interesting, Peri thought. Anchors used what they already knew to start a defrag, but maybe they did more than rebuild a memory from their own recollections, also using the drafter’s latent ones. It had always felt as if she could feel an anchor’s emotions twining in hers.

  “Frank is Anglo-Saxon,” Peri said, wondering about her sudden tension when she recalled him. “Looks like a pro wrestler. He dresses like a bouncer in a polo shirt. Sandy is an Asian princess in jeans and a black chemise. They run the bar.” Peri’s eyelid cracked, and she looked at the shadowed mirror behind the bar. “They’re my psychologists,” she added.

  “Go with it,” he murmured, and her eyes shut as his fingers became more gentle, finding the trigger points under her eyes, pressing until the tension eased. “You came to Overdraft with Jack. Something went wrong. Jack was upset.”

  It was an unconscionably vague place to start, but Peri settled deeper into the light trance. Jack was upset, guilty, maybe. Exhaling through her mouth, she felt the chill soak into her. She could see Jack’s worry in her thoughts, a familiar stranger standing at the stage with Frank. There was a ladder beside them. Jack looked guilty. She was angry.

  I was angry with him. Did I shoot him?

  “Shhhh,” Silas murmured. “Don’t guess. See it. The ladder. Why was it there?”

  His words shocked through her. She hadn’t said anything about a ladder. Silas was seeing what she was, and the confidence from that allowed her to sink deeper—remember more.

  “Frank was fixing the sound system,” she said when the memory surfaced, and Silas’s touch became a gentle hint. Images of Frank slipped through, bits and pieces from a hundred meetings with him, all meshed into one. She felt Silas with her, cycling the multitude of visions down to a single moment of Frank and Jack beside the ladder. She was with Sandy at the bar. Peri breathed deep, smelling the bitter scent of Overdraft coffee and polish. This was right. She could do this.

  Sandy flicked her hair back. “You always remember, you just don’t recall.”

  Peri twitched. Memories were returning, dragging the feelings of betrayal and fear with them. Bill had given them a new task right after she’d lost six weeks in Charlotte. They were sending them out the day after they’d come back. Why hadn’t Sandy cared? She was her psychologist!

  “You’re safe now,” Silas whispered. “Nothing can touch you here.”

  But fear serrated her synapses when a memory of Sandy rose. “Life isn’t fair. Love is not real. I’m doing you a fucking favor!” Sandy shrieked.

  Her heart pounded, and she felt Silas’s confidence as he gathered the memory to him, not fragmenting it but setting it aside as true. A new one took its place of Jack’s face, white from shock, his expression bunched in pain as he lay on a yellow scratched floor. She knelt with him, her hands holding his stomach in. No! she thought, heartache making it hard to breathe.

  She didn’t want to see this. Everything spun in a nauseating blur until Jack wasn’t on the floor, but standing beside her, the ladder next to them. Relieved, she let herself remember.

  “Sandy doesn’t care we lost our downtime. Neither does Frank. They’re our psychologists, for God’s sake.”

  Shock darted through her, magnified by Silas’s emotions twining with hers. Frank and Sandy? They were corrupt? Her own psychologists?

  “I’m not a mercenary. I don’t kill for money,” Peri shouted, wiggling in Frank’s grip as Jack levered himself up on the low stage, his middle covered in blood. But he wasn’t dying, and Peri stared as the sound of Velcro ripped through the air and he took the body armor off.

  “If you’re not doing it for money, then you’re doing it for kicks,” Jack said. “Admit you like it. The thrill, knowing that you might have to kill someone to survive. The sense of superiority you get from it. Otherwise it wouldn’t have taken you this long to figure things out.”

  That’s not true, she thought. Betrayal was an acidic blanket, burning both Peri and Silas. Bill was corrupt. Jack was part of it. He’d been lying to her. Her entire world was a lie.

  But Silas was gathering the memory up, making room for more. It hurt, and Silas’s fingers spasmed as Peri clenched in pain. She looked down, focus wavering as she saw she was shot in the chest. Something had happened. She’d been shot.

  By Jack . . .

  He stood by the door to Overdraft, his Glock in his grip. Peri’s fingers were warm and wet when she touched them to her chest, and she coughed, scared when it came out bloody. The floor was hard against her back as she looked up at the ceiling. Not again.

  “Jump.” Jack holstered his weapon and stood over her. “Go on and draft. I like you better when you’re stupid.”

  Peri knew she wasn’t dying in Overdraft. She sensed Silas sifting through the swirling morass, frustrated as he tried to organize it. He didn’t need to pull the memories from her
anymore. They were bunching up on each other, fighting to be realized. Groaning, she slipped out of the chair and hit the floor. Silas followed her down, wrapping his arms around her to keep her connected.

  Suddenly it wasn’t Silas’s arms around her, but Allen’s. She could draft and forget for a chance to kill Jack, or die.

  “I’m not dying for her,” Jack said, backing to the door.

  Allen’s lips quirked. “How about it?”

  “You’ll wipe me down to nothing,” she groaned. “Use me.”

  “Someone will. You’ll never remember Jack, but I’ll give you the chance to shoot him before you forget.”

  “No,” Peri moaned as she realized she’d done this to herself. She’d let Allen scrub her for the chance to kill the man she’d loved. What kind of a monster was she?

  And then Silas caught and saved the memory as another pushed into its place. She could feel his heartache mirroring hers, building on it, making it hard to think.

  “We’re in a draft!” Frank shouted. “Twenty seconds and she’s done! Sandy, get down!”

  Jack backed to the door, his bloody hands outstretched. “Babe, let me explain!”

  “There are no words,” she said, and with an unhealthy amount of satisfaction, she pulled the rifle up and shot him in the back as he ran.

  Another fragment layered over it, wrong and out of place, making her dizzy.

  “I told you she was verging on one of her epiphanies,” Sandy said as Allen one-handedly caught the keys that Frank tossed him, locking the front door before pulling a chair from a table and sitting, his feet spread wide and stance alert but casual.

  Agony pulsed through Peri as a memory rose from the rest, out of synch and dizzying. “Love!” Sandy shrieked. “There is no such thing as love!”

  Teeth clenched, Peri threw her knife at her. She wanted her to shut up.

  Sandy twisted to avoid it, crashing into the mirror behind the bar, shattering it as she fell.

  Peri moaned as Silas destroyed the memory since the mirror was clearly intact, but more memories ran in its place, a confusing blur until Silas fastened on one.