The Drafter

  He nodded solemnly and took it. “Um, yes. I talked to Bill. He’s freaking out. Are you sure you don’t want to wait and defrag at Opti?”

  “Opti?” she blurted, thinking the request was unusual. But there was a memory knot, and he was tired. “I’d rather do it now if you’re okay. You are okay, aren’t you?” she said, and he nodded, head down as he backed out and shut the door to leave Peri with a lingering unease.

  The six weeks she’d lost wouldn’t come back on their own, and there was only so much Jack could reasonably return to her. Sandy, her Opti-assigned psychologist, who’d been with her from the start, said that the larger the difference between the two timelines, the deeper the damage went. Six weeks for saving her life wasn’t a bad exchange. Six weeks was manageable. But she had to know what had happened up in that room.

  The scent of sausage and egg began to permeate the bathroom, mixing with the lure of coffee on the shelf. Her stomach rumbled as she reached for the robe Jack had brought in, and it pulled free from the hook to send her pen necklace behind it swinging like a pendulum. Peri brought the cotton to her nose, breathing in the scent of her detergent under the cold, stale smell of luggage, then slipped it on, silently thanking Jack for putting the robe in his bag. If she wasn’t relaxed, nothing would come back. That Jack knew her so well made her feel needy and dumb, but patterns kept her sane when the world was jerked out from under her.

  Reluctantly Peri tucked the sterling silver pendant pen away in her bag. Most drafters had a way to leave quick, impromptu notes to themselves in case they drafted without an anchor, but wearing it during a defrag would be a show of mistrust.

  The quick gulp of coffee hit her like a bitter, welcome slap, and she sat on the edge of the tub and pulled her overnight bag closer. Most of the clothes in it were unfamiliar, but she almost always wore the same thing so she’d never feel lost—solid, bold colors and tailored cuts—and she hung a fresh pair of slacks and new top on the back of the door to unwrinkle in the shower’s residual fog. White panties? she wondered, the thin cloth sticking as she put them on under her robe. When had she started wearing white? They were so . . . pedestrian.

  The boots were her familiar kick-ass style, and she gave them a quick wipe to get rid of a scuff, flushing when the cloth came away red with blood. That explains my swollen foot.

  Her tight brow eased at the knitting project shoved in the front pocket for the drive there and back. I’ve gotten brave enough to try gloves? she thought as she set the double-pointed needles aside and kept digging. The domestic art was more than an Opti-sanctioned stress relief, and she liked being able to carry spikes of wood through TSA. In truth, it was a big part of why she’d agreed to it when Sandy had suggested she learn the homebody hobby. In a pinch, the needles could fit beside her knife in its boot sheath.

  Her phone was next, and she checked to see whom she’d been talking to lately, glad she hadn’t forgotten how to work the glass technology. There weren’t many names, and she recognized all of them. An odd exchange gave her pause until she realized it was out of Charlotte, probably the club, a restaurant, or the hotel they’d stayed at.

  She found her knife wadded in Jack’s handkerchief, and she meticulously washed the blood off with a DNA-destroying wipe, using a drop of oil stored in an unused contact lens case to lubricate the blade before tucking it in her boot sheath where it belonged. The bloodstained handkerchief she threw away, knowing that the maid would dispose of it more surely than she could. She didn’t like that she couldn’t remember ending a life. She never killed anyone unless they killed her first. Jack, though, wasn’t that picky.

  Tired, she looked at herself in the mirror as it fogged back up, not liking the shadow of her mother in the slant to her narrow jaw and the upturned curve of her nose. She’d pieced her life back together as much as she could on her own. It was time for Jack’s help, and she headed out, coffee in hand.

  A sagging queen bed with a faded print bedspread took up one interior wall. There was a large window overlooking the parking lot and interstate beyond, and one small window opposite that looked out at scrub and rock behind the hotel. The maroon carpet was matted, and the furniture was decades out of date. A TV was bolted into a corner at the ceiling. There was an actual rotary phone on the nightstand, but beside it was a universal etherball plug-in/charger that connected any device to the Net—a necessity when catering to truckers. The one spot of high tech made the rest of the room more dreary. It was a far cry from the tech-rich, five-star service she was used to, but it was safe, and that was all that truly mattered.

  “Better?” Jack asked as he scooted a second chair to the tiny round table he’d arranged.

  “Getting there.” There was an omelet with toast and sausage across from a plastic bowl of yogurt and walnuts. The early sun streamed in, glinting on the button sitting at dead center of the table. Slowly her smile faded as she tried to both remember and forget the face of the man she’d taken everything from, his eyes open as he stared up at her with his last breath foaming the blood at his lips. Sometimes forgetting was a blessing.

  “You, ah, going to shower before we hit the road?” she asked, hearing the whoosh of the interstate traffic leaking in along with the golden sun.

  Jack glanced at the bathroom. “Probably. After I eat. I’m starving.”

  “Me too.” The sausage smelled wonderful, and though the plastic spork was annoying, it didn’t seem to matter when the fatty bliss hit her tongue.

  Sighing, Jack flopped into the chair across from her. Peri took another gulp of coffee, freezing when she set it next to Jack’s cup—sitting right in front of her. Great. Eggs and sausage were apparently not her usual anymore. Six weeks ago they had been.

  She looked up to find Jack glumly poking at the yogurt. “Ah, this is your breakfast, isn’t it,” she said, and he sheepishly reached across the table to take his coffee.

  “Ye-e-e-eah. You’ve been on a health kick lately, but go ahead. You look hungry.”

  “Oh, Jack,” she breathed in chagrin, and pushed the plate to him, getting up and moving to sit in his lap when he protested. His arms felt right as they went about her, his grunt of surprise making her smile. The smell of gunpowder lingered on him, way down under the dry scent of blue chalk and old beer. The bitter odor penetrated deep into her psyche and kindled a tingling desire born of memories of adrenaline and joined danger.

  “We’ll share,” she whispered, and he shifted her weight. “Here. Take a bite.”

  His eyes lit up, and he held her securely on his lap as she angled the spork and sausage between his teeth. “I could get used to this,” he said around the mouthful, and relief dropped her shoulders. She hated it when she made a mistake this obvious.

  It was all about routine. Routine wouldn’t bring her memory back, but she had to have stability to notice what was out of place—and she was making mistakes.

  “Mmmm, good,” he said as he shifted her so he could help himself. “You know, Bill is really not happy about the knot. Wants us back ASAP.”

  “Of course he does.” But her gaze went to the interstate. If something deeper than a memory knot cropped up, Opti could handle it. Fix her. Returning immediately was a good option. “What do you think? Back by noon?” she asked reluctantly, still wanting a defrag before she faced the couch warriors with their psych tests and evaluations. But if he was too tired . . .

  Jack nodded, picking the walnuts out of the yogurt to eat them one by one. “If you drive. I gotta get some sleep.” He hesitated at her suddenly wide eyes. “I’m good to do a defrag, though,” he added, and Peri exhaled in relief.

  It wasn’t as if she could force him, and if he had begged off because he was too tired, she would’ve had to wait. Most people at Opti thought the drafter was the ruling force in a drafter-anchor pairing, but the honest truth was, the anchor held the sanity of his or her partner—and every drafter knew it. “Now?” she asked, feeling as if they were running out of time.

  Jack nodded
. Pushing the half-eaten omelet away, he levered her up, his hands familiarly on her hips. A last bite of egg, and Peri took up the button. It was cold—as if it held nightmares. Jack closed the curtains, and she sat in his chair, the fabric still warm from his body.

  A yellowish, amber light seeped through the thin fabric. It was like muffled sunlight, golden and warm. She sighed when he came up behind her, his strong fingers pushing into her forehead. Like a top-dollar massage therapist, he began to work the tension from her, starting at her brow, avoiding her bruise as he found and held pressure points until she exhaled the energy from her. The hot shower had eased her sore muscles, and Jack worked from her eyes to her forehead, to her jaw, to her cheekbones, and back again until Peri’s slight headache was gone. She stifled a moan when he turned to her neck and shoulders. There were lots of ways to calm the mind and body, but this was her favorite.

  Peri was still holding the button lightly, her fingers flexing around it as Jack eased her tension. All drafters tied memories to objects to help make them real, but it was only the final timeline that was allowed to remain. In essence, anchors were creating a memory knot, but it was tamed and safe because there’d only be one timeline associated with it. That anchors could remember both was a wonder to Peri. How could there be two pasts? It didn’t make sense.

  “We ate in the city at sunset,” Jack said, his voice low, almost unheard over the distant traffic. “Champagne, strong cheese, and crackers amid gold and pink light. You flirted with the waiter until he brought you a plate of almond cookies off the menu,” he said, and Peri smiled, thinking that sounded like her. “You drove the long way to the building so you could sing with the Beatles. We were the happy, tipsy couple when we entered, and no one gave us a second look. You timed me decrypting the floor’s main door. I was three seconds slow.”

  But two minutes better than my best time, she thought at the memory of burning circuits. Her closed eyes twitched, and Jack’s words made her blood hum as the night became real.

  “You sat, admiring the view as I worked,” he said, and she breathed easy, remembering the deep purples and shining golds of lights between the street and night sky, her confidence that they’d be back at their hotel by sunrise eating breakfast on their balcony and Jack complaining that she was poisoning him with health food.

  “You pointed out the planes stacked for landing,” he said, and she drowsed, recalling her good mood. “You sampled the chocolate, everything going well. Then you heard the elevator, and you were feeling daring, so you left me.”

  I left him. His worry twined about hers, magnifying it. An anchor had to be within a drafter’s reach to recognize a jump, and drafting out of his sight might have left Jack unable to bring back her memory at all. It must have been worth the risk, she thought, her grip tightening on the button, the holes sharp on her skin.

  “It was the security guard,” Jack said, his touch returning to her jawline to work the new frown from her brow. Memories were coming back stronger now. She could feel Jack with her, their mental connection tightening until his emotion in her mind was as real and recognizable as hers. There’d been lights on the ceiling, doors opening that should have remained shut, a dangerous, aware lifter instead of a cream-puff guard.

  Jack’s fingers fell away as their connection solidified and her closed eyes began to dart in earnest. Together they saw the man she had killed. She recognized his expression, gave Jack the knowledge that the guard had smelled like whiskey and sweat when they had collided. Jack felt her confidence when the guard opened the door, felt her pain when his fist found her eye. Peri’s heart pounded as she recalled the taste of her blood when he shot her, the smell of gunpowder, the shock of adrenaline. She was falling away from a man with gray hair. . . .

  And then Jack wrapped his mind around the blood, the pain, the scent of gunpowder, and the image of a confident man in a suit—fragmenting them. Peri’s breath came easier as the broken weave vanished, replaced by the memory of fear and the sudden give as her knife scraped on the guard’s ribs and found his lungs.

  The memories came in no order, with no reason to them, a mixing of the first timeline and the second as Jack, deep into her psyche, burned the first one away—long before the chaos of two realities could linger and drive her insane. Peri’s darting eyes slowed in the first hint of release, and at his urging, they ran through the night again, both of them looking in the shadow places of her mind for remnants of the original timeline that could trigger a mental crash.

  Peri tensed when they found it, feeling Jack’s grip on her mind tightening. There’d been someone else—a man in a suit. Remembered panic pooled from her to Jack, and she gasped when Jack followed her fear deep into her mind and plucked from it the memory of a man eating a chocolate, reinforcing that she’d eaten a chocolate as she sat in a chair.

  But she knew they hadn’t been alone, and an oily voice crying Bravo! echoed against the black edges of burned memory. Jack blotted it away, soothing her.

  Her hand throbbed as she recalled pinning a man to a chair, the disdain in his eyes, her fear at his confidence.

  In her mind, Jack folded the edges of the first-weave memory in on itself, erasing it. It wasn’t there. It hadn’t really happened.

  And then it was gone.

  She was left with the memory of Jack standing before the wave screen, cursing the files’ lack of organization, his face lit and pale in the glow. It was comforting—knowing this was real—and she basked in it, feeling the night’s memories in her unfolding like a crumpled paper, the sequence choppy but structured as Jack insisted that they go over it once more, defining a clean memory from both his and her thoughts.

  It was only when she eased into the satiated state of a successful memory defragment that fear bubbled up again, rising through the carefully stacked memories, welling up around the jagged edges and swamping her. An unreasonable fear that she was wrong, that she’d made a mistake she couldn’t come back from, took her.

  It was from the first weave, the one she no longer had memories of. She had been lied to! She was in danger, foul, loathsome, untrustworthy. . . .

  Peri’s breath caught as Jack’s presence strengthened. Not you, Jack said, his unspoken words ringing in her mind as he sponged up her fear, dissolving it with his confidence. Not you, Peri. You’re clean. You are uncorrupt, my dove.

  Her chest clenched as his love soaked into her, hiding the fear behind it, and the trembling of her arms eased. Jack burned the fear to ash, telling her he loved her, trusted her, that anything else was a lie. Slowly . . . she believed. She had to.

  “I’m here,” Jack said aloud, and she felt his fingers find hers, both of them touching the button she’d taken from the dead guard. His calm seeped into her as she worked the rough, round edges of the small chunk of blue plastic. Jack had been there, had seen both times, and had burned away the mistake they’d made until there was only one memory, the last.

  Peri’s bruises ached anew as she remembered last night and they were given meaning. Her almost-death had never happened, and she only knew of it because Jack had told her about it last night. Secondhand knowledge was safe—a real memory deadly. New Year’s and their anniversary were still gone, but there were ways around that, too: her diary waited at home.

  Her eyes opened. Jack was kneeling before her, and he smiled as their eyes met. Her thumb was catching on the button’s holes, and she stopped rubbing it like the touchstone it was. “Thank you,” she said.

  Jack leaned forward and brushed the hair from her eyes. “You’re welcome.”

  His voice was husky, and sweat had beaded on his forehead. It had been a hard one. Peri set the button on the scratched table, accidentally dragging it off, and it hit the carpet and rolled under the bed.

  Jack’s arms went around her, and she leaned into him, breathing the scent of his hair, her arms tightening when she realized he was shaking. Her eyes warmed with unshed tears. “I almost lost you,” he said raggedly. “I did lose you. I don’t
know if I can do this anymore, babe.”

  She parted her knees and pulled him closer, close enough to feel the warmth of him rising between them. He grounded her, kept her sane when the drafts grew too long and the weaves too elaborate. Most people would say he had the easy part, out of the line of fire as she protected him while he got whatever they were after, but the truth of it was that his job was harder. He saw everything, lived everything, relived it again and again until she remembered it, too.

  He was still shaking, and Peri tilted his head up. “It’s so hard,” he said. “Peri, I love you.”

  “I love you, too.” She kissed him, tasting walnuts. “I’m okay,” she said, holding him close and breathing him in. “Let it go.”

  “But what if I hadn’t been there?” A tight anger eclipsed his grief, his fierce expression hurting her, almost. “What if you hadn’t come back and I had nothing to anchor you? You would have lost everything.” He reached up and touched her jawline. “And I’d lose you.”

  Peri took his hands, feeling his strength. There was no answer, no sure thing. To agonize over it would leave them both questioning. “Don’t do this, Jack. It’s part of the job.”

  “I don’t know what I’d do if you forgot me.”

  “I can’t forget three years,” she said, pulling him close so he couldn’t see her face. It was a wish, not a promise, and they both knew it. A traumatic enough draft could make her do just that.

  Heads bowed together, they held each other, and her shoulders eased when he reached behind her robe and ran his thumb down a line of her muscle. Exhaling, she looked at the ceiling as heartache was suddenly pushed out by desire. His hands rose to find her breasts, his motions trapped under her robe, somehow more throat-catching than if she’d been naked under him.

  Peri curved her hands around him to feel the strength in his shoulders. Relations between anchors and drafters were expected, as it took commitment and trust to merely do their jobs, but love, real love, was frowned upon for just this reason. How could anyone prepare for the pain of loving someone who might forget them tomorrow?