The Drafter (36 page)

The warmth and muffled sound of a well-furnished home enfolded him, pushing aside the images of blood and hard yellow floor that were leaking into his awareness. Peri was trying. She was fighting for her sanity even if her eyes were shut and she shook as if she'd been beaten.

“Howard brought us,” Silas said as the door clicked shut. “We're clean. As for being followed? Who knows.”

“You are a bundle of good news, Silas. Nothing's changed there. Put her on the couch.”

He knelt before the couch in the lavish living room, his chest clenching when Peri reached for him as she felt herself drop. She wasn't as lost as he thought, and his indecision became almost unbearable. The hell with the information. He had to save her. Fingers trembling, he folded her hands over her chest, never letting go as he pushed the hair from her eyes.

Karley leaned close over them both, her lips pressed into a thin line as she professionally evaluated Peri's state. The smell of hairspray grew strong, and he held his breath, praying Karley wouldn't say it was too late. She'd always given up too easily. On everything.

“How long ago did it happen?” she asked, her tone holding that cold lilt he hated.

“Twenty minutes.” Karley straightened up, and he breathed easier.

“I meant, how long ago was the draft you tried to render?” she asked pointedly.

“Four days.” Guilt sank its teeth in another inch, and he tugged the TV blanket up over her. “She was starting to hallucinate. I thought it was worth the risk.”

“She was hallucinating within four days?” Karley's voice was raised in anger. “Are you blind or intentionally being an idiot? It must have been highly traumatic to cause hallucinations after only
four days
. Where's her anchor?”

Silas glared up at her, wanting to stand but unwilling to let go of Peri. “She killed him,” he said drily.

Head shaking, Karley picked up her short glass of ice and something clear. Hand on one hip, she stood before the oversize flat screen currently displaying the house's security. “That was the memory you tried to defragment? Her killing her anchor?”

Frustrated, he fixed the blanket tighter under Peri's chin. “Part of it.”

“And you wonder why you lost control?” Karley's professional outrage began to show. “No wonder Opti threw you out. What could she possibly know worth risking her mental stability for?”

“Opti didn't throw me out. I quit.” He stood, bitter and not wanting to add to Peri's already swirling emotions. “There's no way I could've kept control of what I unearthed. The rewrite was intertwined with the original like hair in a dreadlock.”

Karley pointed at him with her glass, ice clinking. “What does she know that's worth risking her sanity for?”

He stiffened. “I need a quiet place to piece her back together. Are you going to help me, or should I go to a Motel 6?”

“You left her with two timelines, didn't you?” Setting her glass on the mantel, Karley waited, anger pulling her eyebrows together when he said nothing. “You are an idiot. Drafters can't handle two timelines. That's why they forget them! And you
left
them there?”

“I'm trying to
help her
,” Silas snapped, slumping when Karley made a frustrated
Well?
gesture. “Peri has information about the corruption in Opti. It goes deeper than Bill. I didn't fragment anything yet because both timelines hold the proof.”

“Oh, my God. Bill?” Karley sat down, her anger replaced by shock. “Isn't he her handler?”

Silas nodded. “It gets better. He was the one tasked with finding the corruption. He sent Peri and her anchor to get a list of bad agents so he could modify it before reporting them. Peri found out, killed her anchor. But the original list is still live somewhere. If we can find it before Bill does, we can end this.”

And if not, everything lost will have been for nothing
, he thought. “Peri and I have a good working connection,” he said, and Karley's head snapped up, eyes bright in warning. “I successfully untangled a memory knot created by Allen's wipe.”

“Damn it, Silas, those things are dangerous,” Karley said in exasperation.

“No they're not,” he said, his frustration at an old argument getting the best of him. “Opti uses fear to control drafters. Fear that unresolved timelines will cause madness. Fear of being alone so their leash holders are always there. Fear that they can't do without anchors when they can. They filled her head with lies to make her helpless.”

Karley shook her head. “Even the best drafter will go insane with twin timelines.”

His pulse quickened at the truth of that. “I can hide them under enough distractions that she can live with it. We'd have our proof.”

“Silas.”

“I can do this!” he said loudly, then glanced at Peri and lowered his voice. She'd regained enough motor control to curl into a fetal position, and guilt made him feel ill. If he didn't hide the twin lines well enough, she'd ferret them out and go mad before his eyes. He couldn't watch another drafter go mad like that. Not again.

Karley rose fast, her indecision obvious. They'd been married for three years, and hiding his fear from her was impossible. “It can't be done,” she said, touching his shoulder. “I'm sorry.”

“All I need is a quiet room,” he said pointedly, and Peri flinched. But that was a good sign, even as he sensed the memories in her tumbling over themselves. “I can't leave her like this, and I can't fragment everything she worked so hard to uncover. But I can get the information and keep her sane.”

His jaw clenched at the pity in his ex-wife's eyes. “It's one or the other. She's not Summer. You can't save her.”

Silas's gut twisted as Peri picked up on his sudden grief and moaned. “Summer is gone,” Silas said. “I know I can do both. Are you going to help me or not?”

Brow furrowed, Karley strode to the fireplace. She took a drink, ice clinking. “I can't believe I'm doing this,” she said, angry at herself as she gave in. “You can stay until morning. Then you're gone, whether she's conscious or not. Sane or dead. You understand? So you'd better impress the hell out of me and fix this, Doctor.”

His breath came fast and he dropped to a kneel to gather Peri to him. She was so light, hardly there, and he found his feet with a new determination even as his fear shook itself and became that much stronger. “Thank you,” he said, and Peri's eyes opened, scanning the ceiling before she choked and closed them. The fear of being left alone shocked through him—Peri's emotion was resonating in him.

“Upstairs,” Karley was saying over her shoulder as she walked to the stairway between the living room and kitchen. “You don't happen to know her safe place, do you?”

He tried to smile when Peri's wandering, unseeing eyes found his, and his hope leapt when she clutched at his arm. “Don't leave me alone,” she slurred.

It was a clear, coherent thought, and his heart soared as he followed Karley. “Thank God you're still here,” he whispered, eyes on hers. “It's going to be okay. I won't leave you until there's somewhere safe beyond the confusion.”

Her breath came in a heave. Tears were spilling from her as she nodded, and her eyes closed again as if the sights and colors hurt. “Please hurry.”

“She's still cognizant,” Silas whispered as Karley opened a door at the top of the stairs, and he watched Peri's face for any sign of pain when he lowered her gently to the bed. Her long lashes rested on her pale cheeks, making her look lost among the faded colors of the room. Gently he brushed back her black hair making stark lines on the white pillow, and she shook, feeling it. “I need coffee. Can you get me some coffee?”

Karley nodded, lips pursed in disapproval as she left and shut the door behind her.

“Silas!” Peri cried out at the soft click, and he took her hand as he knelt beside the bed to put his face near hers. Her eyes opened, but he knew she wasn't seeing him. She was seeing Jack, and an unknown horror sheened her eyes as she moaned and closed them. She was sliding back into the chaos of memories Silas had unearthed.

There was no way to separate them, but he didn't have to. Steeling himself against the grief and betrayal, he opened his mind again,
reliving everything with her, studying it in detail as she cried, shaking between the covers. But he wouldn't let her relive them alone, and as he shuffled and aligned, piecing everything together by using the fall of shadows and tiny details that she'd never focused on, he realized how he was going to hide her twin memories in plain sight. When he was done, she'd be able to rest her mind from the horror in the scent of polish, the darkness of the beams, the glint of the Juke'sBox, and the almost-subliminal hum of the bar's gaming lounge.

Slowly he shifted the memory of Jack dying, blurring it until the only thing that mattered was the shine on the floor. He tweaked Peri's savage rage while shooting Jack, down to the glint of light on a nearby shot glass. He blurred the voices until the hum of the floor cleaner was all she heard. Allen restraining her as she sold her memory for the chance to kill Jack became less important than the pinch of her boot, something she'd never noticed.

He fragmented what he could, but the twin lines were there still, muted until they and the incongruities they fostered wouldn't be noticed, blurring everything into a monochrome that would let her sleep.

And finally, she found it.

Shaking from the effort, Silas opened his eyes. For a long moment he studied her slender fingers twined in his.
Delicate, but strong
, he thought as he looked at his blocky knuckles beside hers. He listened to her breathe, thinking the smooth sound was the most beautiful thing he'd ever heard. But everything he'd done would last only until her intuition picked away at it. She was too smart to allow such deception, even when she knew it was to save her life.

But that was not what pained him, even as she slept exhausted before him. As he'd sifted through her thoughts, aligning and hiding them, he saw within her that Allen might be right. She'd willingly become what they needed for this task, but she liked who she was, the power she held. Tricking death and walking away to a fast car and cocktails at thirty-four thousand feet had addicted her to the high of being bulletproof, to the point where she might not abandon it when the task was finished. The elegance and grace she wrapped herself in was a mask
to hide the ugly truth. She'd become that which was needed, perhaps too thoroughly to come back from.

He found he didn't care.

But he wasn't done yet, and he closed his eyes and slipped into her mind again. He had to hobble her intuition in such a way that it would give her freedom as well as safety.

That his fix was going to involve Jack, the man she'd grown to love and then hate, was probably a fitting punishment for his own sins.

T
he sound of a hushed argument pulled Peri from a deep, dreamless sleep. She stretched, eyes closed and luxuriating in a pleasant ache and the sensation of clean sheets on her bare skin. It was like skinny-dipping, and she sighed, not wanting to wake up.

“If you aren't out of my house in five minutes, I'm calling Opti and I'll have them here in ten!” a woman was saying, her voice familiar, but there was no face swimming up from Peri's memory to go with it. She was comfortable, and her mind was as clear as if she'd just finished a task. To get up was too much work for too little payoff.

“Touch that phone, and I'll shoot you,” a higher voice whispered, and Peri frowned at Taf's anger. “Peri isn't hurting you.”

There was a soft thump, and then Howard said, “Ma'am. Don't make me tie you up.”

Peri's eyes opened. The room was bright with sun and richly decorated in colors she liked. It was morning, and she didn't have a stitch of clothing on. Someone must have taken her clothes off, because she never slept that freely.
Maybe I drafted?
But there was no recall itch in her mind, none of the unease that an unfragmented draft usually left her with. Frowning, she tried to remember how she'd gotten naked in a nice room like this.

The sound of an unseen door opening pulled Peri upright, and she
tugged the sheet to cover herself. There was a glass of water on the nightstand, and she gulped it down in one go, then wiped a drop from her chin.

“You're going to wake her. Can you do this downstairs?” Silas said in a hushed whisper.

Peri took a breath to call out, choking on it when a movement in the corner drew her eyes. Heart pounding, she tightened her grip on her empty glass and stared at Jack, sitting in the corner in a pressed suit and tie, just the right amount of stubble, a heat-filled glint in his eyes.
It didn't work
. She was still hallucinating.

“Hi, babe,” he said, and Peri closed her eyes, willing the vision to leave.

“Go away,” she whispered, eyes flashing open when he cleared his throat. “You aren't real,” she said, glancing at the door and the hushed argument beyond it in the hall.

Jack put an ankle on his knee and loosened his tie to look indescribably attractive. “At least you can think again,” he said, and a sliver of panic slid through her.
Fudge on a stick, they're starting to interact with me
.

“She's going to call Opti,” Taf said from the hall, her exclamation a whisper.

Silas sighed. “Karley isn't going to call Opti. All of you get away from Peri's door before you wake her up.”

“She
will
wake up, right?” the unknown woman said, but at least now Peri had a name.

Taf gasped, and Howard shushed her. “Of course she will,” Silas said. “I was able to do a few things last night.”

Do a few things?
Peri's gaze flicked from the door back to Jack. Her shoulders slumped as he wiggled his fingers at her, grinning madly. “Go away,” she whispered, setting the glass down so she wouldn't throw it at him. “You're not real. You're
not
real. I killed you. You're dead!” She didn't remember a thing from Overdraft, but that's what everyone had said she'd done. Every time she tried to remember it, it sort of . . . slipped away. The anger, though, the sense of outright betrayal at something she couldn't recall—that was real. And if she felt that much
betrayal, then she had probably loved him.
For God's sake, why can't I ever find a nice man?