The Drafter (5 page)

“Peri, look at me.” Jack yanked a chair closer, sitting so he was inches away, his blue eyes worried as he gripped her arms tightly, keeping her upright. “I'm here. Look at me.”

“I'm . . . okay,” she rasped, but she wasn't. “Memory knot,” she whispered, and Jack's eyes widened in fear. One hand still supporting her, he turned to the stairway. Swallowing hard, she silently agreed. When things go wrong, you minimize, and things had gone wrong.

Memory knots were nasty little snags of unremembered thought triggered by scent and images. On its own, a memory knot was frightening enough, but if it was attached to a rewrite and left unattended, it could lead to a MEP, memory-eclipsed paranoia, as the twin timelines lurking in her subconscious fought to be remembered. Anchors didn't have a problem remembering twin timelines, but drafters . . . Drafters would quickly lose their mind. It was an anchor's job—apart from doing half of everything else—to bring back one clean memory for a drafter to find closure with.

That a memory knot had snarled up before Jack had even had a chance to defrag her memory didn't bode well. Something had happened, something so bad that her mind was fighting to remember it. Killing a guard to save her life wasn't enough. It was something else.

It's a list, lovely woman
, she recalled, and the taste of chocolate and whiskey rose anew. “We need to go,” she said, light-headed as she slid from the stool. “Jack, I want to go home.”

Home was eight hundred miles to the north, but anywhere would be better than this.

“Right. Okay.” Jack's arm slid around her, holding her upright without looking obvious about it. His eyes went to their cue sticks, and she made a small sound.

“Don't you dare leave them. Hand me my purse,” she said, and he nodded, steadying her as she found her chancy balance and pushed through the dizzying sensation of memory trying to beat its way to the surface.

She hardly recognized the stairway, Jack almost carrying her down.

“Going out for a smoke!” Jack said loudly to the doorman, and he opened the door for them. “Don't give our table away.”

But Peri knew they weren't coming back.

The door to the club shut behind them, and Peri looked up in the muffled thump of music and the damp February night. She flushed, embarrassed. She hadn't passed out, but it was like being afraid of ghosts. “I'm okay,” she said softly, and Jack shook his head, his expression in the streetlight hard as they made their way to the car.

“Memory knots are dangerous,” he said, pace slow. “We head back now. I'm driving.”

“I said I'm okay,” she protested, not liking the fuss.

“I never said you weren't,” Jack said. “But we're still going back.”

“Fine,” she grumbled as she found her balance and pulled away. The fresh air had revived her, but she still felt foolish, and Jack refused to leave her side, even when they found her Mantis right where they'd left it.

“In you go,” he said as he opened the passenger-side door for her, the biometric lock recognizing him and releasing. The car chimed a happy greeting as she sighed, fingers shaking as she slid into the leather cushions. The door thumped shut with the sound of money well spent, and with her purse on her lap, she reached to start the car with a push of a button. The warming engine rumbled to life with a satisfying growl and, ignoring the onboard computer's cheerful greeting and question whether it should prepare to register a new driver since she was in the passenger seat, she hit the button for the heated seats and turned off the music as Jack broke their cues down and dropped them in the trunk.

She didn't like leaving her car on the street. Not that anyone could steal it, but the Mantis was illegal outside Detroit because of the solar-gathering, color-changing paint that charged the batteries. Though, to be honest, most cops would only ogle the sleek lines instead of impounding the two-seater. It sort of looked like a Porsche Boxter, only sexier.

Jack jogged around the front, giving her an encouraging smile as he got in and waited for the car to recognize him and release the controls. “Home by dawn, Peri. You'll be fine.”

“I'm fine now,” she protested, but she'd be glad to get home.

Damn memory knot had ruined everything. She had saved Jack's life more times than she could count, and he had saved hers more than she could remember, but as he flicked the warming engine off and found his way to the interstate, a little niggling of warning bit deep and burrowed deeper.

She was only going to remember one past, and Jack . . . he'd remember both.

H
is head hurt, but it was the smell of electronics and polymers from the slick-suit that pulled him awake. Silas snorted, jerking upright only to groan and hold his head. He was sitting at a small table. Squinting, he recognized the small, featureless, eight-by-eight room immediately, and anger pulled his shoulders stiff and made his pounding head worse.

“God-blessed idiot,” he muttered, pushing the sleeve of the slick-suit up his arm to find the tiny puncture wound where they'd darted him—darted him like an animal and dragged him back into something he'd worked hard to leave behind. He'd been in his car the last he remembered, on the way to the restoration site. He rolled the sleeve back down, struggling because it was a size too small.

“I'm not doing this,” he said, directing the statement at the watching eyes. “You hear me?” he said louder. “I'm done, Fran. Done!”

He frowned as the chime rang out, hating that they knew his pulse had quickened. God-blessed slick-suit. God-blessed idiot for helping them design it.

“Good morning, Dr. Denier,” a woman said pleasantly over the unseen intercom. “I'd say I'm sorry, but you and I both know you wouldn't have come if I'd just asked.”

Silas sat back from the table, thick arms across his chest, making
the slick-suit run with stress lines. “I fulfilled my contract. Open the door.”

“Open it yourself,” Fran said, her confident smugness irritating.

Silas's face twisted in frustration. He was not an agent. He was a designer, a tinkerer, an innovator whose playground was where the surety of electronics met the vagaries of the human mind. And they wanted him to run a maze like one of his rats? “You can't make me do this.”

“Yes we can.”

A wave of sensation rippled over him, cramping his muscles and making him grunt in surprise. It was the slick-suit. Silas reached for the sensitive brain of it, then choked as someone tightened the wavelengths. Gagging, he fell prostrate, shaking with convulsions.

They stopped as quickly as they had begun, and he lay on the asbestos tile floor, his anger turning cold.
Son of a bitch . . .

“Begin,” Fran said, and then the chime.

It rankled him no end that he'd chosen the sound himself.

Seething, Silas pulled himself up. Grasping the back of the chair, he flung it at the door lock, shattering the chair and damaging the panel. With a primal shout of anger, he punched it, satisfied when the light went out and a wisp of smoke trailed to the floor.

“Don't be stupid, Denier,” Fran said, and Silas sucked on his bleeding knuckles. “You want to talk to me? Tell me how wrong I am? Get out of the room.”

“I'm no one's lab rat,” he muttered. Levering himself up onto the table, he stood and hammered his way into the ceiling. The audio link was still open, and he couldn't help his satisfaction at the sudden uproar.

Years of bench-pressing paid off, and he pulled himself up into the low crawl space above the training floor. It was cooler up here, and the outlines of the various rooms were easy to see. Besides, they hadn't changed them. Keeping atop the sturdier walls, he walked to the hallway in a low hunch, clear of the training room's potential immobilizing field.

“Silas, get back on the training floor!” Fran demanded, faint through the ceiling.

“Maybe you shouldn't have forgotten that I designed it,” he grumbled, gauging that he'd cleared the active areas, and jumped clear through a ceiling panel and down into the outer hallway.

He'd landed badly, his ankle twinging as his arms pinwheeled to keep him from falling outright. Dust and ceiling rained down, and he slowly rose through it, grimacing at the five men in combat gear pointing close-range weapons at him. He felt vulnerable in that outrageous slick-suit, clinging like a second, uncomfortable skin.

Her heels clicking, an older woman with short, dyed blond hair styled back off her face pushed through to confront him, an aide tight behind. “You designed it. Isn't that the point, Denier? You owe us.”

“I don't owe you anything. I quit Opti. And I quit you.”

“If you're not Opti, you're alliance. And you are alliance,” she said, and he held his breath against the sneeze her perfume tickled forth. Most women would have looked odd in a flamboyant red business suit with an orchid-and-silk corsage, surrounded by squat men in bulky combat gear, but not Fran. Her sure confidence made it all work.

But she had a right to be confident. The alliance was made up of renegade Opti personnel who believed the government shouldn't control the ability to manipulate time. They'd make their fight public except that their ranks consisted of anchors and drafters themselves, and if word got out, the populace would panic and kill them all. So they worked in the shadows funded by benefactors, benefactors like Fran. It was exchanging one power-hungry boss for another as far as Silas was concerned.

His file was in her hand, the photo of him with his close-cropped hair and lab coat three years out of date but still accurate. He'd put on some muscle since then, but his frame had always been bulky, earning him the nickname Hulk from those who didn't like him, and that had been more than a few.

Fran ran her attention up and down his body, smiling in appreciation. Weight shifting, he clasped his hands into a fig leaf, trying not to look obvious about it. “I was done three years ago. Nothing has changed. You going to shoot me?”

“But it has changed.”
Fran gestured for the men ringing them to fall back. “We got word this morning that she might be ready for extraction.”

Twin feelings of elation and betrayal flooded him. “Might be?” he said softly. “You have
nothing
!” He gestured wildly, catching his anger when the men tightened their grips in threat on their weapons. “This idea was flawed from the beginning. It will not work. Not in a year. Not in ten! Every time she has something, they scrub her and she loses more. It was a bad idea, Fran. All you're doing is making it worse, and I'll have nothing to do with it.”

Fran smacked his file against his chest. “Update your info. You leave tomorrow. The way in is already prepared. Even have a friend waiting for you.”

His lip curled, and he refused to take the file.
Toy soldiers playing war
. “You're not listening to me.”

“No.” Fran leaned into him, and he backed up, knocking into one of the guards. “You're not listening to me,” the woman said, her head tilted to look up at him and the light showing where she'd had some work done. “She's got what we need. She doesn't know it yet, which is why it is going to work this time. Go in. Get it. Now, before they figure it out and scrub her. You want to end it? Then end it.”

But even ended, it would never be as it had been. Angry, Silas turned to the man he'd bumped into, glaring until he shifted aside to show an empty hallway. Truly, they had no call to detain him, and they knew it.

“I need you, Silas,” Fran said, not pleading, but close to it. “What are you going to do? Go back to your hobby? Clean your historical relics and pretend you're something you're not? You are a master, Silas. You are the best. And you are pissing your genius away.”

He turned, seeing her surrounded by her guns and men, playing at a war that no one knew existed. He wasn't a genius, just lucky in how he saw the world. “You used me.”

“But it all worked out, didn't it?” she said with a false brightness. “If we have any chance of ending this, it's going to be through you. You're
the only one smart enough to see the extent of the damage and fluid enough to adapt a program to fix it. Don't walk away from her. Not now.”

Jaw clenched, Silas turned. Arms swinging, he strode down the corridor, the slick-suit pinching. His clothes were around here somewhere, and, he hoped, his car.

“Tonight,” Fran called after him, her smug voice irritating. “Five sharp.”

“I don't think he's going to do it,” Fran's aide said, and Silas's neck warmed when Fran laughed.

“He will. Make sure you have something that fits him. That's one big man.”

Ticked, he strode faster, knowing the way to the garage. He hated that she knew him so well. He'd sulk and stew, and probably break something expensive. Then he'd show up at ten minutes to five because she was right. He wasn't the best they had, but if anyone could do it, it would be him.

P
eri lingered under the motel's shower, the tiny world of warmth and fog working over every muscle to ease her aching body. Post-task injuries weren't unusual. What was unusual, what had Jack so unnerved that he'd driven all night, was that damned memory knot.

Brow furrowed, Peri reached for the shampoo. She felt fragile, as if something in her past might loom out of nothing and bring her down. It was obvious what had triggered the knot: the taste of chocolate, the scent of whiskey, Jack's face, stark in the club's lights. But she daren't even think about it. Not until Jack got back with breakfast, anyway.

It had been hard to bring Jack to a halt this morning, so intent was he on getting back to Detroit. He'd driven all night, watching over her while she slept. The man was dead tired, and she was going to insist on finishing the last leg behind the wheel herself. It was her car, damn it. She was fine. She'd be even better after a defrag. Besides, it wasn't often she had the chance to open her Mantis up and let it joyously run until the voltage-sensitive paint paled from its usual black and silver to an energy-saving, low-state white.