The Drafter

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.