The Drafter (20 page)

Sitting up, Peri finger-combed her damp hair, more peeved than curious.

“Hi,” he said flatly as someone on the other end picked up. “This is Silas Denier in Twenty-four thirty-five. Can I have two strawberry milkshakes and a plate of fries sent up? If you can get them here in ten
minutes, there's a twenty in it for you.” Setting the phone back in the cradle with a dull crack, he sat on the bed and stared at the wall.

I love milkshakes and fries
. Guilt swam up, and she shoved it aside. “Thank you,” she said softly. “I don't have any money to pay you back.”

Wiping a hand over his chin, he said, “I've noticed that about you.”

He was angry about things she had no control over. “I didn't know I was running until—”

“Until what?”

Until I destroyed half the message I'd left myself? Until I found out Bill was corrupt? That I might be, too?
“I didn't actually plan this, okay?” she said, her damp fingers smelling of hotel shampoo.

Silas turned, his empty expression taking her aback. “I'm not your slave. Got it?”

“Slave!” Her headache returned full force. “Is that what you think anchors are? No wonder you washed out.” Ticked, she put her feet up on the coffee table.

He rose and began to pace, his agitation far more than a plate of fries and two shakes deserved. “I'm
not
going to make your coffee, wait on you, or rub your feet. As soon as I know what happened in that office, we are
done
. Understand?”

Sniffing, Peri brushed at her clothes. “You have the personality of an armadillo. You say I'm corrupt—without proof—dangling the truth before me, accessible only if I help you bring down everything I believe in. Forgive me for having a hard time letting you into my mind.”

Hand over his mouth in frustration, he turned to face her. “You're right. I'm sorry,” he said as his hand dropped. “I have no evidence that you're corrupt. You're probably a very nice person. Someone who only kills people who kill her first.”

And his apology started so nicely, too
. “That's as good as it's going to get, huh?”

“Yup.” Silas bobbed his head, the golden light leaking around the blinds, casting stripes on him. Her gaze, drawn by the glow, traveled up his narrow waist to the hint of hair showing from behind his not-so-pressed-anymore shirt. Her eyes rose farther to his strong
jaw—currently clenched in anger. The hint of stubble made him look . . . more than accessible. Familiar, almost.

“You know what I'd really like to know?” she said, watching the way the sun moved around him, catching the stubble on his jaw and making him glow.

“What?” he said flatly, his thoughts clearly on something else.

“If Ridley Scott ever finished his
Blade Runner
sequel.”

He started, the blank wonder on his face giving her pause. “Ah, yes, he did.” Mood softened, he sat down. “It was really good.”

“Mmmm.” Her focus went past him, distant. “I wonder if I saw it,” she mused.

“I've got an idea,” he said, jolting her from her reverie as he came back and pushed her feet off the coffee table to sit right in front of her. “Give me a foot,” he said, holding out a hand.

Suspicious, she eyed him from under her bangs. “You just said—”

He reached for one, taking the slipper off and letting it drop. “I was speaking metaphorically,” he said, and she stifled a shiver at the feeling of his hands around her bare foot. “It's a relaxation technique that's helpful with antisocial people who don't like to be touched, a mix of reflexology and Swedish massage.”

“I like being touched. Just not by you,” she said, but he'd begun twisting his hands around her foot to make it ache wonderfully, and she didn't pull away, even when he rubbed his thumb along the arch and she had to bite her lip to stop herself from releasing a groan. She wouldn't give him the satisfaction.

“I can get rid of your headache,” he said, head down over her feet. “Promise.”

She hadn't told him about the headache, but what he was doing felt really good. Not altogether trusting it, she eased into the chair to stare at the high ceiling.

“Okay,” he said as his touch became firmer. “Let's see where you're hiding your tension.”

“Ow!” she cried, jerking when his thumb ran along the side of her foot. “Not so hard!”

But he grabbed her ankle and pulled it back. “That's your back and
hips. If I can loosen those up, I'll have a chance at your headache. Just relax. Deep breaths in through your nose and out through your mouth. Haven't you ever had a massage?”

“Not like this,” she said, and he actually smiled. It was real, and finding comfort in that, she closed her eyes. The more she relaxed, the better it felt. Slowly the muscles in her back eased, and then her neck . . . and finally her shoulders.

Silas took up her other foot, the expected jolt of pain quickly dulling as the muscles lost their tension. “Thank you,” she said when his pressure-point work shifted to a more relaxing motion. She wasn't an idiot. She knew everything was connected, and if she was too uptight to let him touch her face and shoulders, this worked.

“Okay.” Silas's voice was low with a new confidence. “Tell me about your spot.”

Peri's eyes opened, the lazy lassitude she was drifting in vanishing. “Excuse me?”

His hands kept moving with a firm, decisive motion. “Your safe spot,” he said. “The place you go in your mind to find peace.”

Reassured, she closed her eyes. “Oh. I've never had to practice that. My anchors can usually bring everything back without a problem.”

He pinched a nerve, and she jerked. “Ow?” she said, not pulling away because she probably deserved it.

“This isn't a recall technique,” he said. “It's to bring you to a centered position.”

He sounded like a psychologist, which was both reassuring and unnerving. “What branch of Opti did you wash out of?” she asked. There was no answer, but his pressure on her foot didn't change. “Silas, what branch?”

“I didn't wash out. I quit.” His thumb ran up the outside arch of her foot again to show that all the tension was gone. “Find a spot. Tell me what you liked about it. How you felt there.”

Fine
. She was willing to do almost anything if he'd keep rubbing her feet. Her headache was almost gone. “Can I pick a person instead?”

His motion on her foot hesitated. “Ah, no.”

She held her breath, exhaling when she had an idea. “When I was
a kid, I spent a few summers at my grandparents' farm. They had a couple of trees right in the middle of one of their fields where there was an old graveyard. Just a few faded markers. Couldn't even read them. But it was peaceful, and the wind was sweet.” Peri smiled, and the last of her headache vanished. Maybe there was more to this than she gave him credit for.

“What did it smell like?”

Her reluctance to tell him something so personal vanished at his logic. The triggers of scent and touch were important in making a successful connection between a drafter and an anchor, and so she was willing to give him more and see where it went.

“The earth was both hard from roots and loamy between them,” she said, fingers moving as if she could feel the black soil. “The bark was smooth to the touch and detailed in grays. I could be alone there, just me and the sun and the wind, and like the world, it smelled like dry dirt down low, and like freedom when I climbed into the leafy green.”

She was totally relaxed, even if recalling the scent of the dirt seemed to stick in her.

“Centered and still,” Silas said, no longer working pressure points, but maintaining a gentle touch to tell her he was there, listening. “Peri?”

“Mmmm?”

“Do you want to try to remember the airport?”

“Sure.” She could do that, and she cracked an eye to see the bands of the noon light on the ceiling. The TV had gone on in the room next door, and the drone of sound was comforting.

“You were anxious,” he said, and she closed her eyes to deepen the connection so as to let him in. “Now you're calm and nothing can touch you, but then, you were anxious.”

Though unable to remember the precise recall technique used by her last anchor, she'd worked with enough professionals through the years to know what to do—and she relaxed.

“You had a coffee and you sipped it to allay suspicions,” he said, and Peri fastened on the memory that she still retained, shoving away the concern that he'd been spying on her even then. “You set it down when
the woman you'd marked went to the bathroom. The planes were starting to board. You were ready to act.”

In her thoughts, she was in the sun, but she knew she'd sat in the shade at the airport. She could smell the wind and dirt, taste the caramel from the coffee Allen had brought her, but it mixed with bitter, expensive chocolate. A flight announcement echoed in her memory, and the flash of a white face in the haze of a holographic monitor came and went.

The memories of several events were meshing. Silas's calming techniques were not mixing well with her last anchor's, but she could do this, and she focused on the known impressions of the airport, pulse quickening when Silas's confidence suddenly congealed about her conviction. He had found her fully, his presence in her mind professionally light but certain as they began to share the same vision, each leading the other. He'd found her mind with unusual quickness, settling in with a cool detachment that she appreciated, but if he had once been an Opti psychologist, he'd have the knack. Satisfied, she slipped deeper into the light trance.

“Safe now,” he soothed as if she might be afraid, “but you were in danger, and you had a plan. A guard went with you.”

A flash of a man's pale face lit by a monitor came and went again, and Peri shoved it aside in favor of crowds of people and rolling bags. “I went in first,” she said, taking up the narration as she felt wisps of unrealized fragments gathering in the background of her mind. It was almost as if Peri could sense Silas ordering them, seeing them before she did. “I had to wait for a woman to leave, but it gave me time to throw a wad of paper at the camera.”

She caught the scent of the hotel shampoo and the cloying dust from the grove.
No, from the carpet
. She frowned as the image of the underside of a bed intruded, drawn by the conflicting sensations of clean hair and dirty carpet. The warp and weft was unforgivably matted, but where her fingers were splayed open over it, it was dusty and uncrushed. Her palm lay open in welcome. A crumpled sock lay at the edge of shadow and golden light, a blue button beside it. It was a
talisman, and she worried she'd forget it. The fragments didn't mesh with the fading impressions of the airport. They didn't fit, and she sensed Silas's rising concern.

“I knocked the guard into a stall,” Peri said, forcing her thoughts from the contented feeling the image of the sock under the bed filled her with. “I followed her in and hit her head on the pipe.”

The expected empty ache of missing memories thickened, a morass of conflicting images. Instead of a crowded airport, Peri saw a flash of pure gold light from under a door across a matted carpet. It didn't fit, and her heart hurt as more fragments intruded, scaring her. “Silas . . . ,” she whispered, and she felt him take her hands as his presence in her strengthened.

“This isn't a draft fragment. It's just forgotten,” he whispered as he saw it, too. “Peri, where are you?”

“I'm safe!” she half moaned, her chest clenching in grief as she gripped his hands. She was safe. In her lost memory, the golden light fell over her skin. Her robe was almost off and the warmth of a body she knew and loved was above her. Love and a pleasant exhaustion suffused her.
It's Jack
, she groaned in her thoughts, and Jack smiled down at her, the glow in his eyes telling her that he loved her.

“Jack!” Peri cried as she jerked upright. Pain lanced through her and Silas gasped when she pushed him from her mind and she was again alone in her thoughts.

Grief-stricken, she stared at Silas as he knelt before her, seeing his pity and full understanding as the memory of Jack's and her love came cascading back. Jack was dead. Allen had said so. Silas had said the same. She had loved him, and he was gone forever because . . .
she'd killed him
.

“Oh God . . . ,” she moaned, pulling her feet up onto the chair and holding her knees to herself. The jolt of shoving Silas out of her mind was a bitter slap, and the black of her traveling clothes shocked through her, her thoughts expecting the white robe Jack had brought from home. Angry, she pushed Silas's hands away, curling up in the chair and hiding her face. It had been a memory, not a draft that needed fragmenting, and it hurt.

“Shhhh,” he said,
putting his arms around her anyway. “Let it go, Peri. Let it go.”

“You bastard,” she said between her gasping breaths as the scent of leather grew heady. “You knew I'd remember that.”

“No, I didn't,” he said, and she looked up, the lump in her throat hurting. “I'm so sorry,” he added, the knowing reflected in his eyes telling her he'd seen it all, and she hated him for it. “I was trying to bring back your drafts at the airport. I had no idea this would happen. You shouldn't be able to remember anything about Jack.”

Peri got a clean breath in, then another. “You're an Opti psychologist,” she managed. “Are you working for them? Is this some sick way of trying to bring my three years back?”

He shook his head. “No. I really am with the alliance. I left Opti a long time ago. I don't believe in what they do. The lies they tell you.”

Peri dropped her eyes. Her life was a misery. “They don't allow drafters to leave. Ever.”