“Blah, blah, blah.” Scraping his blond hair out of his eyes, Jack tried on a black tie. “You have an expiration date, babe. Cut to the chase.”
Silas was clearly pleased. “I thought it might make you feel more like yourself.”
“It does.” Peri leaned back, ankles crossed as she tried to relax, not liking that he knew more about her than she did. “How long until Howard gets here? I left Allen doped up, and if I’m not there when he wakes, they’ll know I pulled the tracker.”
Head down, Silas looked through the coats, trying several on to make Peri’s mule clap her hands. “He’s on his way. How are you doing?”
Jack snorted, and, surprised, her head rose. “How am I doing? Seriously?”
Silas looked up. “Yes. How are you doing? I can’t ask that?”
Peri darted a look at Jack, now on the stage with the other beautiful pretend people. “I’m pretty confused right now,” she said sarcastically. “Forgive me, but I’ve got this memory of you shoving Allen through a window—”
“That’s fake,” he interrupted.
“We know that, dumbass,” Jack said loudly, and Peri set her mug down hard.
“I know that.” She hadn’t meant it to sound nasty, but that’s how it came out, and she touched his hand to convince him she wasn’t mad. “It would take more than the weight of one man to break the window. It’s supposed to be bulletproof.” She furrowed her brow, angry at herself for having trusted so blindly.
“Do you want me to fragment these fake memories?” Silas said, and she shook her head. It was all she had, false or not. “You don’t trust me yet,” Silas said. “That’s okay.”
Annoyed, she shifted her mug around. “It’s not about trust. It’s about me needing to make the right responses, and if you take them away, I won’t. You were an Opti psychologist, weren’t you? Until Opti fired you?”
He stiffened. “I quit Opti. They didn’t fire me.”
Peri took a deep breath, ready to broach what had been on her mind since last night. “Silas, that picture you gave me triggered a memory knot of Jack and me.”
Silas’s expression blanked. “Are you okay? Have any more snarled up?”
“No. And I don’t know why except that the knot was of a real memory, not twin timelines,” she said, wanting him to say it would be okay. How could something that beautiful be bad? “Even if Jack was lying to me, even if he was a bastard and used me, I felt centered that night. Beautiful. Safe.” Silas followed her gaze to the simulations, not seeing Jack standing beside her and Silas’s mules like a jealous boyfriend.
“Mmmm.” Silas’s sudden worry was obvious. “He’s here now, right?”
She nodded and Jack blew a sarcastic kiss at them. “Here comes the psychobabble BS,” Jack said. “Ignore it, babe. He doesn’t have a clue what’s going on.”
“I wouldn’t worry about the memory knot,” Silas said. “As long as they aren’t centered around twin timelines, they’re just your way to remember artificially destroyed memories.”
Artificially destroyed … They can do that?
“But what about Jack?” she asked, setting her outrage aside for the moment. Opti had lied to her about everything else, why not the missing time associated with a draft, too?
Silas shrugged. “Frankly, I’m surprised he hasn’t broken up. But if he’s still there, then the twin timelines I left in you are still there, too.”
“You left twin timelines in me?” she whispered hotly, lowering her voice when the man cleaning Silas’s coat intruded to hang it up on the purchase rack near her chair. Warm, Peri leaned over the table. “What kind of an anchor are you?”
“A damn good one. You’re still sane, aren’t you?” he said tightly, eyes on the man as he went into the back room. That was debatable, and he shifted under her accusing stare. “The proof that Opti is corrupt is in your mind. I couldn’t fragment either line without destroying the truth,” he finally admitted. “I tied three years of latent memories of Jack to your intuition so the inevitable hallucinations would distract you from tearing your mind apart. Peri, I’d take you in to the alliance myself and defrag them, but without something to prove your loyalty to them, they’ll scrub you themselves.”
Scrub as in artificially destroy. Peri slumped in the seat and stared at him, her trust in Opti falling utterly apart. “I’m just a big Etch A Sketch, huh? Don’t like what you see? Give me a good shake, and write what you want.” It was getting easier to say, but the bitterness was chiseled deeper with every new realization.