Curren accelerated to ninety, veering through the light traffic on the freeway.
“They’re four and a half miles ahead,” Gaul said over the cell phone. “They’re doing just about exactly the speed limit, so you’ll catch up to them in a matter of minutes. Next exit is more than twenty miles out.”
“Copy,” Curren said, though he could tell Gaul had already hung up.
Working for Gaul sometimes felt like working for God. The man’s knowledge resources seemed to border on omnipotent, while remaining almost entirely shrouded. Also, you didn’t want to piss him off. Curren wouldn’t have been surprised to learn Gaul could turn people into salt pillars.
*
“You can just … read me?” Dryden asked.
He felt his mind trying to get a fix on all of it, and not quite managing.
“Reading might be the wrong word,” Rachel said. “That makes it sound like I’m doing it on purpose. It’s more like hearing. It just happens. I can’t even shut it off.”
“And you hear everything. Every thought. Every idea.”
Rachel nodded. “As far as I know. Sometimes it’s confusing, if I can’t tell my own thoughts from someone else’s. If I find myself thinking, It would suck to get shot right now, it’s hard to know if that’s your thought or just mine. But most thoughts, yeah, I can tell they’re yours.” Then, softer: “I can tell you’re a nice person, and that you like me, and that being with me reminds you of someone. And that makes you happy and sad at the same time.”
Tension crept into Dryden’s mind: Would he have to censor his thoughts now? Every stupid, random thing that leapt into his head? Could he even do that?
“Don’t worry about it,” Rachel said.
It took a second for him to realize what had just happened—that she’d replied to something he hadn’t even said aloud.
“Sorry,” Rachel said. “I can wait for you to actually say things, if you like.”
For a long moment Dryden said nothing. He watched the lines on the pavement sliding past.
“How do you do it?” he asked. “How does it work?”
“I don’t know.”
“You’ve always been able to?”
“For the past two months, at least. How long before that, I have no idea.”
In her own way, she sounded as confused as he felt. No doubt she was.
“I know it doesn’t work over much distance,” she said. “If you ever need some privacy, a short walk would do it.”
The strange chill at Dryden’s temples was still there. It hadn’t faded at all since he’d first noticed it, near the freeway. Now that he thought about it, he wondered if it had been there even before that—back in town, back on the boardwalk even, in the first moments after he’d encountered Rachel.
“The chill comes from me,” she said. “Whatever it is my brain does, that’s what it feels like to the other person.” The way she said it—quiet and vulnerable, apologetic—Dryden could almost read her thoughts. Don’t think I’m a freak. Don’t abandon me. Please.
“I barely feel it,” Dryden said. “Don’t worry.”
She nodded, then drew her knees against her on the seat and hugged them. She seemed tiny, sitting there like that.
*
Four minutes until they would overtake the pickup. Curren couldn’t see its taillights yet, through the rises and turns of the coast highway, but he’d done the math in his head.
He looked over his shoulder at the van’s middle bench seat, where three of his men sat with their weapons ready.
He saw no pleasure in their expressions, and felt none himself. The job needed doing; nothing more to it than that.
“Don’t bother disabling the vehicle,” Curren said. “Start with killshots. The girl first.”
*
“The place they had me in was like a hospital,” Rachel said. “Except it was empty. There was just me, and the people keeping me there.”
“This was the place you were running from tonight?”
Rachel nodded.
Dryden tried to picture it. El Sedero was a pretty small town; it was hard to envision anything like an abandoned hospital there. He thought of the district Rachel’s pursuers had seemed to come from: the area just inland from the dune ridge. There was an office park over there—a hundred acres of well-kept grounds, with an array of sprawling one-and two-story buildings. The kind of structures you could drive past every day for twenty years and never so much as think about. You could work in one of them and not have a clue what went on in the place next door.
“Those were the buildings,” Rachel said. “The one they had me in was off by itself, way in back.”