Dryden waited for her to go on. She still had her arms around her legs. She was staring ahead at the night rolling toward them.
“I woke up there, two months ago,” she said. “I was strapped to a hospital bed. I didn’t know where I was, or who I was. A doctor with blond hair would show up sometimes, either to hook an IV to my arm or take one away. Other times, different men would come in, the same ones who were chasing me tonight, and they’d untie my bed straps. Then they’d come in later and strap me down again. Nobody would ever speak to me, no matter how much I asked. Nobody would tell me what was happening to me, or why.”
Dryden felt his hands tighten on the steering wheel.
“Sometime in the first few days,” Rachel said, “I noticed strange thoughts in my head. For a while I thought they were my memories coming back, but not for long—they were just too bizarre. They didn’t seem like my own thoughts at all. Like, some of them were a man’s thoughts about his wife, from his own point of view. These thoughts got a lot louder whenever the blond man or the others came into the room, and at some point I understood what I was really hearing.”
Dryden passed another semi. Ahead of it, the road lay empty and dark for a mile or more.
“Everything I know, I got from their thoughts,” Rachel said. “The people in that building. It wasn’t much; they hardly knew anything at all. They’d been assigned to keep me there, but they didn’t know where I came from. They knew I could hear thoughts—they’d been warned about that—but no one had told them how I could do it, how I got this way. So I don’t know, either.”
“They must have known other things. Who they worked for—the government, a company, something like that.”
“It was hard to get anything like that from them. Most of the time they weren’t close enough for me to hear them thinking. Even when they were, it almost never helped. You’d be surprised how scattered people’s thoughts are. You hear little chunks of an argument they had with someone, looping over and over. Probably stuff they wish they’d said. Sometimes you just hear a song in their head. You hardly ever hear important things about their lives: their name, their job, anything like that. Like, how often do you actually think of your own name?”
“I guess I can see that.”
“When people do focus their thoughts, they mostly think about what they don’t know. What they’re unsure of. So with these guys, a lot of their questions were the same ones I had. Like who I was. Where I came from. They didn’t know. I did get the name of someone they work for, someone pretty powerful, I think—a man they thought of as Gaul.”
The name struck Dryden. He’d heard it before, though he couldn’t quite place it. Someone at the top of one of the big defense contractors, he thought. Way up in the overlap between corporate America and the government. That wasn’t a world Dryden swam in himself, but he’d learned more about it than he cared to, during his active years.
“The people in that building wondered about him a lot,” Rachel said. “They were always nervous about him. Especially the blond man. He’s the one I mostly learned things from. He had a room down the hall from me—his office, I guess. He was in there a lot. Maybe he thought it was out of my range, but it wasn’t. Not quite.”
“What did you learn from him?”
Rachel shut her eyes. Dryden got the impression again that she was framing her thoughts, trying to put them in some order that would make sense.
“That they were supposed to get information from me. Things I know—things I knew, anyway, when I could remember.”
Dryden waited for her to continue.
“That’s what the IV drugs were for. To make me talk—in my sleep. Only it was more than that. The drugs were supposed to make it so I could have conversations in my sleep. Someone could ask me questions, and I’d answer. Like if I was hypnotized, I think. My memory problems come from the drugs, too. The way the blond man understood it, that was a side effect that only kicked in while I was awake. When I was asleep—talking in my sleep—I could still remember what I knew.” She breathed out softly. Dryden heard emotion in the sound of it. An edge of fear, for some reason.
“Did you find out, after a while, what they’d gotten from you?” Dryden asked. “Did you hear it in the blond guy’s thoughts?”