He’d learned years before not to let those kinds of thoughts last. He’d learned how to let them fade—how to let everything fade, really. How to go through the day in logical steps: sleeping, breathing, buying groceries, taking the trash to the curb. Life as a mechanical process. As limbo. As inertia.
That it could all change—that there was anything for it to change to—had not crossed his mind in years. Not until today.
He looked into the cabin again. Rachel had eased onto her back. For a minute or two he watched her sleep. Then he faced the woods again and watched the dark come down.
CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Long after night had claimed the valley, after the moon had risen through low clouds, sending wraiths of pale light playing over the forest floor, Rachel began to murmur in her sleep. Dryden entered the cabin, moving carefully so as not to wake her. His adjusted eyes found the audio device, and he pressed RECORD.
For the first minute or two, her sounds were indecipherable, even from a foot away.
Then her body stiffened. Her right arm jerked. Dryden knelt beside her, ready to take hold of her if it looked like she could injure herself.
Her arm spasmed again. The other did the same. Both started to move away from her sides but stopped after traveling less than two inches, held fast as if by invisible straps. She tried to sit up, but her shoulders also met unseen resistance. With a chill, Dryden understood. After two months of sleeping in restraints, Rachel’s body had become conditioned to the limits. Dryden took a moment to reflect with satisfaction upon the revenge she’d dealt the blond man, even if she hadn’t meant it as such.
Her murmurs fell silent for thirty seconds, and then she said, “It’s so pretty from this window at night.”
Her eyes were still closed. The cabin had no windows, regardless. Rachel was describing something in her dream.
“From up here,” she whispered, “all the lights…”
She trailed off.
Dryden sat down on the plank floor beside her. He steadied himself. This would either work or it wouldn’t. All he could do was try.
Making his voice as soft as he could, he said, “Hello, Rachel.”
She didn’t quite startle. The reaction was more reserved than that. A twitch of her eyebrows in the faint light. Tension in her features that hadn’t been there a few seconds earlier.
“Hello,” she said. Her tone was devoid of emotion.
“Can I ask you some questions?”
Rachel exhaled slowly. When she spoke, she sounded like she was reading from a note card.
“Rachel Grant. Molecular Biology Working Group, Fort Detrick, Maryland, RNA-Interference Cohort, Knockout One One.”
Dryden took in the words. Took in their meaning, at least in the abstract—the rough implication of where Rachel had come from. Of what she was.
But more than the words themselves, what struck him was the way she’d said them, and the way her jaw clamped shut when she was finished. The mix of determined and scared shitless that etched itself across her face.
It was a look Dryden had seen on other faces. Many others.
As carefully as he’d first spoken, he said, “Do you recognize my voice?”
She appeared to think about it. Her eyes, already shut, tightened as if narrowing.
Then the scared resolve fell back over her like a shadow, and she replied in the same flat tone as before.
“Rachel Grant. Molecular Biology Working Group, Fort Detrick, Maryland, RNA-Interference Cohort, Knockout One One.”
An old, familiar phrase surfaced in Dryden’s mind. One that was known to soldiers the world over.
Name, rank, and serial number.
Rachel’s stock reply was the equivalent. She held it in front of herself like a shield, because in her head she was back in that little room in El Sedero. Whatever pretty dream she’d been having a minute ago, the very act of questioning her had changed it, and now her mind was stuck in the phantom restraints as surely as her arms were.
Dryden rubbed his eyes. Christ, how to explain it to her—that he wasn’t one of those people? How to explain it without telling her too much and waking her up?
Rachel’s head turned a few degrees toward him, though her eyes remained shut.
“Waking who up?” she asked.
Dryden stared at her. Because he’d been with her all day, because he’d gotten used to having her respond to things before he actually said them, he almost missed what’d just happened—that she’d heard his thoughts, even from inside the dream.
“Inside what dream?” she asked.
Shit. Shit.
Dryden felt it all getting away from him. Like a stack of dinner plates atop his hand, unbalancing, pitching outward—
He made his voice as stern and cold as he could manage, and said the words as quickly as they formed in his head: “The thing everyone’s scared of—tell us about it again. Right now. You’ve already given us that much, there’s no harm in repeating it.”
For a moment Rachel seemed to continue looking at him through her closed eyelids, as if still hung up on the question of who was dreaming. Then the strained resolve settled back into place.
“Why do you need to hear it again?” she asked. “I told you.”