She let go of the car door and moved toward the base of the tower. One step after another. Easy does it. At the edge of her vision she saw Sam turning and scanning the road behind them. She kept going.
She knew what she had to do. She wasn’t sure how she knew—maybe it was another conditioned response. She also knew it was just about the last thing in the world she felt like doing, but that really wasn’t a reason to back down, was it? She was tired of looking scared. Tired of being scared. She crossed the last few feet to the tower’s base and grabbed hold of the nearest corner with both hands.
If the vibration in the ground had made her bones hum, this contact made them scream. It made the bones themselves feel hollow. Hollow and full of buzzing flies.
She heard herself making a noise. Whimpering. Crying out. Heard Sam somewhere behind her, calling her name, running toward her. She caught the intention in his thoughts: grab her by the shoulders and pull her away from the damned thing.
“No!” she said.
She heard him stop right at her back. He came around to the side, his hand closing on one of her arms.
“Rachel—”
This is how it works. I have to hold on until it happens.
The thoughts had formed on their own. She had no idea what they meant. What was supposed to happen?
“Rachel?”
Have to hold on. Any second now—
“Don’t stop me,” she said. “It’s okay.”
He said something else, but she missed it. The sunlit desert fell away, and all at once she was lost in a world of voices and mental pictures.
Pictures of everything. People, dogs, cars, but in almost all of them there was—
The town. The place they’d driven through when they got off the freeway, north of here. These were mind pictures of the town, the stores she’d seen, the gas station, the hills to the east. And the voices were thoughts. Like a thousand people’s thoughts at the same time, as if she were standing in the middle of a huge crowd, close enough to read them all.
Sam was still in the background saying her name. Asking if she was okay. She wanted to answer, but—
Something else was happening now. Beneath all the pictures and the voices, beneath her own feet even, there was—
A tunnel. Opening up like a trapdoor below her. She couldn’t see it but she could feel it. A tunnel made of wires, crackling and humming like the big black thing halfway up the tower. The tunnel led down and away—far, far away. Her mind reached down into it, screaming along its length at dizzying speed, and she felt—
Someone else. Someone at the far end.
—another mind there. A man’s mind, it seemed like. She felt his thoughts seeping into her. An image of a swimming pool with mountains behind it. Two women with dark hair, in the water, naked. Then a room full of strange machines and computers.
Mod signal on number two just got a little screwy, what’s that about—whoa, hey, HEY.
Panic soaking the man’s thoughts now.
What the fuck just happened? Get Hager, someone fucking get Hager!
Yet even these sounds and pictures were fading away from her, the crackling tunnel and all the rest of it, dimming and quieting, because suddenly she had a sense of—
What was it?
Some place inside her own mind. Like a room for storing things, only she couldn’t see into it. There was something blocking the way, like a fabric stretched across the entry. A membrane. The things inside the room were pressing at it, their shapes pushing it outward, stretching it.
My memories. These are my memories trying to get free.
It seemed to her that the tower itself was shaking them up. The vibration in her bones, in her mind, jarring everything.
She could feel Sam’s hand gripping her arm tighter now. Any moment he’d pull her away, but—
Something in the memory room was breaking through. Something important to her, its edges sharp and white hot, cutting through the membrane.
She saw a picture in her mind. A woman stooping to smile at her. She had kind brown eyes. She was beautiful.
Hello, Rachel. How are you feeling today?
What was her name? That’s what was trying to cut through the barrier. The woman’s name. She was sure of it.
Sam was talking louder now. Fear in his voice. Telling her to let go.
The membrane was stretched to the breaking point, the burning edge of the name almost through—
Holly. Her name is Holly.
Holly what?
The mental picture was still there. Holly’s eyes, so pretty when she smiled—
What was the rest of her name?
Hadn’t she heard that name somewhere else? Hadn’t someone had it in their thoughts? Not so long ago?
Holly. Holly, Holly, Holly—
Sam’s hands took hold of her fingertips and pulled them free of the metal. The terrible vibration cut out as if an OFF button had been pressed. She reeled backward and lost her balance, but by then his arms were around her. He was holding her and speaking softly.
“Are you alright? Rachel.”
She opened her eyes and looked at him. “Holly Ferrel,” she whispered.