The Drafter

But as she sat on the floor and shook, she didn’t think she cared anymore. Jack was dying on the floor and she couldn’t save him. Then it was her on the floor, Allen holding her head from the scratched boards, and she wanted Jack dead. She wanted him dead!

 

“Make it stop!” Peri screamed, but nothing touched her ears. Silas’s arms around her jerked, and he looked up when the glass in the front door shattered. A dark hand snaked in, looking for the lock. Dazed, Peri stared at it, wondering if she was alive. She was on the floor. Silas was wrapped around her as if he could keep her from falling apart by his touch alone. He hadn’t known what to fragment, and now they were both there, two timelines fighting for supremacy, driving her insane.

 

“Thank God you told me where you were,” Howard said as he tumbled in, the light gray in the parking lot behind him. “Opti is two minutes behind us.”

 

She was hallucinating again. Howard couldn’t really be here.

 

“Silas!” the imaginary man shouted as he rushed forward and grabbed Silas’s shoulder. “We have to go! Pick her up!”

 

Peri’s breath came in with a heave when Silas stood, scooping her up in one move. “Where’s Taf?” Silas said raggedly.

 

“We got a car. Another friend of hers. Come on!”

 

Peri shook. They’d been interrupted mid-defrag, and she was dying. Howard held the door, and the flush of cool air struck Peri with the suddenness of a slap.

 

“What happened?” Howard said, pacing beside them to the car.

 

Silas’s lips pressed. “I tried to defragment something I shouldn’t have.”

 

Peri’s chest hurt as she felt her breath come and go. Around and around the memories spun. There was nowhere to hide, and she shook, going into shock.

 

“What’s wrong with Peri?” Taf said from behind the wheel as the two of them got Peri into the backseat.

 

“Just go!” someone yelled, and the car lurched into motion, going too fast for even an empty parking lot. Dazed and unable to separate reality from memory, Peri breathed in the scent of Silas as he held her in the backseat. She looked at her hands, wondering where the blood was. The sky was gray. The ground was gray. She was gray, stuck between the two. She loved Jack. She’d killed Jack. Everything was all at once. Where there had been a hole in her memory, there was now overwhelming confusion and loss, married to images that made no sense. She couldn’t handle two realities. If she could, she’d be an anchor.

 

“Is she going to be okay?” Howard addressed Silas worriedly.

 

“I don’t know,” Silas said grimly. But as Peri tried to remember how to move her lungs in order to breathe, she doubted if okay was anything she would ever be again.

 

 

 

 

 

CHAPTER

 

TWENTY-FOUR

 

 

Silas watched Peri breathe, amazed her mind was still fighting even as it was fraying right before him. Both timelines held information they needed: who’d betrayed her and how deep the corruption went. He had fragmented almost nothing, believing he could hold it all until he had the entire two lines. But the memories had come too fast and adhered too quickly—and though the two timelines weren’t yet coherent, she had them both now. The more they fell into place, the more unstable she’d become. She was trembling, full into a memory overdraft, which was a nice way of saying he’d screwed up, leaving her mind to destroy itself.

 

“Turn left,” Silas whispered, his voice just louder than the car’s engine. They’d been interrupted, and he didn’t know what to destroy, what to fix. And she was in agony. Damn you, Allen. I blame you. “It’s the third one up. Stone walkway,” he said.

 

“I see it,” Taf said, and Silas held Peri closer to minimize the jostling as Taf drove them through the high-end subdivision. He could feel Peri’s thoughts circling as she tried to organize the memories he’d unearthed. Her pain and betrayal resonated in him as if they were his own. It was the pain that was keeping her sane right now, the desire for revenge. She couldn’t allow others to believe they wouldn’t be held accountable for what they’d done. But it was only a matter of time until Peri got everything in the right place. Grief wouldn’t be a strong enough emotion to hold her together then.

 

“Peri?” he whispered when he realized her shaking had stopped. “Stay with me.”

 

“Is she okay?” Howard said from up front, and her eyelids flickered.

 

“No.” Silas’s voice was ragged as his thumb brushed the hair from her cheek. “Peri, can you hear me?”

 

Her breath came in as a wheezing, pained sound, and he fastened on it. She could hear him, even lost in the twin timelines her mind was stuck on. If he could mute them both to where the present was stronger than the past, he might be able to stave off the inevitable. But for how long? “Hang on,” he whispered, seeing Karley’s two-story home, gray in the snow and porch lights. “Concentrate on what you hear. I’m not letting you go.”