Deep Sky

himself on the table.

Green. Blue.

He was about to be drawn out of this memory against his will. Any second. But drawn out to what? And to when? When and where had he put the Tap into his head?

Green. Blue.

Black.

He flinched and opened his eyes. He was back in the study, at the plane’s tail. Holt and Porter were standing in front of him, Richard Garner just beyond them and off to the side, still bound to the dolly. Travis looked down and saw that he himself was bound to a dolly now, right where he’d been in the dream.

Which hadn’t been a dream.

Neither had it been a projection sent to him by somebody else.

It hadn’t been either of those things.

He had less than a second to think about it, and then his memory simply wiped itself away. Vanished like a sand picture in the blast of a leaf blower.

Where was he?

How had he gotten here?

What the hell was he tied to?

An old man who looked like Wilford Brimley leaned into his viewpoint, scrutinizing his face.

“Can you understand me?” the old man said.

But before Travis could reply, his memory blew away again, no more than a second after it’d begun to form.

Where was he?

How had he gotten here?

Garner watched Travis struggle against the drug. As strange as it was to experience the effect yourself, it was almost more so to see someone else endure it.

He watched Travis’s eyes keep losing the room and finding it again. Rediscovering his surroundings every second or so as his memory fractured.

Porter was leaning in with his nose six inches from Travis’s.

“Tell us who goes through the Breach,” he said—framing it as a command, not a question.

Travis blinked, no doubt having lost the statement already. He stared at Porter and said nothing.

Porter repeated the instruction. And again. And again. Carefully and patiently. Working it into Travis’s subconscious like a dog trainer setting a patterned response. He’d been doing this for years.

“Tell us who goes through the Breach.”

Garner had undergone the questioning himself all night and all day. Sessions like this every hour or so, seventeen in all. The needle marks on his arms helped him keep count.

He’d given up a lot of information. He knew it. He also knew he’d held on to the only piece that would matter in the end. He knew by the frustration he’d seen in their eyes, each time the narcotic’s power dissipated and his memory stabilized. They hadn’t gotten it from him. He’d been protecting it too long to surrender it now, even under the drug.

It would be different with Travis. If he knew the answer, he’d learned it today.

Porter gave the command a sixth time: “Tell us who goes through the Breach.”

Travis’s eyelids drew close together. He seemed to grasp the instruction, even beneath the crumbling memory.

“Tell us who goes through the Breach.”

“I do,” Travis said.

Porter narrowed his eyes. He drew back a few inches.

“I go through,” Travis said. Something like amusement crossed his face. “Lucky me.”

“Is he playing with us?” Holt said. “Is the effect wearing off?”

Porter looked at his watch. “It’s probably starting to. We used up three sixteen while he was in the memory.”

“Get the Tap back out of him,” Holt said. “While you can still make him cooperate.”

Porter nodded. He leaned in again and said, “Think the Tap out of your head.” He repeated it, his speech precise and direct. He said it a third time and Travis shut his eyes and seemed to concentrate hard on something. A few seconds later he gasped. His face twisted in pain. Then the Tap began to emerge from the same pinprick hole it’d gone in through, a bright green tendril snaking and darting. Porter held up his hand and let it collect in a mass on his palm.

“Try again in an hour,” Holt said. “We’ll have the whole four or five minutes to question him then. We’ll get it.”

By the time they left with the Tap—re-formed into its cube shape—Garner could tell Travis’s memory was solidifying. The drug’s influence tended to recede very rapidly, from full strength to no effect at all in about a minute. The clarity growing in Travis’s eyes showed he was well into that time.

Where was he?

Some little room.

He was tied to something—a dolly, it looked like.

He took a deep breath, and felt a fog clear from his mind as he did. Another breath—even clearer.

He looked up and saw that Richard Garner was with him, also tied to a dolly.

He thought the room was a study, though for the moment he wasn’t sure how he knew that.

There was a deep droning sound coming through the walls and floor. Jet engines.

This was Air Force One. This room was back in the tail. He was certain of that, though again he didn’t know how.

While he wondered, it occurred to him that someone had just left the room. Two men, he thought. And they’d taken something with them.

The Tap? Had that been it? He was all but sure of it, and a second later he was sure of something else:

The Tap had just come out of his head.

The headache said so, and the trickle of blood at his temple confirmed it.

His next breath pushed out the last of the haze, and the day’s memory came down on him in a single rush.

He and Paige and Bethany, flying to Rum Lake. Evading the contractors by entering the mine. Meeting Dyer. Seeing the second Breach. Using the transparency suit to get away. Then the supermarket. The missile. The mindless drive down to Oakland afterward, with little thought in his head but gutting Stuart Holt like a fucking pig. He recalled boarding the plane, scouting it out, finding Garner back here at the tail. Then killing the others, and—

And catching up to the present.

From within a Tap memory.

He thought about that. He stared into space and tried to put it together.

The Tap memory had ended in the conference room aboard this plane.

Where had it begun?

When had it begun?

He couldn’t recall any starting point.

Worse yet, the Tap had burned all his real memories of the time span in question. It always did that. He had no way to remember what had really happened during the period he’d just relived.

“Coming around?” Garner said.

Travis nodded.

“They used a drug on you,” Garner said.

Travis nodded again. “Phenyline dicyclomide.”

Garner looked surprised.

“Dyer told me about it,” Travis said.

“Do you understand what they did to you just now?”