The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

Most important to kill our people, captives, even if you fail to kill all hostiles. Kill captives first. I am sorry to ask this.
    Another gap, and then a last passage, this portion so faint that Travis had to tilt the page toward the light.
    PS—If you kill them all don’t go near the thing they have taken, three-inch sphere, dark blue, just get away and call Tangent.
    Travis read the full page over again. By the time he’d finished, he felt a chill his heavy coat couldn’t keep out. He noticed a second slip of paper just visible in the pocket of Mrs. Garner’s shirt. He withdrew it and unfolded it. There were only a few lines.
    Richard,
    I’m fading in and out a lot, and when I’m out, I’m back in the dorms, back in Room 712 under that quilt with you, watching the snow over the law quad. Lucky life, spent with the only one I ever loved.
     
    Ellen
     
    Feeling like a trespasser, Travis carefully refolded the note and returned it to her pocket, exactly as it had been.
    He stood, and saw for the first time the ground outside the starboard windows, above where Ellen sat. Here at last were the footprints. And ATV tracks. Though they terminated at the edge of the snowfield, forty yards away, there was little doubt which way they led.

CHAPTER FIVE
    Paige Campbell stared up at the pines and tried to slip into dream lucidity. She’d managed it twice so far, for maybe a minute each time—not much, all things considered, a few crumbs of peace, but oh Christ, they were worth it. Even as something to look forward to, they helped.
    She wouldn’t need them to look forward to, of course, if she could just move her head a few inches. Raise it up from the tabletop, then bring it down again as hard as she could, crack open the back of her skull and rupture something, anything. Three or four solid whacks, before the rat-faced man could stop her, and then she’d be gone.
    Why was that asking too much? Why was it a pipe dream just to want the chance to die?
    Because the rat-faced man was good at his job; that was why. Because her head was strapped fast to the wood, like every other part of her. Even her tongue had been clamped to her teeth, to keep her from biting through it and choking on her own blood.
    So instead she tried for dream lucidity. It was magic when it worked. All at once no pain, no straps, no clearing in the freezing daylight that never ended. The dream places were familiar, safe. The first one had been the reading nook in her living room. She hadn’t read anything there in the dream; she’d just walked through the space, barefoot on the stone tiles, and run her hand over the soft fabric of the chair.
    The second place had been the beach at Carmel, pushing her fingers down into the sand, past the baked surface to where it was cool. She hadn’t been there in years, but the memory of it came back in high definition now.
    The opportunities to slip away were rare. It was only possible when the drug started to wear off, in the last five or ten minutes before they injected her again. If she wasn’t careful they’d catch on, and start injecting her sooner. That meant closing her eyes was a no-no, as much as it would have eased the way into dreamland. She’d just have to get there with them open, but that was fine. She’d done it both times.
    One trick was to stare at the pines instead of the sky. The light was less intense that way, maybe half the effect of letting her eyelids fall shut.
    This time around, though, none of it was working. Too many distractions. The rat-faced man and one of the others were arguing just a few feet away, jabbering machine-gun fast in their language. Once upon a time Paige had loved the sound of that language, had considered minoring in it, going abroad for two semesters to immerse herself in it, and had moped for months when her academic path had swung her away from that option. Now, she thought, if she had a big red button in front of her that would magically tear the tongue out of every man, woman, and child on the planet who spoke it, she’d break her hand on that button.
    If her hand wasn’t strapped to a fucking table.
    The argument ended, and here came the rat-faced man’s footsteps again. Here came the needle again. No dreamland this time.
    Here came the tears, too, even before the injection and the resumption of the pain. She hated that she couldn’t stop herself, hated having ceded that much control to these people.
    Her body jerked when the needle touched the skin