Forest of Memory (3 page)

“You don’t.” He picked up the rifle, which was no less terrifying now that I knew it shot tranqs. They were designed to take down a deer. No telling what they would do to me. He wandered over to where I stood by my cart. “What’re you hauling?”

“I deal in Authenticities. Antiques, mostly.” It was not, I thought, the moment to mention that I dealt in Captures as well. I very much wanted to get out of this alive, and despite his assurances about the deer, I was less than confident in my survival odds.

“Let me see?” He walked over to me, and it’s hard to describe the way he seemed to get bigger as he came. This is one place where a Capture would not have shown you the emotional experience, even if you were tapping directly into my vitals. There was a power in his movement, as if he were holding the earth down as he walked, as if he were grounding the world instead of the other way around. Up close, he was older than I’d thought. Above the mask, his face was creased with wrinkles. His eyebrows had been dark once, but were bushy with wild gray hairs now. I could only see from the bridge of his nose to right above his eyes, but it was enough to tell that he was laughing at me.

“What?” I moved to stand between him and my cart, though if he had chalenged me on it, I would have
let him
given him the whole thing in exchange for letting me walk away. The move was the unconscious part of my brain wanting to protect its possessions, regardless of the danger. The rest of my brain was busily engaged in screaming RUN!, and the two conflicting impulses led me to just stand in front of him. Not threatening, not retreating.

“I’m curious, and we have some time before they wake up.” His eyes crinkled again. “Maybe I’ll buy something.”

“These aren’t for sale.”

“No?”

For a brief moment, my brain was actually smart. “I’m making a delivery. To Portland. My client is expecting me.”

He
paused
cocked his head then, and his eyes went vague, looking off to the side at a projected virteo that didn’t even show up in the daylight as a glimmer. He grunted and shook his head. “Or you’ve just purchased them yourself. Well . . . Katya Gould. We apparently have more to discuss than I thought we did.”

In any other circumstance, the fact that he knew my name would have been no big deal. Facial recognition flags people all the time, so you know who you’re talking to and how they stand in rankings compared to you. When I meet with a new client, I know their purchase history and the name of their first pet. What made this terrifying was that *I* didn’t have a connection. He did.

Something to discuss? That did NOT sound good. And what had he seen in that pause? Something about who I’d bought the typewriter from? My client list? I stalled, pretending that antiques were the only business he could possibly mean. I can’t tell you if I was doing that as a strategy—to try to seem as if I wasn’t a threat—or if it was just a panicked coping mechanism. I remember it both ways.

“You’re a collector?”

That smirk again, just peeking above the cloth. “Indirectly.”

“You make a habit of being vague, don’t you?”

“I make a habit of not answering questions I don’t need to.” He tilted his head at the deer. “Case in point. You, on the other hand, are very good at tracking down the provenance of the objects you sell and, more important, you have a client list that interests us.”

“I note you said ‘us.’”

“Yes.” He shrugged and gave me nothing past that. “So, you have a typewriter, I see.” They turned up in costume dramas often enough that I wasn’t surprised he could name it. Though I was surprised by his next sentence. “That’s the one war correspondents liked, isn’t it?”

“Hemingway had one.” I almost swung straight into the sales pitch, I but managed to hold my tongue. “You were interested in my clients. I should point out that I maintain complete confidentiality. I never discuss price or purchased items with others.”

That’s the thing about being an Authenticities dealer. People who seek my services want a unique experience, and that means they often don’t even want other people to know what they have. There are some people who won’t share their purchases with their spouses.

“Where do you get ribbons for them?”

That startled me, but not too much. “I print them.” Seeing the surprise on his face, above the mask, I felt like I had to justify it. “I include the original ribbon, but even with re-inking, most are close to two hundred years old, and too fragile to use. If someone actually wants to use the typewriter, and some people do, then I have to give them a reproduction ribbon. I label them.”

He just grunted and picked up the dictionary, which made me think he might have been a collector. Someone else would have gone for the typewriter, mistaking it as the most valuable item. But the dictionary had a solid provenance and was dripping with wabi-sabi.

He thumbed open the first few pages. “How much?”

“You can’t afford it.”

“Maybe my client can. How much?”

So I told him and watched his brows rise to vanish under the bottom edge of his hood. He rolled his eyes, and for a moment I thought he was making a face at the amount, but the telltale shimmer of a virteo projection sprang into bein g in front of him. He made a few eye gestures and then blinked twice to shut the field down. “The vinos are in your account. Not that you can check, but they are there.”

“Won’t that tell me who you are?” The words were out of my mouth before I could think them through. I mean, maybe he hadn’t killed me because he’d thought I couldn’t identify him with the mask and all. If I had just reminded him that he had made a mistake, it would be appallingly stupid.

It didn’t seem to bother him at all though. If anything, he seemed to find the question amusing. His eyes crinkled in another grin. “No.”

Which was a relief and deeply disturbing at the same time. I mean . . . being able to mask transaction identification was high-level stuff, from what I understood. I occasionally had clients try it, but . . . well. My i-Sys is very good.

The dictionary vanished into his kit. The movement, and I’m sure this was calculated, showed a handgun under his coat, and another clip for the big firearm, which almost certainly did not have tranquilizers in it. “You’ll want to cover up the cart, now. In case of rain.”

There hadn’t been any rain in the forecast when I’d left this morning, but I didn’t argue. The man had a gun, after all, even if he had just paid an ungodly sum for the dictionary. Or his clients had, whoever they were. I tugged the tarp back into place, zipping it down. When it was sealed, the cart could be submerged in water up to ten feet in depth and the seals would hold. There wasn’t any real need for that, but it had seemed like a good investment to be certain wind and rain couldn’t get in. Sometimes I dealt in paper ephemera like the dictionary. Clients wanted to see the graceful decay of age, not mishandling by their broker, which meant I had to be able to annnotate damage. Recent water damage? Didn’t sell.

I had the cart half covered before my brain processed what he’d said and the red flag it raised. I was only an hour out of Salem, and the sky through teh trees was a crystal-clear blue. “There’s no rain in the forecast today.” Here’s where Lizzie should have confirmed that for me, but my earbud remained stubbornly silent.

He stepped back, turning out a little so the deer came into his line of sight without his needing to turn his back on me. “We’ve got about twenty minutes before they wake up. Need to get the cart off the road.”

“I’m not . . . I’m not—what are you going to do with me?”

“I want you to push the bike back the way you came. I’ll be right behind you.”

I shook my head and backed away from him. This was not going anywhere good. Turn my back on him? Walk away, with him standing behind me with a gun, and push the bike off the road? I didn’t know why—or even IF—he’d paid for the fdictionary, but my brain put together this whole scenario where he was about to kill me and had framed someone else by using their account for the transfer. All he had to do was hide my body. Anyone watching my live feed would see where I disappeared from the net and would look forward for me first, along the route I’d been traveling. If I went backward, it would take them longer to find me.

And how long would it take someone to notice I was gone? Presumably, my i-Sys would be rasising flags right now, but I didn’t actually know that. I mean . . . I didn’t know anyone who’d been off the grid for more than a couple of minutes at a time, and that was always in places where the reception was known to be spotty. Spelunkers whose smart-dust trails were interrupted, things like that. Would my disappearance be remarked upon, or would it look like equipment failure? Or had he made arrangements to cover that, even?

He hadn’t. I didn’t know this then, but he was working with a ticking clock that had nothing to do with the deer. I’d been a minor bobble in his day; he’d been planning to release me, until his client changed his plans. My i-Sys WAS sending up all sorts of system flags and trying to arrange for a search-and-rescue team to look for me. All I knew at the time was panic.

I thought I would probably have better odds sprinting for the woods. At least the trees might make it harder for him to shoot me. That was why he’d waited until the deer were on the road, right?

He saw all of that and lifted the gun, just a little, so that it pointed more toward me. “Just put your hands on the handlebars and turn the bike around. Nice and slow.”

I did. What I remember most clearly is the sweat running down the backs of my knees. That’s a funny place for sweat, isn’t it? You think about fear and clammmy palms, or sweat on your forehead, but it was my knees. I thought they would crumple with each step. I THINK he helped me turn the bike, because the path was so narrow that it would have been hard to do with the cart, but I don’t remember for sure. I justr emember the backs of my knees tickling as sweat slid down from my thighs to my calves.

There wasn’t anything realistic I could do, so I walked the bike, expectings omething to hit me from behind with each step. “How far do you want me to go?”

“Just keep walking.”

“It’d be faster if I rode.”

He snorted at that. I didn’t look over my shoulder, even though he didn’t tell me to keep staringstraight ahead—or at least, I don’t think he did. All the scary movies I’d seen and the books I’d read over the years told me that looking back caused bad things to happen. After a while—I’m not sure how long, since I’ve discovered that I’m a crap judge of time without an i-Sys to remind me—he said, “Turn off here. To the right.”

He put just enough pressure on the cart that I had to slow, and I think I was in enough shock that I just followed his command. I stepped off the road and followed his instructions as we pushed the bike through the woods and around clumps of ferns. The undergrowth slapped my legs with slender branches, leaving welts on my bare calves as if I’d been beaten with tiny switches. I envied the man’s long trousers and shirt sleeves. Once he had to help me boost the bike and cart over a moss-covered log. He slung the rifle over his shoulder in order to use both hands to lift the cart.

In hindsight, I have this mental image of shoving the bike and trailer back toward him. It would have knocked him off balance. He might even have been pinned for a moment by the cart. I could have run into the woods and dropped behind one of the thickets, burrowed into the ferns and gotten away.

Instead, I thanked him for helping. I THANKED him. That still burns.

But it also snapped me out of the shock a little as I realized that I was just going along with whatever he wanted me to do. It’s easy for you to sit there and wonder why I didn’t try to escape, but by this point, maybe only ten minute s had passed. My mind was still trying to understand what had happened. I started looking for another opportunity. Started trying to think through what would happen if I ran. I kept subvocalizing questions to Lizzie, out of sheer reflex, and the continuing silence made me raelize how much I relied on her to help me make decisions. It wasn’t so much that she told me what to do as that I liked having someone to bounce ideas off of. So don’t judge me for taking ten minutes before I genuinely tried to think of ways to escape.

I’ve gotten a lot of flak for making this up, or for being a willling victim. I wasn’t. And I can’t prove that to anyone because there’s no record. This was hard for me.

We went deeper still into the woods. Underneath the wind, I could just make out the sound of water running. It was the tantalizing sound of freedom.

He stopped and pointed at a small clump of saplings.

“Here. This is good.”

He pulled the branches aside and gestured for me to push the bike and trailer back into the space. It did not take him long to drag underbrush up to mask my equipment. At first I thought it was not very well hidden, but the random branches and leaves he’d thrown over it broke the shape up enough that it was hard to spot, even knowing exactly where it was.

He told me to walk ahead of him and he tidied up the signs of our passage as we
walked back
returned to the road. When we got back to it, I was surprised by how far away we were from the deer.

The buck lifted his head, and the man swore.

“That took longer than I expected.”

At first I thought he meant the drug had taken longer to wear off, but then I realized he was talking about hiding the bike.

He shook his head and ran past me to the deer, slinging his gun in front of him. His feet made no sound at all on the pavement. I watched him run for a minute as I continued walking forward, as if he were behind me and forcing me. Then my brain caught up with the fact that he was completely distracted. I stopped.

I don’t remember really weighing the options. I just turned and slipped off the road back into the underbrush and headed toward the sound of the stream. I say “slipped” as if I were at all graceful, but compared to the man, I sounded like a demo team tearing up an old road. He slowed and glanced over his shoulder as I crashed through the leaves. I didn’t care. I just barreled between the trees. By this point, I was thinking at least a little clearly, and I RAN, not caring about how big a path I tore through the woods. I figured that even if he saw me go, he still had to deal with the deer, and the more distance I put between us the harder it would be for him to find me when I went to ground. More important, there was a chance that if I left the range of his damper, my i-Sys could spot me again.