She wondered what had happened back at the camp. She had missed appointments. Did she still have those jobs? Would they understand? The Jorgensons needed more flour, have to remember that... She felt the ache in her head and tried to remember she didn’t need to worry about the flour, but nothing but the minutia of camp life wanted to stay in her mind.
The muttering stopped, the man slumped over where he sat, asleep or unconscious.
Eleanor let her head fall to the side and searched for something, anything she could use to escape. She sat next to a deformed section of rock, as if someone had dripped stone wax down the side of a sheer cliff face. Almost like a border.
She squinted. The same as in Joel’s sketch. She was sure of it. Smooth, with a border around it on three sides.
She had made it.
Too late.
She strained her bound hands toward the rock face, to feel it, to know she had achieved a portion of her goal. She extended her fingers a fraction not enough to attract the attention of the sleeping man,
Cold! Such cold, she’d never felt anything like it. She remembered the verse.
Mirror of stone
Cold as space
Passage through the dark
Passage? Certainly cold. But passage?
She inched closer. Her hand. Did it go through the rock? Was it an illusion, like the crevasse earlier?
She rocked to her knees and the tie around her ankles dug into her thighs. Pushed up to a kneeling position, pushed against the edge of the border with her bound wrists. She stood at the edge of the smooth surface. Half again her height, twice her width, not as red as the surrounding stone, but black, with a subtle sheen.
The rock could be the same. The pain in her head grew with each movement. Her hobbled feet betrayed her and she stumbled over a rock. She cried out as she caught herself with her hands.
The sound woke the man and he approached her, slow with sleep but the madness still in his eyes.
No time to wonder, to be sure. She took a deep breath and threw her body against the mirror’s surface.
And at the edge of her vision the man’s face went rigid in shock and then she passed through the stone mirror into the darkness.
Chapter Nine
Sunlight crawled across the wooden slats of the wall. The window framed slender trees stirring in the breeze and green fields rolling away out of sight. Adam turned away from the light.
A desk squatted in the corner, the shelves above filled with models of ships, homemade during long hours with his grandfather. Endless afternoons spent whittling; working wood into the exact shape of each type of ship his grandfather had served on.
Voices from the past echoed. “Granddad, why can’t we make an order from the supply ship? They’ve got really neat models, with lights and mini anti-gravs to give lift.”
His grandfather paid the complaint no mind. He’d heard it before and would hear it again.
“Worth doing things yourself, boy. You’ll know the shape and line of this ship, where she bows, where she bends. Where are you now?”
“Working on the reactor chamber. Next’ll be the crew quarters and then I’ll finish up the helmsman’s pod.”
“You’d not know that if you bought a model from supply.”
“But it’d look better and be done by now.” But he muttered the words away from the old man’s hearing.
Adam pulled himself back to the present. Every breath hurt. He tried to reach the glass of water on the nightstand. His hand didn’t obey. He tried again. Nothing.
Panic made him gasp, each breath sliced deeper. He closed his eyes and held his breath, willed himself to slow down. He opened his eyes, stared at the ceiling, tried again to remember how he came to be at his grandfather’s house.
Something about a case. Something stolen? He closed his eyes, rifled through the mental cabinet of memory, but all the files were empty, only out-of-focus pictures remained. A young man in a coffee shop. A face, in a mask, that fell. Stone walls surrounded him. Nothing more.
He opened his eyes again. Something, a start. Outside, he saw a tall man stride through the fields towards the house. Comforted, Adam went back to sleep.
When he woke, his grandfather sat in the wooden chair at the foot of the bed.
“’Bout time. Though they said you’re hurt pretty bad.” His grandfather, Jake Cole, would never get old, just greyer. Tall and broad, his grandfather could likely still fill out his old Navy uniform without a wrinkle.
Adam coughed. The blood spatter on the cover threatened to bring back the panic.
“Yeah, they said you’d be doing that for a while.” Jake uncurled from the chair and reached for a damp towel sitting on the dresser. “Here.” He sponged the blood from Adam’s lips and blotted the cover. “Well, it’s not the first time that’s seen blood.”
Jake rinsed the towel in a basin and sat back down. “Doctor said you might not be able to talk much for a while. That true?”
Adam forced his head to move. The slightest of nods felt a gargantuan task.
“Right then. We’ll make do. Let’s start at the beginning. Do you remember what happened to you? Blink twice, quick like, for yes. Once for no.”
Adam wondered how even his eyelids could hurt.
“You don’t. Well, that’ll make this interesting, because no one else knows what happened either.” Jake settled back in the chair and took out his pipe, tapped the bowl on the footboard of the bed. He didn’t light it. He almost never did anymore, but he cupped it in his hand when deep in thought.
“You were chasing some girl. SecDept didn’t release a lot of the details. You went into the mountains and came out five days later. The folks in the camp say you staggered out like the rocks themselves beat you to pieces. You made it to your flitter, radioed in your position and collapsed.” He scrutinized the bowl of the pipe, as if he could find answers there. “Almost three weeks ago. You’ve woken up a couple times, but never knew where you were. I brought you home from the hospital as soon as they’d let me. Don’t trust them to do a proper job of it.”
Adam felt like his grandfather read him a story from an old book. This had happened to someone else, not him. Nothing familiar, nothing sparked a memory.
“Doctor says you got a lot of dust in you. No one stays in those mountains for that long and comes out. You can bet the Guards who came to get you asked the prospectors why the hell they didn’t send help. They’re not talking, claim their camp doctor is missing and they’re too worried about him to spare much thought for a stranger. Whole place is under lockdown.”
Adam had been sure at some point in his grandfather’s story a light would come on, memory would be unleashed and he’d feel whole again. But nothing came.
“They’re plenty angry about the lockdown, but we need that ore too much to let them quit working.” He put the pipe away and sat up straight, shoulders squared. “The damage from the dust may be permanent, son. I’m sorry. You’ll get your voice and muscle control back, but they don’t know how much your lungs will recover. And you might never get the memory back. No one knows. I guess the only good thing is they’ve sent over a heck of a bonus, called it hazard pay for the last assignment.”
“I’ll let you rest a little more.” Jake stood and rested his hand on Adam’s shoulder. His grandfather’s hand, always so competent and massive, trembled. That frightened Adam most of all. “We’ll get through this, boy. I promise.”
Two weeks later a knock at the door brought Adam’s concentration from his lap desk. As he shifted his focus to the door, the holoscreen winked out. “Door’s open,” he rasped.
Doc Klage strode in. On bad days, the doctor’s robustness affronted Adam. The booming voice added insult.
“How are you doing today, son?” Without waiting for an answer, th
e older man dragged the chair up to the side of the bed and plopped down. “Chilly out. Getting colder later this week, no doubt.” Small talk dispensed with, he got out the bioscanner and put it over Adam’s chest.
“Breath in. Breath out. Hmmm.”
Adam waited for the tests to finish, the poking, the prodding, and the demands to move here and there.
“Hmmph. Well, you’re better than you were, but you knew that. Your lungs are healing, slower than I’d like, but they’re healing. Chances are good they’ll be almost as good as new.”
Adam brightened.
“Note I said ‘almost.’ They’re never going to be completely healed, son. I’m sorry, but I’m not going to lie to you. When’s the last time you coughed up blood?”
Adam kept his eyes away from the washbasin and hoped he had cleaned up the traces of his fit that morning. “Days ago. Hasn’t been a problem.”
“Still no memory, I take it? No flashbacks, no disturbing dreams?”
“None.” Adam rubbed his temples. “I’ve got bits and pieces of what happened in the weeks leading up to going out to the mountains, but even that’s hazy. I wish there were more. It would be something for me to go on.”
“Don’t push it, son. I’m pretty sure it’s safe to say those memories are gone for good. Whatever happened out there, you may never know.”
Doc pushed himself up out of the chair and gathered his gear. “I’m sorry about all of this. But remember, you’re a sight better than you were. I’ll be comfortable recommending you test for active duty in a few more weeks. I’m sure you’ll be glad to get back to the job, rather than pushing papers from remote.”
Doc stopped to talk with Jake outside the door. Adam strained to hear, but couldn’t make out the words. After a few minutes, Jake came in.
“Doc told me the news. I guess we sort of figured about the memory.”
Adam stared out the window, watching the trees, wishing that somehow, some of this would make sense. “I’m going to find out anyway.”
“What?”
“I’m going to find out what happened out there.”
Jake slouched into the chair abandoned by the doctor, took out the old pipe, and twirled it in his fingers. “How do you plan to go about doing that, son?”
“I don’t know. I’m not going to live with this hole in my head and never know why. Somewhere, somebody knows something. And they’re going to tell me.”
Jake grinned. “First time you’ve sounded like yourself since this whole mess started. You let me know what you need and we’ll make it happen.”
Being out of the office presented Adam with an unexpected gift: free time. With no distractions from other officers stopping in to chat or swap stories of what they did after the previous shift, Adam found plenty of pockets of time for his new project.
From the makeshift office he had set up on his bed he punched up the call number for his last case file.
“Sealed? Why would it be sealed?” Nothing came to mind, a situation Adam had come to recognize as his new mental state of normal. “Whatever. Must be a hiccup in the system.”
He shook his head and reached for his notebook from the box of personal items Jake had retrieved from his office. Officers weren’t supposed to keep hard copy notes of their cases, but most did. Simpler to use in the field and then copy notes into the sometimes glitchy system from the office.
“All right. A witness reported seeing an older woman come to the bar the day the girl disappeared.” Hazy memories surfaced, like remembering a vid he watched a long time ago and didn’t pay attention to in the first place. The notes indicated he had spent some time with a younger man named Doug and he could put a face to the name, but found no emotional reaction, no solid feel for what, if any, relationship they’d had. Back to the mystery woman. “First place to start is a search on all records of any visitors to Travbon within a month of either side of that date. If she’d been local, the witness would likely have recognized her.”
He entered the search parameters and waited. Nothing. Not a single hit in that time for a slender woman over fifty with short grey hair. He tried again, this time for all women over fifty, starting two months before the disappearance date. Two options. He punched up the files on both and examined their photos. Improbable. One was too heavyset, not the lean figured described by the witness. The second had curly hair past her shoulders. No matches.
Adam’s communicator sounded, startling him from his perusal of the last woman’s files.
“Officer Cole, how can I help you?”
“Cole, what the hell are you doing?”
deBaca’s curt voice snapped through the screen as a new holowindow unfurled over his desk.
“What am I doing?” Adam’s mind raced. “I’m looking at some old files, running searches. There’s not much else I can do from here.”
“You attempted to access a sealed file. You know that’s not permitted.”
“Ma’am, if I had known about the seal, I wouldn’t have tried.”
“Why are you running those searches? Are those women connected to a current case?”
Adam felt his stomach curl in. She could only know that if she had his access monitored. “No, ma’am, they’re not related to a current case. I hoped to trigger memories of the last few days before my injury.”
deBaca’s scowl softened. “I suppose that’s understandable. But don’t mess with this one any further, got it, Officer Cole?” Her eyes flicked off screen for a second.
“Yes, Ma’am. It won’t happen again.”
“If you need more work, I’ll be happy to send some over. Never a shortage of reports to finish.”
“No, Ma’am.” Adam felt his heart rate return to normal. “I think I’m going to rest for a while. I’m about ready to come back to the office, though.”
deBaca smiled. “Good man. I’m sure we’ll see you in the station soon enough. Convince the doctors and they’ll convince me. deBaca out.”
Her image snapped out as the screen faded away.
Adam closed down the desktop then pushed himself off the bed. He grabbed the cane standing next to the dresser and inched out of his room.
He found his grandfather on the porch off the living room downstairs. Jake sat in a rocker. Like the house and most of the furniture, Jake had built the rocker over forty years ago as a courting gift for his new bride.
A glance told his grandfather enough. “What’s wrong, son. No, sit down first, get your breath, and then tell me.”
Adam eased into the chair his grandfather pointed to. Stronger, but still nowhere near healed and far from the excellent shape he’d been in when he went into those mountains.
“I got to thinking I’d look at the case file. It was sealed.”
Jake took out his pipe, but didn’t say anything.
“I checked my notes. A witness put a woman he’d never seen before at the girl’s home, arguing with the aunt. Figured that would be a thread to start tugging on. Ran some searches, didn’t get far. DeBaca pinged, she wants me off of this, wants it left alone.”
Jake tapped the bowl of the pipe against the porch railing. “Were you logged in with your work account?”
Adam creased his forehead. “Sure. Can’t get in otherwise.”
Jake grunted. “Hate to make you get up right after you sat down, but I want you to follow me.”
Jake led Adam down into the basement; past the boxes of his grandmother’s possessions the old man had packed away.
“Here. Follow close as you can.” The old man stopped before a pile of boxes stacked against the wall. Jake had never shown any signs of his mind going before, but Adam had to wonder.
Then Jake grabbed the top corner of the stack and pulled it towards him. He grinned at the slack look on Adam’s face a
s the entire pile swung out and revealed a hidden door.
“Get inside and we’ll talk. I guess it’s time for you to learn a few things.”
Chapter Ten
The rose tinted light soothed her eyes. For a time Eleanor observed the shift of light and color. Words, out of the range of her understanding. The rustle of movement. A faint scent in the air she couldn’t place, musty and floral. Layers of soft silken fabrics fell in graceful swags from some unseen point far above where she lay.
The lighter shades to the right led her to guess a door or window lay in that direction, behind the curtains, but no other indications of the world outside intruded into her rose cocoon. A small table sat to the left of her bed, dark wood inlayed with a light, silvery-metallic material in intricate floral patterns. Twined vines, familiar.
Her hands went to her throat, sought the hoori flower necklace, found nothing. Her pack sat on the floor, under the edge of the small table. Eleanor lifted it to the bed, rummaged through, but no necklace. She pulled the vidplayer out and compared the decorations to those on the table. The same artist could have drawn the twists of the vines and the graceful blooms. The towers of the city flickered into existence on the screen, and the same strange, stiff people again crossed through the streets, but the masks of their face revealed nothing.
She lay back. Her pack seemed untouched although the necklace was missing. But where was she? What had happened when she fell through the rock?
Again she examined the decorations of the table. A tall, thin metal vessel on the table caught her attention. She raised it to her face, sniffed, tasted sweet syrup and spices.
“Please be careful, girl-child. Do not drink too much, too quickly.” The voice was high, the Standard accented by odd whistles.
Eleanor whipped her head around, but no matter how she searched, she could not find the speaker.
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