Forest of Memory

by Mary Robinette Kowal

  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.

  I was breaking branches, and I knew I’d be easy to track, but I had the sense that he would have found me easily even if I’d demonstrated impeccable woodcraft. I strained my ears to listen fo r him, but beyond the sound of bracken crackling underfoot and my own labored breathing, I couldn’t make out the sound of anything else moving in the forest. The trickle of water came and went between my footfalls, and I just aimed toward where it was loudest.

  I passed a mossy log with a gap under it that was just big enough for a person to hide in. I got this idea that I could make
a false trail and double back to hide under it. So I ran on. The idea was that getting to the stream would make it harder to tell that my trail had vanished. In theory. I had read about it, and it certianly seemed to make logical sense, but I didn’t know if that was a literary convention or if streams really were good tools for throwing someone off your scent. On the other hand, it wasn’t as if he were going to be smelling my trail. At least, I didn’t think he would.

  The angle of the ground pitched down ahead of me, and I crested the top of a little hill. At the bottom was the stream I’d been running toward. It was narrow and had ferns crowding the sides. I slid down the bank and landed with a splash. Heart hammering, I stood in the rushing water and listened. The brook babbled around my ankles, but I heard nothing beyond the water.

  “Lizzie?” I pressed my hand to my earbud. “Can you hear me?”

  I didn’t really think it was likely yet, and the silence confirmed that I was still in range of whatever he had used to block me. As carefully as I could, I pulled myself up out of the stream, trying not to make it obvious that I was backtracking. I tried to be quiet as I crept back along the path I had torn through the woods. My chest hurt because I kept trying to hold my breath so it didn’t make any noise, hoping I could hear if he was coming toward me. He’d been so silent on the road. I tried to reassure myself that it had been the pavement. I’d heard him make noise as we walked in the woods with the bike, but not when he’d stepped out of the trees.

  Clearly, he could be quiet when he needed to be. I tried placing my feet carefully, but even so the leaves rustled and shushed under me as if they were trying to warn me that I was too loud. I could hardly draw air. Every fiber in my body screamed at me to turn around and not walk toward him. I kept going, hoping I could convince him that I was running downstream. I heard crashing in the forest at some distance. I didn’t think it could be him, the noise was so loud. The deer, I decided, had gotten to their feet, at least one of them, and were entering the woods. Was that good or bad?

  I had no idea. Wit h luck, he was going to follow them. Without luck, that meant whatever he was doing was finished and he could focus on finding me. I was drenched in sweat by this point as the thermal battery fibers in my clothes utterly failed to keep up with the excess of panicked heat I was generating. Still, I kept going, not hearing anything. It seemed as if the distance from the stream back to the moss-covered log had lengthened while I’d been walking. Any moment, I was sure he would appear in front of me. When I reached the log, I stepped carefully over it, not disturbing the moss, and pushed in from the back into the little hollow beneath it. I shoved leaves in front of me to create a small blind, masking me from view if he was following my trail.

  The ground was cool, and the leaves clung to my face. I remember being surprised by how damp it was. That was a relief at first, helping me cool down after my run. The spicy, almost cinnamon aroma of the crushed leaves was soothing as I lay there and waited. What I was hoping, desperately, was that he would either not look for me, or look and give up.

  As I lay there, limbs stiffening in the embrace of the earth, I heard a low hum. The slight ticking of gears going around almost blended with the breeze. A bike was on the road. It did not slow as it went past. If I had stayed on the road, would that person have been able to save me? Just having someone else present might have been enough to get me away from him—but I had run into the woods.

  The bike didn’t slow, so I assumed the deer were gone. Now I just had to figure out how long I needed to wait to be certain he was gone as well.

  My right hand started to fall asleep. Pins and needles prickled in the side of my palm, and I flexed my fingers, trying to keep the circulation going without making a sound.

  A twig cracked. I stopped breathing for a moment, absolutely certain I had somehow broken the stick myself. The more horrible and totally obvious idea came next. Another person had broken the stick. He was tracking me. I closed my eyes, as if that would somehow make it harder to find me. In the waiting darkness, I focused on listening for sounds of him. A rustle that wasn’t in time with the breeze. A squelch of a foot on soft leaves. Then a sigh.

  It really is amazing how loud a sigh can sound in the forest.

  “Come out from under the log, Katya.”

  I opened my eyes. With the leaves, I was in a cool, dark shelter of filtered green and brown. A childish part of me wanted to stay still, as if pretending I wasn’t there would make him go away. It was all too clear that my flight down to the creek had not fooled him for a moment. “The cyclist will hear the rifle if you shoot me.”

  “That is correct.”

  And then he cocked the rifle. The sigh had been bad. The sound of that small, metallic click . . . It couldn’t have echoed—we were in the woods, for crying out loud—but it still reverberates in my mind.

  Now, clearly, I’m not dead. Clearly, I came out from under the log. Leaves clung to me. Mud and scratches covered my legs and arms. He stood there, his eyes blank above the mask. The rifle was pointed at my sternum. My memory breaks here.

  I don’t remember being shot.

  I wish I could give you some poetic langauge about how things grew hazy or how I asked him “Why!?” in an impassioned tone, but that would be bullshit. It turns out that when you are drugged like that, there’s a jump cut in your memory. One minute I was standing in the forest; the next, I was lying on my back in a tent.

  Well . . . I say I was lying in a tent. It took me a minute to sort that out. Waking up was confusing. My head was too heavy to lift, and my eye s felt as if they had been filled with sand. I stared at the dappled cloth over me and couldn’t figure out what it was. At first I thought the patterns on the ceiling were moving because I was drunk, but it was just the shadows of leaves. I don’t know how much time passed as I drifted in and out of consciousness, surprised anew each time I awoke. The remnants of the drug kept trying to pull me back down into sleep. In fact, I’m not entirely certain that I didn’t fall asleep again. I remember murmuring to ask Lizzie to keep me awake.

  Her silence was baffling. Then, FINALLY, I remembered what had happened.

  My eyes opened w ide at the memory of the man aiming the rifle at me. I lay there trying to listen for some sign of him and had to fight to avoid drifting off again. I pushed myself to a sitting position, the tent pitching around me. It was a small space with walls of a synthetic silk compound. He’d set it up between two trees, and the smart fabric had wraped itself around the trunks as additional supports, making something about the size of an old pup tent. The ceiling brushed my hair when I sat up. The interior was filled with the scent of my own sweat and the decay of my breath. The sides of the tent turned in spirals around me. I gripped the thin thermal blanket in both hands and held on until the space steadied.

  There were so few things that made sense about the whole experience; I’m not sure why I expected events to suddenly appear orderly and rational now. Holding my head, I listened past the walls of the tent for someone else. I heard nothing, but that was proof of not a thing beyond the fact that he could be exceedingly quiet when he chose to be. For all I knew, he was standing just outside the tent and watching me.

  I suppose I should backtrack here to explain that one of the things I noticed when I woke up was that someone had washed me, but that I was wearing the same clothes. The thing I didn’t know, and couldn’t know, and still don’t know was whether or not anyone he had undressed me in the process of cleaning the mud from my skin. It was a profoundly creepy thought. Really. I felt more unclean than when I’d had mud all over my body. Lizzie couldn’t tell me. The only thing I had was the report of my own sensations, and they felt profoundly unreliable in that moment. I could barely turn my head without puking from dizziness.

  What had the deer felt like when it had awoken? I mean, that rack of antlers must have pulled its head back down even more than my own wanted to droop. My first instinct was to crawl out of the tent and try to stagger away into the woods, but�
��let’s face it—he had found me easily when I was in full possession of my senses. The smart course was to wait until the rest of the tranquilizer wore off before going out.

  The tent flap opened.

  I will admit: I jumped and gave a little squeal.

  He was kneeling in the dried leaves outside the tent, still with that damned mask over his lower face. I hadn’t heard him AT ALL.

  He paused, watching me recover from being startled, and tilted his head. “How do you feel?”

  “Bastard.”

  He didn’t respond, just waited. I squinted past him, but the light outside the dim interior of the tent dazzled my eyes almost to the point of pain. All I could really see was that we were still in a forest. I presumed it was the same one.

  I was wrong, of course, but I wouldn’t know that until later.

  I still don’t know how he moved me from a forest outside Salem to one in Washington. I mean, we must have been in a vehicle of some sort, but that’s just one more giant gaping hole in my story. I only promised to tell you what I experienced though, so the things I didn’t . . . well. You can’t blame me for not knowing them, can you?

  Anyway, he knelt there, waiting, and I sat there being stubbornly righteous and feeling as if answering any questions would be giving in to my captivity. He didn’t seem particularly put out, but then it’s sort of hard to tell what someone thinks when they have a full face mask on. He passed me a water bottle.

  Or rather, he held one out, but I didn’t take it. He shrugged and set it down on the floor of the tent. “You’ll be thirsty. Drink it slowly.”

  Then he let the flap fall. I didn’t hear him walk away, but I hadn’t heard him approach the tent either. For all I knew he was right on the other side of the flap, waiting for me to move. It was incredibly maddening. Every breath I took seemed too loud. The air in the tent burned my throat. I put my hands to my head and bent forward, trying to get a grip on myself.