Two-hundred-sixty-seven, two-hundred-sixty-eight, two-hundred-sixty-nine…
Folded hands clasped inches from his own forehead, body rigid, stiff, barely remembering to draw breath every few seconds, Kellen opened his eyes. A drop of sweat left the edge of his chin and hit the floor below his face.
It wasn’t working. Neither exhausting him enough to sleep, nor taxing enough of his mental energy to shut off the thoughts.
With a defeated sigh, Kellen relaxed out of the solid plank he had been holding and turned over on the floor. He reached out and checked the time on his phone. 6:47 A.M.
The device clattered to the ground, Kellen’s arms retracting toward himself, fingers pressing to his forehead. He had to sleep.
“Stop.” He sat up on the floor. Dropped his hands onto his folded knees and shut his eyes for a moment. “Enough.”
Water. Salt. Dirt. The burn of it. In his nose, his throat. The sting in his eyes.
Then deeper. His airway, his lungs.
That dark room.
Kellen reached again for his phone. He didn’t think long enough to hesitate before he had selected a number from his contacts and was lifting the cracked device to his face, clawing his fingers through the loose strands at the front of his hairline, praying he would hear the line connect.
“Kellen…?” Her voice was rough with sleep and hushed like there might be someone sleeping beside her.
Kellen bit his lip hard, chest suddenly flooding with regret. He swallowed, brushed the back of his hand across his forehead. “Sorry, I butt-dialed you.” He started to lower the phone.
“You ‘butt-dialed’ me?” Instant skepticism. There was movement in the background of the call, and a moment later, Kellen heard the quiet sound of a door clicking shut. “Seriously, Kellen? You don’t call me for eight years, and then you butt-dial me? What’s really going on?”
Wolf knew something was wrong. She was standing like a statue near the bed, her tail straight, eyes pinned on her person.
Kellen watched the dog for a few seconds. He ran a hand through the front of his hair. “Sorry, I—Sorry, I don’t have anyone else to talk to about this.”
“About what?”
Heat coasted down Kellen’s back like something physical was being poured against his skin. He shut his eyes, bit his lip until the salty water taste on his tongue was fully masked in the flavor of his own blood. “What if he was right?” And with those breathed words came the terrifying feeling like standing on the edge of a cliff—abyss below, emptiness inside.
“What if who was right?” Lila’s voice dipped with impatience. There was another sound in the background. A drawer shutting, maybe.
“My father.” The two words escaped Kellen’s throat like sound through a hollow tube. Brine water. A dark room.
Six seconds of quiet on the other end. “Your father?” Another silence. “Kellen, where are you?”
“I’m—” He glanced around himself. “I’m just at the motel—Why?”
“Okay, well send me the address. I’m coming to you.”
“What? No. No, Lila—” The phone Kellen was holding vibrated with a notification, and half-fearing it was something from the ex-wife he was speaking with, he lowered the device and looked at the screen. It wasn’t a text. A notification from the CatsEye Defend3r app showed at the top of the screen.
Distractedly listening to the sound of Lila’s voice continuing from the phone speaker, too quiet to make out at a distance, Kellen touched the notification.
“! Location services shared with unauthorized application,” the top read. A long chain of Rust programming language followed.
Kellen’s heartrate slowed. He scrolled through the coding for a moment. Then swiped back down on the status bar. Location services was on. Silently, Kellen touched the option and watched it gray out. One second, two, five. And the grayed-out icon lit up again on its own.
“Lila, I need to call you back.” And he hung up.
There was a laptop in the bag under the bed. Kellen opened the computer and set it on the bed, then paced in a small circle while it booted up. He leaned over the mattress and tapped in a passcode. CatsEye Defend3r was loading on the laptop while Kellen fished around in his duffle for a USB cord.
He glanced around the room for several seconds before reaching for his right earlobe and taking out the stud earring there. He wiped the pin tip on his shirt, then pressed it into the ejection hole on the side of his phone and removed the SIM tray.
He connected the phone to the computer and sat down on the bed. “Full System Scan,” he selected from the top menu of the CatsEye program.
Brisk knocking sounded at the door to unit 325 of the Greenroof Motel.
Kellen’s eyes shot up at the door, then immediately scattered across the disassembled phone on his bed and the computer rapidly running scripts beside it.
Wolf stood up and let out a low warning bark.
Kellen’s hand moved to the touch pad, and he tapped open the start menu on the laptop and activated the lockscreen. Then, right as the knock came again, he straightened off the bed and started for the door.
One look through the peephole sent a flood of adrenaline through Kellen’s chest. He hesitated, the thudding sound of his own heartbeat filling his ears for a moment. I did this to myself, he knew. Why the fuck did I call her?
The knock came a third time, and Kellen abruptly unlocked the door and opened it. He hadn’t sent her the address, so he could’ve asked her how she got it. He could’ve used a greeting. But nothing. Nothing came out of Kellen’s mouth as he met eyes with Lila, then silently stepped aside to allow her into the unit.
Wolf took one look at the newcomer and erupted in growls. Tail tucked between her legs and neck bristling, she backed her way into the darkness under the bed and continued growling at a lower volume.
“Sweet dog,” Lila commented. She glanced at the phone and computer, then turned back to watch her ex-husband finish locking the front door.
“She doesn’t like people,” Kellen murmured. He stood awkwardly in the entryway for a moment, then moved silently to the wall, hands tucked uncertainly behind his back.
Silence. Then, “I saw the Cherokee outside. That rust bucket is still running?
Kellen passed his tongue across his lips. “What…um. Why did you come?”
“You mentioned your father might be right about something, and I just wanted to make sure it wasn’t the bit about holding little boys’ heads underwater to enhance their ‘spiritual abilities.’”
Silence. Kellen blinked.
“So, I called De’Angelo for your address because you never sent it to me,” Lila launched on. She slipped her purse off her shoulder and set it down on the bed. “Come to find out, De’Angelo hasn’t heard from you since last night. He said the guy tailing you couldn’t follow the vehicle you got in, and for all anyone knows, you’re dead.”
Kellen said nothing.
“You never checked in?”
Wolf’s growling ceased for a moment, further intensifying the silence.
“Seriously, Kell—”
“The kid they sent me to meet doesn’t know anything, so I thought a check-in could wait until morning, alright?”
“Really?” Lila sank onto the mattress beside her purse. “Well, shit, De’Angelo won’t be happy to hear that. Are you sure?”
Kellen’s vision drifted to the floor. He saw a dog paw stick out from under the bed briefly. Then a nose. And then the growling resumed. “No, I’m not sure.”
“So are you going to scout it more?” Lila seemed to notice the coffee machine in the kitchenette, and she stood up again.
“Don’t know yet,” Kellen murmured. He watched Lila open a few drawers under the countertop. She found a k-cup and started pressing buttons on the coffee machine.
“So, what was that about your father this morning?”
Kellen’s eyes pinned the floor. Rectangles. Squiggly lines someone had decided would make the linoleum look like wood. Kellen tilted his head unconsciously to the left a little, studying the pattern on the floor until he found the place where it began to repeat.
“Kellen? You said he was right about something?”
Silence.
“Not sure what in the hell that man could’ve been right about, but I’m game. Shoot.”
More quiet.
“Kellen?”
“If I thought…If I thought I saw someone…I dreamed about…in real life, am I crazy?” The question finally came out. And the taste left on Kellen’s tongue was like brine water. Crazy. Or it was all true. There was no third option.
“Someone you dreamed about?” The coffee machine beside Lila was making noises, now. She turned and put her back to it. “You think you saw someone you dreamed about? It’s probably just a trick of the mind making you think the person is familiar from one of your dreams. But that doesn’t make you crazy, Kellen. Everybody’s brain has a fart sometimes.”
Only half-consciously, Kellen’s hands lifted to his face. His chest expanded for a faltering breath, but barely any air came. She wasn’t hearing him. And why he had expected her to when he couldn’t even bring himself to really tell her was beyond him.
“Kellen?”
And suddenly she was close. Kellen’s hands lowered from his face, and he met eyes with her. It hurt. The way she stared at him, like she could see straight through everything she was looking at. Like she was reading the thoughts off his mind.
“Okay. Okay, just tell me.” That piercing blue stare. “I’ll be quiet and listen. Just tell me.”
He took another breath. Slower, this time. Focused on the feeling of the floor beneath his feet. The sounds he was hearing; the coffee maker, Wolf still growling—
“No, no. Don’t do that. Don’t just come out of it like you love to do.” Lila took Kellen’s arm in a grip uncomfortably firm—a feeling Kellen reflexively wanted to shake out of. “Tell me, Kellen, for the love of god, just—”
“The CI is someone I dreamed about.” The statement left Kellen’s throat in a whisper. Like a confession. His eyes leveled back with hers. Watched them pensively, searching for her reaction.
“The CI…? The one you met with last night?” Her grip loosened on his arm. The look on Lila’s face sent Kellen’s heartrate through the rafters. No. No, maybe after all, he had never wanted her to take him seriously. Maybe he had wanted her to brush him off, make light of the situation, tell him it was all a “brain fart.” That it was nothing.
“Well—that’s not quite the same as passing someone briefly on the street and thinking you recognize him.” Silence. Three seconds of it. And the pounding of an unchecked heartbeat in Kellen’s ears. “How—How recent was this dream, though? Have you had these dreams more recently? You told me you weren’t any more. And I thought you stopped having them years ago, around the time Skyler went missing.”
And suddenly, the panic response shut down. All the checks and balances activated. The thoughts switched off. Thick doors shut and locked behind them. Kellen’s breath slowed and steadied out.
He moved from beside the wall. “I think they bugged my phone. I’ll know within the hour what all was compromised, but the malware accessed my location at the very least.”
“Really?” Lila stood like a statue where Kellen had left her, eyes pinning him with disbelief. “Really, that’s it? You’re just going to shut down on me like usual?”
Kellen gave her a blank look.
“It’s her name, isn’t it? Nine years after the fact, and you still can’t even—No. No, that’s it. I’ve had enough. Kellen, I am so done with this bullshit of yours. You say you want to talk—you call me all the way out here—”
“I didn’t tell you to come.” Kellen’s eyes lowered to his computer, and he typed in the passcode.
“God, Kellen! ‘Skyler’, alright? ‘Skyler,’ her name was Skyler Eastland, and we lost her, alright? We lost her, and you have to accept that it happened and just—learn to live again.”
She left. Picked up her purse and left the unit.
Kellen watched the door shut behind her, the coffee machine still trickling and hissing forgotten in the kitchenette.
Face against his hand, Kellen’s eyes lowered back to the computer screen. His vision numbly registered the coding lines moving across it. Blurring, blurring, then the warmth of the first drop across his face. The track it left. Then another. Silent, steady. Kellen’s fingers lifted off the number pad on the laptop and traced up the front of his shirt. His fingertips found the worn rounded rectangle of the locket hanging from the leather string beneath the fabric. But his touch only grazed it before his hand shifted abruptly away to wipe his face instead.