The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

a passed note, and he marked its progress by the silence it left in its wake.
    They let him sleep after the fifth round of questioning. He woke to the bark of the wheels touching down. Then came a jeep ride over rough ground for a few hundred yards, through bright sunlight that warmed the black fabric of the hood still over his head. The baked air could only be that of a desert. Behind him he heard the jet already powering up to take off again. The jeep reached a smooth surface at the same time that it passed into shadow out of the sunlight. An elevator ride followed, lasting some ten seconds. Ten seconds moving down.
    “You can take that off him. Those, too.” A woman’s voice. Soft and raw, like she’d ruined it screaming at a rock concert the night before.
    The binds at his wrists clicked open, and the hood came away to reveal a windowless office—and Paige Campbell standing in front of him. The veins in her right arm were still discolored, and her face remained drawn and pale, darkened beneath her eyes. But she was on her feet, as steady as a person could be. Her breathing was silent, normal. She’d come out of the Brooks Lodge on a stretcher, two thirds of the way dead, maybe ten hours ago, depending on how long Travis had slept on the plane.
    The others left the room. He was alone with her.
    She followed his eyes to her arm, the now-sutured incision across her triceps just peeking from her sleeve. Some compound the color and consistency of tar had been applied to the wound, probably deep inside it. The swelling around the injury had all but vanished.
    “You’ll see a lot of strange things around here,” she said. Then, softer: “I saw a map of the distance you carried me. Thank you.”
    He didn’t know what to say back to that. He nodded, and thought of what else she must have seen by now. His criminal record. Every detail of what he’d done. More than enough to counterbalance any merit he might have gained with her.
    “Sorry for your treatment aboard the plane,” she said. “We’re methodical.”
    Her cell phone rang. She looked at the display, answered, and told the caller to give her a minute. In her voice was the same tension he’d heard among those on the plane.
    She gave him a look that seemed to cut past any further polite conversation while at the same time apologizing for it. “Would you consent to a narcotic interrogation? It may help us recover more of what the Whisper told you.”
    He had a sense that she didn’t expect that to work, but that she’d take what she could get. He also felt sure it would happen whether he consented or not. Nice of her to pretend to ask, though.
    On the wall behind her was something that clashed with the professional look of the office. It looked like a promo poster for a rock band. It was a close-up of a steel surface, with the words ETHER WASTE carved roughly into it. Nothing else. No tour dates, no website address.
    Paige waited for an answer. Probably wouldn’t for much longer.
    “Do what you have to,” he said.
    “Thank you.” She indicated a door on his left. “There’s a bathroom there if you’d like to clean up. I’ll be back in a few minutes, and we’ll get started.”
    He turned toward the closed bathroom door as she crossed the office to leave.
    “I thought I was back up to speed on heavy metal groups,” he said. “Guess I missed one.”
    Her footsteps halted at the threshold to the corridor. “What?”
    He looked at her. Saw her looking back with blank eyes.
    “Ether Waste,” he said, nodding at the poster. “I’ve never heard of them.”
    She didn’t move. Still staring at him from the doorway. She had no idea what the hell he was talking about. Maybe the drugs were still having some effect on her thinking, though nothing else about her behavior said so.
    Then she reacted.
    Her eyes narrowed and she took a step in from the doorway. Looked back and forth from him to the poster. “You can read that?”
    He started to ask if she was okay, but the sentence died as a thought. He was looking at the poster again, which suddenly looked more like a blown-up forensic image than a promo. He looked at the text in particular. Really looked at it, instead of just reading it.
    It wasn’t English.
    It wasn’t even writing, by any definition he’d have assigned. There were no discrete rows or columns. No sense of order at all. The engraving on the steel was just a chaotic tangle of curves and lines, overlapping and pointing in all