The Breach - Ghost Country - Deep Sky

going to give you what I came here to give you,” Emily says. “It’s not much. Think of it as a nudge. A preference for where you’d like to live, when you leave this place.”
    The moment she finishes saying that, Travis feels something inside his head. A tingling. It lasts perhaps a second, then vanishes.
    “There,” Emily sighs. “You’re exactly on course now, my love. On course to meet me again.”
    Against his will, tears sting the edges of his eyes. She’s going to leave now. He’ll be alone here again. Alone with the miserable fluorescent light, and the headaches, and the ugly blue walls. And nothing else. For years, and years, and years.
    “Shhh,” she says. “It’ll all be fine. Someday we’ll laugh at this, I promise.”
    But he’s so very far from laughing right now. This moment is wonderful beyond anything he’s ever known. It is also horrible, to the same degree, because it is ending.
    “Hand me back to the grinning jackass now, Travis.”
    He knows he cannot disobey her. Feels his body shifting forward already, as if of its own volition. Feels his leg muscles contracting to stand, and his arm stretching out to give her back.
    “Please,” Travis whispers, as if he could possibly change her mind.
    “Soon,” she says.
    He wonders if he’ll think of anything but her, in all the years to come, and she pulses in his hand one last time.
    “By tonight, you won’t think of me at all,” she says.
    Then the man with the graying hair at his temples comes forward and closes his fingers over her. All that stops Travis from killing this man is Emily’s insistence. The man pulls her away. Travis’s breath rushes out. If he were holding a knife right now, he’d cut his own throat with it.
    The man named Pilgrim raps on the door. It opens, and like that, he’s gone, and the wonderful blue light with him, and Travis falls onto his bed, and there is no stopping the tears now. Still wishing for a knife, or a nice .38, he considers the sharp metal corner of his bedframe instead. It won’t be anywhere near as quick and clean as a blade. But when the job is done, it will be just as done.
    He lies there, considering it. Minutes pass. At some point it occurs to him that he’s let the blue sphere slip from his mind for a few seconds. Maybe as many as ten. How is that possible? How could he have forgotten it—her, forgotten her—for even that long?
    He realizes he’s staring right into that fucking fluorescent light now, and rolls over onto his stomach, face into the pillow. He is very tired. Very worn by the jagged emotions. He finds his awareness drifting down toward sleep.
    He wakes. His mouth is dry, like he’s been eating cotton balls. He must have slept for hours. He stands, goes to the sink, splashes water on his face and drinks with his mouth to the spigot.
    Something is troubling him. Some memory he can’t quite get to. Something he dreamed, maybe. He tries to picture it, and for a moment he draws the image of a pulsing blue light, and for some reason he feels very good about it. Maybe it was a nice dream. But even as he dwells on it, it slides down into the darkness, out of his reach. Gone.
    He straightens up, shuts off the faucet. Returns to the bed, but doesn’t feel like lying down again, or even sitting. Without really deciding to do so, he begins to pace the room: door to toilet, toilet to door, door to toilet.

Part III - ENTITY 0697

CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
    They flew west in a kind of perpetual daybreak, crossing the pinched tops of the time zones at the same speed as the Earth’s shadow.
    Travis tried to sleep. He failed. In the calm hours after takeoff, as the night’s adrenaline faded, the events in Zurich caught up with him in full. In the midst of the violence he’d thought he appreciated its scale, but he’d been wrong. With each new hour’s hindsight his sense of it deepened, like the piles of bodies in the streets around 7 Theaterstrasse.
    Twice during the flight he threw up, just reaching the lavatory both times. In each room he passed along the aircraft’s corridor, the operators—still wearing every piece of equipment except their rifles—sat wide awake. Some rested their heads in their hands; others stared out the windows at the black ocean and pastel sky. The view was beautiful, and maybe they needed to look at something beautiful for a while, for whatever help it might offer.
    Paige didn’t sleep, either. She fell into a long silence over Europe and then