Ghost Country by Patrick Lee Page A

on the decision. Waiting for it to happen. When it did, she would try not to cry about it. She’d still be holding on to the logic of it all, telling herself that her life was just part of what it cost to get the job done. She would be thinking that very thing when she felt the silencer touch her temple.
    “You love her.”
    Travis opened his eyes.
    Bethany had stopped pacing. She was looking at him.
    “You love her,” she said again. “Paige.”
    “I knew her for less than a week.”
    “That’s long enough.”
    “Why do you think I love her?”
    “Because you stayed on that concrete pad. Stepping onto it was one thing. But staying on it, after what happened . . . that was another thing entirely. To do something that insane, you have to care about someone more than you care about your own life. A lot more.”
    Travis didn’t reply. He stared ahead at nothing. “I can’t do it,” he said. “I can’t leave her in there.”
    “I don’t want to leave her, either. I just don’t know what the next move is.”
    Neither of them spoke for the next minute. Travis’s eyes fixed on a spot on the carpet. He stared at it and hardly blinked. He let the edges of his vision blur.
    Then he turned and looked at Bethany.
    “What was the last thing Paige said to you in that phone call?”
    “That you can go through and come back,” she said. “She was just saying it’s safe to go through the opening.”
    Travis thought about it. “No, that’s not what she said. Not exactly what she said anyway. Play the recording again.”

Chapter Sixteen
    S he played it. They listened. They heard the frantic rush of Paige’s voice telling Bethany to go to her residence, to get the entity and get out of Border Town. To use it. To go public with whatever she learned. To get Travis Chase’s help if necessary. Then she said, “ Shit, what else . . . ? ” and went silent for a few seconds. Travis caught the sound he remembered from the first time he’d heard the recording: running footsteps, men coming to get her. That sound was all he’d heard on the first listen, at that part of the clip. This time he focused on the other sound, right there beside it in the audio. The more important sound, by far. Paige’s breathing in the absence of her voice. Two breaths, deep and fast. They didn’t shudder on the way out. They seethed. Travis got the sense that however scared Paige was, she was frustrated even more. She was struggling to remember something critical, some detail she needed to tell Bethany in the few seconds she had left. Which was strange, in retrospect: if all Paige needed to say was that a person could step through the projected opening, would that have been hard to remember? Would it have even been necessary? Wouldn’t Paige expect them to figure that out for themselves?
    A second later they heard Bethany’s voice on the recording: “ What’s happening? Where are you? ”
    Paige’s voice came back in, louder and more intense than before. “ You can take it through and still come back! You can take it through! ”
    Then it was over.
    In the silence Travis looked at Bethany.
    They both looked at the black cylinder, still lying in the armchair, still switched on. The iris stood open to the forest and the overcast sky above it. The manila rope lay in tangles on the carpet where they’d left it after pulling it up.
    “Take it through,” Bethany said, turning the phrase over like a found artifact. “Does she mean the cylinder? Take the cylinder through the iris?”
    Travis stared at the thing. It was hard to imagine what else Paige could have meant.
    “It would be easy to do,” he said. “Switch it off with the delay, and then carry the cylinder through the iris during the minute and a half it stays open.”
    “You’d have to be out of your mind,” Bethany said. “What happens when the iris shuts behind you? Now you’re stuck seventy years in the future, with a machine that can only take you seventy years