Page 80 of Forged in Deception

He remembered lots of colors and twisting shapes. He remembered feeling like he’d lost his place in space and time, like he was floating in an infinite blackness.

He remembered his ears pulsing with blood. He remembered the mixture of silence and buzzing that followed the sound of an explosion…

But there had been no explosion here. No. Even DX8 hadn’t made him delusional enough to believe that. All it could do wasforce him to remember Afghanistan, to make him relive things that he wanted so badly to forget.

Even now that he had sobered up somewhat, his brain still felt riddled with holes. What else had he seen?

He was curious, but a bigger part of him was thankful that he didn’t know. Perhaps God was protecting him from those memories.

But as for the real world, a few details began to emerge from the haze of his exhausted mind.

Police had shown up here, and they’d arrested Bajwa. He remembered that. They had big dogs that barked, and then the drumbeat sound had been turned off.

He could see Paul and Cora sleeping on their respective mats nearby, looking normal. That was good, at least.

He craned his neck to look for Karlin, to ask her how on earth she’d accidentally given him the wrong dose, and then he remembered.

She had gone outside, and he’d seen Lily following after her.

And even though hours had passed, neither of the women had returned.

Asher sprung to his feet, gripping the wall of the hut for a moment to steady himself before taking off at an unbalanced run. His legs were filled with rubber, but he had to push through it, along with the general feeling that his head was stuffed with cotton balls.

The desert was dark and empty, but there was a thickness in the air, like a storm might be rolling in soon.

He wanted to run, but he had to think. He needed direction. By now, Karlin and Lily could be anywhere.

Despite the remaining fogginess in his brain, he was sober enough now to remember what he wished he’d told Karlin. She didn’t know that he’d caught Lily lurking around his cabin when they got back from the Senera offices the day before.

At the time, he’d wanted to accept the woman’s excuse for being there. He liked Lily, and he’d been so focused on stopping Senera that digging into the other patients’ pasts felt like it was mostly a waste of time.

But now, nefarious possibilities began to unravel in his mind.

Lily had probably been at his cabin for the most obvious reason–she suspected that he wasn’t who he claimed to be and was digging for clues. She could have swapped his DX8 dose, too, probably at the lab beforehand. How she’d gotten in, he didn’t know, but security there wasn’t exactly tight.

Giving him the real drug would have allowed her to both confirm he was lying and take him out of commission in one blow, allowing her to get to Karlin.

It all fit. It was certainly a more plausible explanation for the DX8 switch than Karlin simply making a careless mistake. He knew her well enough to know that she virtually never made them.

That, and how out of it he still felt. He should have been a lot more clear-headed by now than he was, which made him think he’d been given a much bigger dose than anyone else.

But nothing he could think of settled the most obvious question: why?

Was Lily involved with Senera somehow? Was she working with Bajwa?

If she was, why had he been arrested? Was it all part of some ruse?

He pressed his fingers to his temples, as though he could push through the haze somehow. All of this attempted deduction was not helping his headache, either.

He had to get ahold of dependable, brilliant, and always sober Ben so that he could do a deep dive into Lily Moonchild.

Finding a phone was now his next objective.

But before he could consider where to look, he heard the sound of angry voices coming from inside the hut.

KARLIN

Every inch of Karlin’s body ached.

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