Page 4 of Beyond Reason

Fetterman.

I shook my head again and forced a smile across my features. “You’re probably right.”

She wasn’t right, but I didn’t know the layout of the location, and I wasn’t going to test my limits when I wasn’t sure what was going on. There was no reason for me to get hurt.

No reason for me to get…

Hm.

Something about the thought didn’t sit right in my mind, but I pushed it to the side and made a show of laying back in the hospital bed again like I was more than willing to listen to her.

“I’m sure all of this is a shock to you, Mr. Lister. Let me go get the doctor, okay?”

I waited until she’d left the room to push myself back into a seated position. I could unhook myself and leave, but I still wasn’t sure where I was.

I wasn’t sure who they thought I was.

My fingers twitched, and I grabbed the bag of personal belongings that she’d pointed out earlier. The contents dumped across my lap in a jumble.

I didn’t recognize any of it.

A dark wallet, cheap. A plastic rectangle… flash drive, she’d said, and my mind tried to tug at the information of what it was.

Something about… a computer.

Information storage.

I’d never seen the damn thing in my life, so it made no sense. I pushed it to the side and flipped open the wallet. It was what I’d been looking for to begin with, because if I’d got myself entangled in some kind of infiltration where I’d cooked up a new identity, I would have an ID.

And there was an ID in the wallet. A smiling face with dark brown eyes and unruly hair. I could even admit that he looked a little like me, but neither the driver’s license nor the badge that read Northman Technology across the top seemed familiar. My lids fluttered shut as something tugged at the edge of my mind.

Northman Technology.

Fire, and pain. And…

It felt like there were memories just below a dark surface, barely visible under the water… but something about the vastness beneath, the black that seemed to span for miles, told me I was better off not reaching for it.

With a small shiver, I lifted the license and looked at it again.

Marshall Lister was five feet, eight inches. I was eight inches taller than him, and I knew I had at least thirty pounds of muscle that simply wasn’t around anymore.

Something strange was going on.

Unsettling.

My eyes flicked to the phone again—it looked strange, too. Just like the monitors, just like the television and everything else in the room.

The movement of my hands felt almost mechanical, swiping across the screen and pressing down out of muscle memory more than the knowledge of what I was doing.

Two faces sprang onto the screen. Marshall Lister and a taller man with eyes as empty as a winter sky. But Marshall was looking up at him with a sweet smile, and it was obvious that he didn’t mind the expression that was slightly unhinged.

It took me a second to pull my gaze from the faces on the screen to the little icons littered around them.

I didn’t recognize most of them.

It didn’t stop me from prodding at it with a strange level of familiarity that I couldn’t quite place, but I wasn’t going to ignore. Somehow, I knew what to do, even though I had no idea what I was doing.

It was enough to give me a headache.

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