Page 58 of Undertow

The road east toward Corvallis from the coast cut through the Siuslaw National Forest—two lanes of wet asphalt winding through Douglas fir and Sitka spruce, the kind of green so dark it was almost black in the early morning light.

Gabe rested his arm on the driver’s side door. Cara was in the passenger seat with her knees drawn up and the denim jacket zipped to her chin, and she’d been quiet since the truck stop. The vial was in her inside pocket, and every few minutes her hand drifted to touch it through the fabric.

His phone buzzed on the console.

Piper: Status report: no tails. Wade’s checked the mirrors 400 times. I counted. Dad fell asleep with his mouth open and I have photographic evidence for future leverage.

Then, a minute later:

Reagan: Clean behind us. No repeating vehicles. Elena sleeping. Stay on schedule.

Cara read both messages without picking up his phone.

“No one’s behind us either,” he said.

The road from the coast had been empty—a few logging trucks, a mail carrier, nothing that repeated in his rearview for more than a mile. Gabe’s eyes burned. His shoulders ached from gripping the wheel.

Once the forest cleared, Corvallis stretched ahead like a postcard someone had sent from a different life.

The campus sat in the middle of town, redbrick buildings and bare-limbed elms and students in rain jackets crossing the quad with coffee cups and backpacks, the universal choreography of people whose biggest problem was a midterm.

Gabe parked on a side street near the science building, then they headed off to find Reagan’s contact. .

Dr. Susan Lafferty was small and sharp-eyed, somewhere north of fifty, with the wariness of an academic who’d been asked to do something outside the syllabus. She met them in a ground-floor lab that smelled like ethanol and institutional soap.

“Reagan said you needed a compound analysis,” Lafferty said. “She didn’t say what kind of compound.”

Gabe dangled it in front of her. “We have no idea. That’s why we’re here.”

She took the baggie and extracted the vial, holding it up to the fluorescent light, tilting it as she squinted. The liquid inside was clear with a faint amber tint—unremarkable, the kind of thing you’d walk past on a shelf without a second glance.

“What are the observed effects?” she asked. Clinical. Not looking at them.

Cara spoke. “Memory loss. The person who was given this—she’d lose hours, sometimes whole days. She’d be functional, cooperative, could hold a conversation. But she couldn’t form new memories of what was happening to her. She’d wake up and the previous day was just gone.”

The scientist set the vial down carefully on the lab bench and took off her glasses. Then put them back on.

“Selective episodic suppression,” she said quietly, almost to herself. “I’ve heard whispers. Conference hallways, late-night conversations nobody puts on the record. A synthetic compound targeting hippocampal memory consolidation—blocking the transfer from short-term to long-term without affecting procedural function.” She looked at them for the first time with something other than caution. “No one’s published on it. No one would. The ethical implications alone are horrific.”

She squinted at Gabe, then looked again, longer. “Are you law enforcement?”

Gabe had been expecting the question. “I used to be. FBI. But I left the Bureau. This is a private investigation. Unofficial.” He kept his voice level. “Your analysis won’t be used for any official proceeding. I give you my word.”

Lafferty studied him for a long moment. Then she picked up the vial again.

“I’m holding you to that.” She eyed the closed door behind them. “I’ll have in forty-eight hours. Maybe less, if it’s what I think it is.”

The I-5 stretched south through the Willamette Valley, the scenery mostly farmland and warehouses.

They’d crossed into California before Cara spoke.

“Don’t take it,” she said.

Gabe glanced at her. “Take what.”

“The chief position. The permanent appointment.” She was looking straight ahead, at the highway, at nothing. “Don’t take it on my account.”

He should have been surprised. He wasn’t. The silence had been heavy since the coast.