Before You Wake ✓

t h i r t y - e i g h t

ANDREW HAD A HARD time focusing his gaze on the syringe, the thick, glazed plastic of its barrel swimming as his vision doubled. He grimaced, screwing his eyes shut as the searing pain in the back of his eyes intensified.

After the intensity of last night, the hazy stupor of the pain meds and the zero hours of sleep he was allowed, Andrew was having a hard time keeping his surroundings in check. The syringe, tucked in the crook of a gloved hand, was coming at him again and he flinched, shrinking back onto the bare mattress.

Pity washed over Quentin's smug features. "The faster this takes, the less painful it'll be."

"You're not putting anything in me," he slurred.

Quentin motioned for the tech to leave the room. Once they were alone, he eased himself onto the mattress beside Andrew.

"I thought you, of all people, wouldn't have any objections to this."

At Andrew's frown, he sighed. "You killed your best friend. You spent weeks stuck to a hospital gurney, so long you began to get ass sores, surrounded by people who spent their lives consistently abandoning and ignoring you. You had to walk away from your whole life — and as pitiful as it may had been when you received Dreamweaver, it was still yours, and it was still hard to do. Hard to leave behind the few people you really cared about."

A violent anger began to rise in Andrew's chest and he shoved it back down, hot tears stinging his eyes.

"That's a relentless amount of pain you have to carry around all the time." Quentin paused, turning to look at the syringe on the bed side tech's tray. "Would it really be so bad to forget all of that?"

The rage clawing through him suddenly calmed, paused and minimized as a chilling fear took its place. Andrew's eyes travelled to the syringe. Anne's small bruised face came to the forefront of his thoughts, when he had asked her who she was. How she had ended up at Roanoke.

The solemn shake of her head. She didn't know.

They made me forget.

The fear gripped Andrew, held him transfixed. It was as if he couldn't move, couldn't breath, couldn't scream, and when Quentin continued to scan his face for a reaction and didn't find any, the older man rose to his feet and left the cell.

When the tech came back in, this time he was flanked by two guards, both bearing restraints in their hands. The trio advanced toward Andrew and the limestone wall digging into his back was a cold reminder that there was nowhere he could run.

He screamed but no sound came out. The needle found its place in the soft flesh of his arm, its contents seeping into his blood stream and marking the first step in erasing the definitive history of Andrew King.