“There was no earthquake,” the intercom shouts.

“Uh, yes there was. I can assure you there was a giant fucking earthquake. I watched the buildings fall myself.”

A door opens. More footsteps.

This time it is a woman.

She is wearing a long jacket. Her salt and pepper hair is held back in a ponytail. There is a white surgical mask over her face.

“You never made it to Fairbanks,” she says.

“Yes, I did.”

“The pilots took you here, to our facility. You don’t remember?”

“You’re crazy. I went to Fairbanks. There was an earthquake, I fell in the river and was washed a hundred miles downstream, and I spent the last twenty-one days trying to survive in the Alaskan wilderness.”

“You don’t look like you’ve been in the wilderness for three weeks.”

I look down at my arm. I wrap my fingers around my wrist. They don’t even come close to touching. I pull my hospital gown open at the neck and peer down. I expect to see gaunt ribs. I don’t. I feel my face with my right hand. My thick matted beard has been replaced by a single day of stubble.

“What the fuck is going on?”

“How long were you in Alaska?”

With all the thoughts racing through my head, it’s hard to think. I was in the wild for twenty-one days, plus the two days before the earthquake. “Twenty-three days.”

“How many hours awake is that? For you?”

“Twenty-three.” I gulp as I say the words.

The woman nods. “Twenty-three hours ago you boarded a plane for Fairbanks. The plane took you here instead.”

Chills run down my arm.

“Wait. Why? And where is Ingrid? And where is here?”

“Ingrid is fine. So is the cat. They were given a mild sedative before takeoff and left in the car.”

Mild sedative? Left in the car?

“Okay, but why I am here?” I ask. “What is this place?”

The woman stares down at me with blistering green eyes.

“This is the future of enhanced interrogation.”

It hits me.

The last twenty-three hours I’d been asleep.

I was being tortured.

Tortured by my own brain.

I think back.

A white room.

A doctor in blue scrubs.

An IV in my arm.

Where is it?

I don’t know.

Where is it?

Where is what?

The flash drive.

What flash drive?

A syringe of pink liquid.

I squirm.

He injects the syringe in my IV.

I scream.

That was real. Everything else, the cabin, the sunrise, the pregnancy, the earthquake, the river, the canoe, the moose, Opik, the cabin, the bear, the anger, the hunger, the pain, the death, it was all…

“What did you inject me with?”

“Just a cocktail we’ve spent the better part of forty years perfecting.”

“A nightmare serum?”

“Something like that.”