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Consciousness returns in pieces.

Motion first. A low vibration beneath my spine, steady enough to tell me I'm moving before I've opened my eyes. Then sound: tires against pavement, the muted mechanical hum of an engine, something small rattling near my left shoulder every time the vehicle changes direction.

The back of my head throbs in time with my pulse.

Panic would be reasonable under the circumstances. It would also be profoundly unhelpful.

I breathe through my nose and begin with what I know.

I was struck from behind on the ridge. I lost consciousness—or, more accurately, I lost continuous memory. Those are not necessarily the same thing. A person can be unconscious for seconds and remain disoriented afterward. Post-traumatic amnesia can persist considerably longer, and unless whoever put me here had the foresight to document my Glasgow Coma Scale at regular intervals, I have no reliable way to determine which occurred.

My head really hurts. I am nauseated. I don't know whether I vomited while unconscious. I don't know whether I have a skull fracture. I don't know whether there is intracranial bleeding slowly increasing pressure inside my head.

None of those questions can currently be answered, so I set them aside.

I open my eyes.

Not complete darkness. A thin strip of gray light cuts across the space above me, enough for my eyes to begin assembling shapes from it. Carpeted interior. Plastic paneling. Metal hinge. My knees are bent because there isn't enough room to straighten them.

I try anyway and discover space isn't the only problem. My ankles are bound. A quick pull of my arms confirms my wrists are too, secured behind my back.

I stare upward for several seconds.

Then the car takes a curve, and I roll into the sidewall.

The expensive car. For one absurd moment, I feel grimly validated. I knew that fucking thing didn't belong here.

The satisfaction lasts approximately half a second before I return to the considerably more relevant problem of being inside the trunk of it.

Before I can determine where I’m being taken, I need to establish how much time has passed.

I was on the ridge when I was hit. The car was parked below me near the fenced property, which means whoever attacked me had to get me from the trail to the vehicle. I am not particularly large, but an unconscious adult is dead weight in the most literal mechanical sense. Carrying me down an uneven mountainside would be slow, awkward, and conspicuous. Dragging me would be easier but would leave evidence on both me and the ground.

Assume several minutes simply to move me.

Add whatever time was required to reach the car, load me into the trunk, and get onto the road.

Then driving time.

The problem is that I have no upper boundary. Five minutes could be missing. Twenty could be missing. An hour could be missing. I cannot retrieve information I failed to encode simply because I would find it useful now.

So I stop trying to make it.

Instead, I listen.

The road beneath us is paved. The ride is relatively smooth, although every so often the tires hit a seam hard enough to send another pulse of pain through my skull. We're not climbing sharply. I don't hear sustained highway speeds.

Stillwater is small.

That matters.

There aren't an infinite number of places to take someone here. There are houses, businesses, churches, stretches of forest, access roads, old industrial properties. There are abandoned buildings scattered around the outskirts because nobody in this town has ever encountered a useless structure and thought, Perhaps we should tear that down.

I close my eyes again and reconstruct the town as best I can.

The inn. Police station. The Mill House. Living Water Fellowship. The rec hall. Roads leading out toward the highway. Hiking access. River. Old properties left behind when businesses closed or families moved away.

Too many possibilities.