by Rachel Caine
He knew all that, too. She saw it go over his face in waves of emotion that finally settled into a pale, still mask.
“Listen,” Thorpe said. He licked his lips, and his eyelids fluttered shut briefly, and then he looked straight into her eyes. “If you use this on Jane, you won’t have anything left to use on anyone else—nothing to backward engineer. A weapon doesn’t do you any good if you don’t have the ability to reproduce it.”
“We may not have a choice. If she comes at us before we can get the cure to our scientists . . . I promise, we won’t use it unless we have to.”
“Not good enough,” he said. “Redundancy is everything, Bryn. I lied to you. There’s one more dose, the prototype. I sent it as far away as I could with someone I trusted. You—you might need it. More than that, you need to keep it out of her hands.”
“Who has it? Thorpe, you’re out of time!”
“I know.” He smiled sadly, palely, and nodded just a little. “Her name is Kiera Johannsen, and she’s a climatologist living in a remote research station outside of Barrow, Alaska. She doesn’t know what she has. I told her it was just a failed formula I wanted to keep on hand for research purposes, and asked her to store it for me. She agreed. Try to protect her, if you can.”
“I will,” Bryn said. Suddenly, all his bullshit and prejudice and annoying little quirks didn’t seem to matter all that much. This was a man on the edge of eternity, and he knew it. “I’m sorry.”
“Not your fault.” He took in another deep breath. “The person I called sold us out. It probably doesn’t matter now, but it’s my brother-in-law, Jason Grant. Jane probably got to him, and he’s probably dead. Everyone I knew is probably dead, but they might not know about Kiera. Not yet.” He gave her a sudden, cynical grin. “You ever been blown up?”
“No,” she said. “Shot, stabbed, fallen from a height, several inventive things that Jane cooked up, but not completely blown up. Are you asking if it will hurt?”
“I’m fairly sure I won’t feel much,” he said. “Please ask them to move the truck back.”
Bryn nodded, opened her phone, and called Joe. He answered before it even rang. “The fuck?”
“IED,” she said. “Get the truck back. Way back. It’s going to go off.”
“Then get your ass back here and we’ll go.”
She took a step back, and then hesitated. “No,” Bryn said, without taking her eyes from Thorpe’s. “No, I think there’s something I can do here that’s more useful.”
“Die?”
“We both know it won’t kill me.”
“How the hell do you know?”
“It’s worth the risk,” she said. “Just do it, Joe.”
He cursed some, but then he hung up, and in the next ten seconds Lonnie was backing the truck up the road, over the curve of the hill. Putting solid earth between them and the explosion.
When Bryn couldn’t see it anymore, she tossed the phone on the other side of the road, into the ditch, and then nodded to Dr. Thorpe.
“Here goes nothing,” he said. “You know what I want you to do?”
“Yes,” she said. “Good luck, Calvin.”
“My friends call me Cal,” he said. “See you.”
Then he took a deep breath, reached out, and ripped the duct-taped item from the rough board of the billboard’s supporting column.
Bryn saw it in high-definition slow motion—him turning, tossing the silvery mass of tape toward her, her hand grabbing it from the air. She was already turning away from him by that time, with the grace and efficiency of a dancer, not a motion or muscle wasted, and then she was running, great long leaps powered by adrenaline and the extra boost of the nanites, and she made it almost halfway across the road before the wave of the blast hit her.
It picked her up in a shimmer of superheated air and threw her, ripped her, punched through her in a nail of white-hot shrapnel, and she rolled, shredded, into the ditch with just enough instinct left to clutch the duct-tape ball to the core of her body. She screwed her eyes shut against a flare of intense bright light.
The sound hit her a second later, rippling in a physical wave that shattered eardrums, and as the brutal glow still shimmered in the air, Bryn Davis’s shredded body died.
Her last thought was incoherent and strange.
I miss you.
She saw Patrick’s face, just a flash, and then it was all gone.
Again.
Chapter 7
Coming back wasn’t fun. Bryn hadn’t expected it to be; she’d gone into this on instinct, and instinct had a fatalistic sort of acceptance to the pain that she’d earned. At first, it was all instinct—whimpering, twitching, just an overwhelming sense of the world rushing over her, sweeping her back into a bloody swirl of agony and fury, and it took time for her conscious mind to fight its way to the front and be able to begin to analyze the inputs.
There were a lot. And they weren’t good news.
Sight came online before hearing. She knew they were speaking to her, but she couldn’t lip-read; it was simply too much effort. Instead, she watched Joe’s face for clues about how bad this was going to be.
He was pale, and his face was set into a hard mask. So, presumably not very good at all. Riley was on her other side. She became aware that her bones were resetting, slowly. Usually they snapped together like Legos, but this was more of a . . . bending, a slow knitting that felt torturously deliberate. Her lungs were full of blood that was being pushed up, out through her mouth. Muscles twitched and convulsed as they repaired themselves.
The nanites had a lot to do. But, incredibly, they were doing it. She’d given herself only about a twenty percent chance, tops, of surviving the blast, but damned if the little monsters weren’t pulling it off. She could almost like them, in that moment.
Almost.
She coughed out a massive amount of blood that left Riley and Joe exchanging horrified looks, but Riley toweled her face and hair clean. The water on her burning skin felt as good as paradise. Running a fever, she thought, and almost laughed, because a little cold was the least of her problems, wasn’t it? She coughed again, and this time managed to drag in some sweet, life-giving air.
Riley patted her shoulder in congratulations. When Bryn concentrated on the movement of her lips, she thought she was saying, Good, Bryn, just breathe. One thing was for sure: if Riley Block looked shaken, Bryn had truly been on the edge of permanent, gruesome death.
She wasn’t sure she ought to find it quite as oddly funny as she did, that deep concern on Riley’s face. But hysteria was probably about as good a way to deal with this horror as screaming, and a lot more fun. There’s that PTSD, she thought, and was instantly sobered up. Dying over and over was bound to have a cost—mental, if not physical. What had Patrick said about Jane? She hadn’t been the cruel bitch she was now, not at first. It took time.
It took agony, and the wearing away of sanity against the hard rocks of immortality.
Her eardrums healed, finally, and sound crashed in raw and hard, and she almost cried out just from the shock of it. Everything sounded wrong, and too loud, and vertigo hit her, hard, even though she was flat on her back on the ground. She gulped in tearful breaths, heard the uneven, too-fast beat of her heart, and felt the last important, load-bearing bones seal together. Just ribs and fingers and toes left now. They’d heal up in a bit.
“Do you have it?” she said. Her voice sounded raw and garbled, and she tried again, and again, until finally Riley got the message and held up something bloody, wrapped in duct tape.
“This?” she asked. Bryn nodded. It probably looked like a convulsion. Felt a little like one, too. “It survived, Bryn. You did it.”
Bryn shook free of Joe’s hand and rolled over on her side, then shakily pushed herself up to a sitting position. That was hard. It was only then that she realized she was lying on the hard shoulder of the road, surrounded by blood like one of those old-time tape outlines from old cop shows. Blood dripped from her hair,
from her clothes, and she smelled the hot coppery tang of it everywhere.
Then she smelled the smoke, because what was left of the billboard—a couple of ragged poles and collapsed wreckage—was burning with furnace-level intensity. It looked ghastly. She didn’t see any sign of Calvin Thorpe, but she expected that if she searched around, she’d find pieces of him, here and there. Not big ones.
He was right. It had probably been very quick.
Riley said something to Joe, and he jogged back to the truck, which was idling nearby; he came back with a stack of fresh clothes and a big jug of water. Bryn, with Riley’s help, stripped off the tattered rags of her clothes and stood in her burned and shredded panties and bra to pour the water over herself, washing off the worst of the blood and grit before she threw on the loose jeans and blue work shirt. Her shoes were mostly intact.
There were a lot of small, round metal objects on the road. Larger than shotgun pellets. Ball bearings. There were also nails, bent and broken and scorched, littering the road as well. They’d built a first-class dirty IED, all right.
It made her light-headed to think about all of that shrapnel tearing through her flesh and bone, turning her into a shredded bag of meat. What the concussion didn’t rupture in the first place. God, she hated bombs.
“You okay?” Riley asked, and then gave her a very pale imitation of a smile. “As much as possible, I mean.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Let’s go.” Her voice still sounded as if she’d gargled with those nails, and she hoped it would get better. The nanites were focusing on the important things first, and being comfortable didn’t really figure into their priorities.
The first hunger pangs hit her after she took three steps, and doubled her over like a cast-iron fist in the guts. Bryn stumbled, choking, and felt something feral clawing its way out from inside her. The nanites needed fuel. They were overheating, operating beyond their capacity.
Food. Now. NOW.
Joe stepped down out of the cab of the truck, and before she could think what she was doing, before she could even try to think, she was lunging at him.
Riley got in the way. Thank God. Bryn fought her, hard and violently, trying to get not to Joe but to the fuel that Joe represented—the raw energy stored in that fat and blood and muscle and tissue.
Riley wrestled her down to the road and held her there, and after a few minutes, forced something into her open mouth.
Meat. Sweet, salty meat, tough and chewy . . . salami from the meat store in Kansas City. She chewed and swallowed with mechanical intensity until it was all gone, and the red eased its grip on her just a bit, until she could signal to Riley that she was back in control.
Riley didn’t trust that, and kept hold of her, but let her have another big chunk of the salami. She chewed and swallowed again, a process that had nothing of pleasure to it and everything of desperation. She ate at least three huge hunks of the stuff before suddenly the need just . . . switched off, like a circuit being cut.
She burped, mumbled an apology, and handed the rest back to Riley, who offered her—incongruously—a napkin. Bryn used it to wipe the greasy residue from her mouth and hands.
“Sexy,” Riley deadpanned. “Better?”
Bryn nodded. The taste of meat was metallic and sweet in her mouth, and she wasn’t sure she could bring herself to give an actual answer in words. She was still shaking, but that was terror, not hunger.
She hoped she’d never get the two of those confused. The idea of hurting Joe Fideli brought tears to her eyes, and she couldn’t look at him as, with Riley’s help, she walked to the truck and climbed inside.
Lonnie wasn’t looking too happy anymore. He seemed scared, flinching from meeting her eyes, and he was only too happy to put the truck in gear as Joe settled in next to him while Bryn and Riley sat on the bunk behind them. “You—you were dead,” he said. “Not just wounded. I saw you, lady—you were fucked.”
Bryn didn’t have the energy to try to convince him otherwise. He’d seen it, he knew it, and it terrified him. Fair enough. It had spooked Joe, too; she saw it in the wary way he studied her, as if he was waiting for her to turn feral again. She gave him a shaky, apologetic sorry, and he nodded. Not like he quite trusted her, but as if he understood she was trying.
Lonnie’s wide brown eyes were staring at her from the rearview mirror. He looked away when she glanced his way. She knew she ought to feel something about that—feel sorry, maybe, that he saw her as such a monster. But truthfully, it didn’t matter anymore. Nothing mattered that much.
Nothing except that blood-smeared syringe in its nest of duct tape, that Riley was still holding.
Joe said, quietly, “Lonnie, focus. You’re nearly done with us—I promise you that. We just need you to take us the rest of the way and we’re done. Another two hours, tops.” He patted Lonnie on the shoulder, brother to brother, and Lonnie didn’t flinch from him, at least. Though he did shoot him a doubting look.
“You—you’re going to let me go, like you promised, right?”
“Absolutely,” Joe said. “And I want you to do me a favor, man, I want you to call in a 911 on the fire when we’re pulling away, okay? Just tell them the billboard’s on fire and you’re not sure what happened. You would normally call a thing like that in, right?”
“Right,” Lonnie agreed. He took a deep breath, and nodded. “Okay. Okay, we can do this.”
“Bet your ass,” Joe said. “Now let’s roll.”
Lonnie engaged the gears, and the truck growled forward. The blood-angel that Bryn had left on the road surface disappeared under the tires, and then they were past the smoke, to the clear air beyond. The truck was moving at decent speed by the time they crested the next hill, and beyond it was . . . a normal world. Hawks soared the skies, planes skimmed the roof of the world, and on the ground it was just blank, empty road and countryside, with some scrub houses in the distance. They’d probably have seen the smoke, Bryn thought. Maybe even the explosion.
Lonnie made his emergency call, and reported it as simply as possible; his voice was shaking, but that probably wasn’t too unusual for someone calling in a thing like that, especially on a long-haul drive. He looked relieved when it was over, she thought, and settled in behind the wheel to drive.
She dismissed him as unimportant, at least for now, and focused herself on more important things. Who the fuck are these people? She was shaken, she had to admit it. Somehow, while they’d been driving, the Fountain Group had found out who Thorpe was, tracked down his allegedly foolproof contact, and probably tortured and killed him. . . . Then, instead of sending an assault force (since the last overwhelming onslaught hadn’t gone so well for them) they’d done something incredibly smart—they’d gone unmanned low-tech. There’d been some surveillance, most likely remote-piloted, but they’d thought that they’d be able to take out Thorpe, his weapon, and (as a bonus) at least one of them, too.
And they nearly had, with something as simple as a pressure bomb. Something you could build from plans on the fucking Internet.
Whoever was running this—and Bryn was now sure it wasn’t Jane, Jane wasn’t sane enough, or flexible enough, to plan this way—it was someone capable of making cold-bloodedly rational decisions. Losses and gains, offset by risks. Varying tactics. That wasn’t Jane; she was smart, and brutal, but she wasn’t a fantastic tactician.
Bypassing Jane and getting to the brains of the operation would stop this, stop it dead and cold. Then she could destroy Jane, but it was important just now to learn something from her enemy—to change tactics.
“We need to get out,” Bryn said.
Lonnie sent her a startled, scared look, and then Joe turned and frowned at her. “What?”
“Just trust me on this,” she said. “We get the hell out of this truck, and head out on foot. Then we split up, and you give me Patrick’s burst transmitter. You and Riley, you get back to whatever hole Manny is hiding in. Please, Joe. You know me. You know I’m right.”
&nb
sp; “Right about what?” Riley asked sharply. “We’re two hours from our goal. If we ditch our transportation, we add a day of hard hiking. Besides, do you think you can run off on your own, without backup, and get anything accomplished? Jane is out there. And she can call on half the military and, for all we know, half the law enforcement in this country. She’s rich in resources, and we’re not. Don’t throw away what little we’ve got.”
Joe was watching her without replying. She felt closer to him than to Riley, even now—even after both of them had experienced the infection of the nanite upgrades. Joe was basic version 1.0 human, and he had always had her back. Always. Even when he couldn’t trust her not to turn flesh-eating monster on him, which was . . . quite a lot of trust.
“Yeah, I get it,” he said after a long moment. “Lonnie, stop the truck.”
Lonnie clearly didn’t want to, but he hit the air brakes, and the truck sighed to a halt on the road’s shoulder.
“You can’t let her do this,” Riley said, and put a hand on Bryn’s shoulder as she tried to get up. “No. Just—no, Bryn. This is the wrong move; I know it. I’m telling you, just stay. We need to stay in the truck.”
Bryn looked at her for a long moment, and then shook her head. “We can’t,” she said, and moved Riley’s hand away. “I see something. You don’t. You take that vaccine to Manny and get him to start making more. I think we’re going to need it. Badly. We have no idea how far the Fountain Group has taken this—how many upgraded foot soldiers they have besides Jane.” She nodded at the duct taped syringe.
Riley pulled her sidearm. She did it in a motion so fast Bryn hardly even saw it; the muzzle of the gun stopped with perfect precision in line with Bryn’s eyes. Close range. Messy. “I have no idea what you think you’re doing, but you’re going to get yourself killed,” Riley said. “Stay with us, and help us get this to Manny. This is precious. It’s more important than you or me or any of us or all of us. It can stop them.”
