by Rachel Caine
They kept going, past row after row of utter destruction and neglect. No sign of people, just circling, wheeling birds over the flat, harsh lake. The white spots she’d initially taken for foam on the water’s surface were, in fact, dead fish. Hence the greedy birds.
It was beyond any doubt the most blighted and depressing area Bryn could imagine that hadn’t been bombed out of existence.
Mercer slowed the sedan finally, as a chain-link fence appeared ahead. It was ancient, but still upright and doing its job—odd that it hadn’t been ripped apart by vandals, as so many others had been. Behind it lay a large, square cinder-block building that looked beaten, but not quite as broken as the others.
Mercer parked. Freddy got out of the car and slid back a section of the fence that had been cut loose from the post; Mercer scraped through with only a minor loss of paint, and Freddy restored the fence and twisted some kind of fastener back in place to hold it. That was why vandals hadn’t bothered to rip it down.…They didn’t need to do so. Easy access.
They parked in front of the building. It had a single closed door, and a faded, illegible sign that Bryn couldn’t make out. She thought it looked like the ghost of a sailboat, and water, but this place was like a real-world Rorschach test—you could impose your own meaning on anything you saw here.
“Out,” Freddy said, and opened her car door. She didn’t like it, suddenly, didn’t like this.…It was rarely good news to be driven to the middle of abandoned nowhere and marched out of a car. But in truth, if Mercer had wanted her dead, he could have let her go to the incinerator and not put forth the effort.
So she went…although she remained acutely aware of Fast Freddy’s knife and where he kept it. In a crisis, she’d go for that.
She also didn’t let anyone touch her. Not at all.
Mercer walked right up to the door and knocked. Three strong, steady bangs of his knuckles, then three more, as if it was some kind of signal. Bryn listened. There was no sound out here at all except the unearthly crying of the gulls diving on the fish and the rattle of wind. The smell of the place struck her hard—a hard-to-stomach aroma of pure, rotten death. Recreation area my ass. The only recreation still thriving out here was conducted in the dark, fueled by booze, drugs, and violence.
The door opened on shadows, and Fast Freddy tried to push her inside; that was a mistake. As he reached for her, Bryn stepped into the gesture, grabbed his arm, and twisted it behind him, then frog-marched him over the threshold as a human shield. “Touch me again,” she whispered in his ear, “and I’ll cut things off you, asshole.”
He laughed. Laughed. “I forgot,” he said. “You’ve met Jane.”
She twisted harder and got a wince out of him. “What do you mean by that? You think I’m her?”
“I think nobody is the same after they meet Jane,” Freddy said, and for once, there wasn’t any mockery in his voice. “I damn sure wasn’t.”
Mercer entered behind her, and Bryn backed to the side, taking Freddy with her; she didn’t want Mercer at her back any more than she did anyone else just now. He didn’t comment, not even to ask her to let go of his sidekick; he just shut and locked the door.
A rank of lights flickered on overhead—old fixtures, dirty bulbs. It was amazing any of it still worked. The room itself was just a rectangular box that vaulted up into a curved concrete roof spiderwebbed with cracks and peeling turquoise paint.
There were two people standing in the center of the room, and both of them were armed.
One of them was Liam. It was very odd seeing him here, dressed in his sweater vest and dress pants under Kevlar, with what looked like a .380 semiautomatic pistol in his hand—what was even odder was that he looked completely comfortable with it, especially as he aimed it two-handed with impeccable form at Mercer’s head. “Please don’t move,” he said. “This might not damage your friend, but I understand it would greatly hamper your future plans.”
Mercer, looking amused, shrugged and raised his hands. “And here I thought we were all friends.” He glanced at Bryn. “You can let him go now. You’re safe.”
She released Fast Freddy, because the other armed person was Pat McCallister. No comfortable sweater, no dress pants. He was dressed for war and death, and he looked very intimidating. His dark, very cold stare fixed on Fast Freddy as Bryn let go of him. “Hands,” he said. “Up on your head. Down on your knees.”
“Do it, Freddy,” Mercer said. “Let’s not start off our collaboration with so much drama. Please have your man stop posturing. You can’t afford to kill me, McCallister. You need what I know.”
“Not as much as I’d like to blow your brain stem out the back of your skull for all the misery you’ve caused,” Pat said. “Don’t underestimate how much I hate you, Mercer.”
Mercer made it look like the prisoner-of-war pose was his own idea, even as Pat slammed him facedown onto the concrete, zip-tied his hands and ankles, and flipped him over on his back to search him. He came up with two guns, which he added to his own arsenal, and then repeated the process with Fast Freddy. He didn’t miss the knife.
Only after the two men were down and helpless did he nod to Liam, who relaxed and stepped back.
And then he finally looked at Bryn.
She didn’t remember him moving, but suddenly he was there, within touching distance, arms open for her, and McCallister was the only safe place she could imagine left in the world. The only solace.
But she flinched when he reached out. It was sheer gut reaction, utterly beyond her control; she saw the flicker of shock in his face, and then the understanding, which was worse. He didn’t try to embrace her.
Instead, he slowly, carefully put his hands on either side of her face. They felt sunshine-warm. So did his voice. “I’m sorry,” he said. It was little more than a whisper, and his eyes were fierce and desperate. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come for you myself. It was safer this way. We didn’t have the firepower to take that place, Bryn. The only thing we could do was trust that Mercer could pull this off. I hated leaving you there even an extra second, believe me.”
“I know,” she said, and wrapped one hand around his wrist. His pulse was tapping hard against her fingers. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay now.” She was lying—to him, to herself—but she couldn’t say anything else. Nothing else would help that anxious, tense look on his face. “Where’s Joe?”
“With his family. I wouldn’t ask him to leave them now, not after—”
“After Jeff went missing,” Bryn said, and felt a horrible surge of fear. “He’s all right, isn’t he? They let him go? He wasn’t hurt, was he?” That was the one rock to which she’d clung through all that horror with Jane—that at least she’d saved Jeff. If she hadn’t…if she hadn’t, the tide would rush her over the cliff.
“He’s fine. Scared as hell, like his mom. Kylie was going out of her mind, and Joe—” McCallister cut himself off, and shook his head. “I can’t let him put them at risk anymore. Or himself. Joe’s out of this—he has to be.”
“Yes,” she said. “I don’t want him hurt, either.” She took a deep breath and said, “I also don’t want you putting yourself at risk. Or Liam. This isn’t about you; it’s about me, and Annie. About the Revived. You’re just going to get hurt, Pat. These people…they’re not like Pharmadene, as bad as that was. They’re something else. Something far worse.”
“She’s right,” Mercer called from where he was on the floor. “You have no idea how much worse this really is. I’m nothing. Pharmadene is nothing. Widen your scope of disaster, McCallister.”
Patrick stepped away from Bryn and walked to Mercer. He put a booted foot on the man’s chest, and said, “What do you know?”
“More than you.” Mercer gave him a chilling smile. “If you want a clue, then I’ll give you one for free. The nursing home where they were holding your girl is just a start. Just a tiny little air bubble on the tip of the iceberg, if you will. But to give you an idea of scale, they’ve killed at least
fifty people there. Old, sick people. Who misses them? Who cares, when they’ve got nobody left? It’s inevitable progress—they’re dying anyway. But they’re still useful for one thing.”
“Test subjects,” Bryn guessed.
“Oh no,” he said. “Incubators. In a way, you really have to admire their ruthless efficiency, don’t you? And all I had to use were chimpanzees.”
Pat’s expression had gone just a little bit unhinged, and he pressed down hard with his heel, driving the breath out of Mercer’s chest with a pained gust. “Start making sense while you still can.”
Mercer made some wheezing attempts, and Pat finally eased up on the pressure to let him draw in a whooping gasp. “Can’t tell you here,” he said, and coughed. “No time. We need to get out of here and find a safe haven before her tracker starts sending a signal.” He read the frown on their faces, and shook his head. “Idiots. Of course they know about the trackers. They know about the nanites, and the frequencies they broadcast. And they’ll be listening.” He jerked his chin at Bryn. “You’ve got about two hours before that happens, at the most. It’ll start out as a weak, intermittent signal, so maybe three hours for them to get a firm lock. But she’s a beacon, and she’ll pull them straight at us.”
“Pat?” Bryn asked anxiously. “Is he right? Can they track me?”
“It’s possible,” he finally said. “And it’s possible this piece of shit is lying to make us go where he wants.”
“Listen, G.I. Jarhead, if you want to reacquaint yourself with the lovely Jane, just go ahead and—”
Patrick went utterly, completely still, and then he put his full weight on the boot on Mercer’s chest and barked, “What did you just say?”
“Pat! Pat, you’ll kill him!” Bryn blurted. From the sharp cry Mercer let out, a rib had already snapped. And Patrick clearly didn’t care. “Pat!”
Even Liam was looking alarmed and moving toward his boss with the clear intent of pulling him off—until Pat sent him a look that stopped him cold in his tracks. “Mercer,” Pat said. “I’m only going to say it one more time, and then I will stomp on your chest as many times as it takes to splinter your breastbone and get your complete fucking attention. What did you say?”
“Jane,” Mercer wheezed. He’d gone gray with pain, and a good deal of actual fear. “They have Jane working for them. She’s one of them.”
Patrick took his foot off Mercer and took two long steps back, as if he didn’t trust himself not to follow through, regardless. There was something black and totally out of control inside him, something that shocked Bryn down to the core; she’d known he was capable of violence, but this was beyond all that.
This was feral.
“Pat?” she asked. He looked up at her, then down, as if he couldn’t hold her stare. “Pat, who’s Jane?”
“My wife,” he said. “Jane was my wife.”
Chapter 15
My wife.
Jane.
My wife.
It kept running through Bryn’s head like white noise, and she just couldn’t comprehend it. He didn’t have a wife. He couldn’t have a wife, because he’d never, ever talked about it. And if he ever had married someone, it certainly, absolutely could not be Jane.
That was utterly impossible. He was a good man, a decent man, and Jane…Jane was everything foul in the world. A walking toxic spill.
“That’s not true,” Bryn said aloud. “Pat—that’s just not true.” She stared at him, but he’d veered away as if he didn’t dare come close to her now, either. He stalked toward the corner, boots scraping on the dusty concrete, fists clenched.
Lying on the ground, Mercer laughed, but it dissolved into painful coughing. He rolled on his side and spit up blood. “Ask him,” he said, and grinned with bloody teeth. “In case you think I’m making it up, her full name is Jane Desmond Franklin.”
“She’s dead,” Patrick flung back without turning.
“Well, I think we could all agree, there’s dead and then there’s really, sincerely dead. And Jane’s the former, not the latter. By the way, congratulations on your taste in women. You do run to type, my man. Bryn’s got that same crazy, strong energy, doesn’t she? Doesn’t give up. Just like…Jane. You know, before.”
Patrick turned and went for him, and if Liam hadn’t gotten in his way and deflected the rush, Bryn was utterly sure that Mercer would have been bleeding out his life on the concrete. She couldn’t move. She felt as if she’d been nailed in place, then frozen solid.
Liam shoved Patrick back with surprising strength and shouted, “Don’t play his game!” Patrick subsided, breathing hard, eyes fixed on Mercer’s laughing face. Liam swung around on Mercer himself. “Jane cannot be alive.”
“Ask Bryn about her.”
“Bryn—” Liam glanced at her, and his eyes widened. “Bryn?”
Something inside her had just…shut down, so her voice came out flat and mechanical as she said, “There was a woman. She said her name was Jane. She’s the one who was in charge, who took Jeff, who got me.” Who took me apart. Jane. Jane Jane Jane. Spider to my fly.
“It’s the same woman,” Mercer said. “Freddy saw her.”
“I did one better than that,” Freddy said. “Check my cell phone. Coat pocket.”
Liam knelt beside him and got the phone out. He turned it on and rose to his feet, staring at the screen in disbelief.
Patrick came to join him, took the phone out of his unresisting hand, and what was in his face as he gazed at the picture wasn’t disbelief at all. It was the face of a man gazing into his own burning and inevitable hell.
He turned off the phone and dropped it on the ground, and paced away, head down.
“She can’t be,” Bryn said. “She can’t be your wife.” In no universe did that make any sense at all. Tectonic plates shifted inside, broke open, and lava scorched her soul to ashes. “Patrick, tell me she isn’t your wife.”
Patrick didn’t speak. Didn’t even look her way. It was as if he were trapped in a black, black box somewhere far from here.
It was Liam who said, in a very shaken tone, “She was, once. They were married when both were in the military, then divorced. She was killed in action.”
“They said she was killed in action,” Mercer said. He sounded smug now, and oddly delighted. “I had her file, you know. She went from black ops to so deep undercover even you weren’t read in, Patrick. And she wanted it that way. When she came to us as part of the military program, we were explicitly told you were not to have any information. But then, the restraining order you had against her was something of a clue you might not want further contact.”
Patrick stopped walking, but he didn’t turn in their direction. His head stayed down. “Military program,” he repeated. His voice was soft, but it echoed through the concrete room. “There was no military program. It was terminated before the test subjects arrived.”
“So the records state,” Mercer said. “I only had a couple of successes out of it in any case. And I don’t really consider Jane a success. She was described to me as a diamond in the rough, and I think that was very accurate; the problem with diamonds is that they shatter if cut the wrong way. And Jane shattered. She just…enjoyed it.”
“She was insane long before that,” Liam said flatly.
Fast Freddy laughed. “You know, there’s a rule that says don’t stick your dick in crazy. Should have remembered that one, Patrick.”
Patrick made a sound that Bryn had never heard before—warning, threat, an animal fury that raised the hair on her neck and chill bumps on her arms. He turned, and there was a shine in his eyes that made even Fast Freddy’s smile vanish. “You don’t know what happened to her,” he almost whispered. “So shut your mouth before I rip your jaw off.” Whatever history there was between him and Jane was…monumental, Bryn realized. Fear, anger, loathing, a complicated kind of pity, horror, maybe even a little damaged and fragile love.
No. No, you can’t. You can’t feel anything for he
r. What she did to me…Jane had been the one to inflict the damage, to drink up Bryn’s pain and blood and tears, but it was Patrick who cut her now, to the core.
His feelings for Jane, about Jane, were a kind of betrayal she’d never been prepared to feel.
Patrick’s wife. Jane.
It changed everything, tainted everything. If he’d hated the woman, if he’d just purely loathed her, it might have been okay; Bryn could have learned to live with that. But it had been that little flash of compassion, of regret, that had destroyed her.
And now he looked at Bryn, and she looked at him, and she didn’t understand him at all, not at all. He was a man who’d romanced Jane. Who’d kissed Jane. Who’d dreamed of a family with Jane.
It didn’t even matter if it had ended in bitterness, divorce, anger. He’d loved her once, and that made Bryn want to die.
“We have to go,” she said. Her voice still had that eerie sound, flat and mechanical, unfeeling, as if the nanites were talking for her. “If they can track me, we can’t hide here. We need to go somewhere safe.”
Liam looked hugely relieved at that, pitifully grateful that they didn’t have to discuss Jane. “The mansion is strong, but not defensible against a genuine assault. This place, on the other hand…”
“No,” Patrick said. His voice was rough and low, but under control again. He blinked, and that animal shine left his eyes. “Can’t stay here. She came here once. She’d know its weak spots.” She meant Jane. Now that his anger had passed, he had that stricken look again, as if he was afraid he’d gone mad.
She was wondering if she’d gone mad. If all this was some dream she’d escaped into, to evade the reality of Jane and her cutting smiles. Maybe none of this was really happening. That would, in fact, be better. It’d mean that she didn’t have to live in a world where Jane Desmond Franklin had been married to the man she loved.
