by Rachel Caine
But she couldn’t help them yet.
Bryn raced down the silent hallway, the empty one, all the way to the end, and banged open the door to the stairs. Her heart was hammering now, her palms wet, and she knew there would be someone waiting for her at the bottom. Probably a lot of someones, all intent on stopping any intruders.
She could take some pain, and some injury, but it still frightened her.
This has to be done. And you’re the only one left.
There were security men stationed at the bottom of the stairs, inside the door. Both had guns out and trained on her as she rounded the last turn of the staircase, and they didn’t challenge or wait.
They just fired.
The bullets took Bryn in the chest and left arm, and she staggered against the wall under the assault. The pain rose and then receded, too fast for it to be a nanite thing; shock, she guessed. She felt woozy and strange, but calm enough as she lifted her gun with her right hand and fired clean head shots.
They went down. So did she, falling the last few steps, but she staggered up, pressed her wounded left arm to her side, and kicked their handguns out of the way into the shadows. They weren’t permanently down, but it would take time.
And time was what she needed.
The shots had drawn more security out from their positions in front of the meeting room the security guard had told her about, and Bryn didn’t wait this time; she began shooting, fast and accurately. She took four of them out and wounded a fifth, but then something hit her from behind with staggering force. Not a bullet, though.
A chair.
Bryn twisted around and caught the wooden chair as it descended again, using her wounded left arm; it didn’t stop it entirely but it reduced the force of the blow. She kicked out, and her assailant fell back, dropping the chair in the process.
Mareen, Harte’s executive assistant. She held up her hands in surrender as Bryn aimed at her. “I’m not revived!” she gasped. “I didn’t get the shot yet; you can’t!”
“No, I really can,” Bryn said, but she shifted her aim and took out Mareen’s knee instead. The woman went down screaming. Somewhere deep inside, the nicer, kinder Bryn winced and complained, but this wasn’t the time for mercy or kindness. It was time to get it done.
The meeting room doors were closed and locked. Bryn kicked, bracing herself, and it took three tries before they flew open.
She went flat to avoid the hail of gunfire that followed, and was only partially successful. She felt more bullets striking, and this time, the shock didn’t really protect her as much. The bright, razor-edged net of pain fell over her and tried to pin her down, but Bryn fought her way back out of it. She rolled, stumbled upright, and dropped three men in jackets, one after another. One got her with yet another round, but it was a flesh wound in the upper arm. Still, it made Bryn’s vision gray out for a moment.
That was just long enough for Irene Harte to step up and shoot her in the chest, twice, point-blank. This time it was bad enough to stop her. Bryn went down flat on her back, unable to breathe, unable to think. The wave of agony was crippling. Her brain seemed to be covered in a red and silver storm—red for the pain, silver for the nanites trying desperately to abate it.
“I knew it’d be you,” Harte said, from a great distance away. “Not McCallister. You. Because you never understood the good we were going to do here.”
Bryn blinked, and the world steadied and sharpened just a little. Irene Harte was standing over her with the gun, staring down. She didn’t say anything else as she cocked back the hammer of the revolver and aimed it at the center of Bryn’s forehead.
Bryn couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t think, but she could tilt the gun that was still in her right hand, and with the last of her strength, she pulled the trigger.
She hit Irene Harte in the chin, and the bullet exited the top of her skull in a shattering explosion of blood, bone, and brain.
Harte stared blankly down at her and tried to squeeze the trigger—or at least, that was what it looked like, in that split second of frozen time. But then Harte’s eyes rolled back, and she folded like a paper doll, and the shot, when it came, bored into the floor an inch from Bryn’s head.
The next security wave poured in, looked at Harte’s body, and went still in confusion. Bryn rolled up to her knees. She could breathe only in shallow hitches, and she knew the nanites were working overtime to keep her moving, but it was enough.
Harte had invoked protocols, but she’d specified only that they were supposed to protect her. With Harte dead, they had no real direction to follow. Nothing to work for. Nothing to achieve.
Nobody paid attention to Bryn until she gasped out, “Evacuate the building. Get everybody outside. If they resist, knock them out. No killing. Go.”
Five security personnel dashed out to do her bidding, and she hadn’t even tried to invoke protocols. Her ability to get up wavered when she achieved a kneeling position, so she stayed there for a long few moments, wondering how much time was left, wondering whether she had the strength to make it to McCallister. She wanted to. She wanted to get him and Joe safely away, before it was too late. The FBI would allow them to go. They weren’t … infected. They were still alive.
Harte was safely and permanently dead. Bryn checked. There was no sign of any nanites trying to heal her wound. Her eyes remained open, fixed, with uneven pupils. Like Mareen, she hadn’t taken the shot; she’d wanted to be the puppet master, not the puppet.
Thank God.
It took five long minutes before Bryn could make it to her feet, and another three before she could manage to crawl up the stairs. She left a bright trail of blood behind. The hallways were chaotic now, Pharmadene people with conflicting orders, all trying to carry them out.
Gunfire was still coming from the area where McCallister was pinned down. Someone had given this batch of security personnel orders to take down the intruders, and somehow, even the bomb threat hadn’t altered that order.
Bryn made it to the doorway, leaned against the jamb, and methodically put rounds into the backs of six guards who were firing at McCallister’s barricade. The last one turned and tried to shoot her, but then he hesitated. She knew him. It was the man who’d escorted her through Pharmadene on her first day.
“Get out,” she told him. “Just go. Go now, before it’s too late.”
He thought about it, raised his gun, and then lowered it again. There was confusion in his eyes, and fear.
Then he ran.
Bryn collapsed.
McCallister lunged forward as he came around the barricade and caught her on the way down.
“She’s dead,” Bryn said. “Harte’s dead. You have to go now. Get out before it’s too late; the government’s cleaning all this up. Please go. You have to go while you still can….”
“Fuck,” McCallister spat. He picked her up, turned, and said, “Joe! We are leaving!”
“About fucking time,” Joe said. “Harte?” He slid around the barricade, carrying a shotgun.
“Bryn says she’s down. Move your ass.”
“Hey, you’re the one who just gained weight, not me.”
McCallister gave him a wild-man grin, and Bryn relaxed against him, thinking, If we go now, it’s all right. Everything’s all right.
They made it to a fire exit. The alarms went off screaming. Bryn had a confused impression of the buses in the parking lot, still full of silent Pharmadene revivals, waiting for the end. I should save them, she thought. As many as I can.
But before she could, a black limousine pulled up to block McCallister’s path, and Riley Block stared at them. She had a semiautomatic pistol aimed right at McCallister’s head, and held it there for a long few seconds before she sighed and said, “Oh, fuck it. Just get in.”
McCallister threw Bryn inside and dived in after, with Fideli close behind. The limo sped away without even waiting for the door to close.
Bryn turned her head away just as there was a screaming sound f
rom overhead, and a tremendous shove at the back of the limousine, and the world exploded into fire around them.
“… worst explosion in the city’s history,” a tinny voice was saying when Bryn swam up out of the dark. “Gas company officials continue to say that the incident is under review, but according to recent information from government sources, gas officials were warned about the dangerous state of the pipes under the Civic Theatre as long as a year ago. Clearly, this could have been much worse had the rupture occurred during a major event….”
Bryn cracked her eyes, widened them, and blinked to try to get things clear again. She was lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors, and a television was playing. The thin flat-screen was sitting on top of a rolling cabinet across the room. She blinked and fixed on the picture, which was of a rolling ball of fire rising up into a cloudless blue sky. Burning buses. A wrecked limousine.
Her wrecked limousine.
She felt surprisingly good, but then she would, wouldn’t she? Goddamn nanites. She could have been shredded by the blast and might have come back together again.
Maybe.
An alarm went off on her monitor, and she squinted at it, trying to see what emergency it was sensing. Before she could, the door opened, and a doctor looked in.
No, not a doctor. A woman in a lab coat.
Riley Block, with a livid bruise on half of her face, and a patch over one eye.
Riley turned the alarm off and said, “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up.” She poured Bryn a glass of water and handed it over. “Drink.”
She did, almost choking at first, then draining it eagerly. “More.” She coughed. Riley poured. “McCallister?”
“He’s all right. You got the worst of it—shrapnel through the door. He had cuts and bruises, and Fideli got a broken leg, which he hasn’t stopped griping about.” Riley touched the patch with one fingertip. “I got this. Glass. It’s just scratched, though.”
“Sorry.”
“Better than losing my life.” She regarded Bryn in silence for a second, then sat down on the bed beside her. “Some of the Pharmadene people were caught in the blast, but some got out. You warned them, didn’t you?”
“Yes. I had to.”
Riley nodded slowly. “I can understand that, but now we’re stuck. The government doesn’t want to officially acknowledge what happened. Pharmadene’s executives have been detained. Their threat is done. The people who made it out were seen and captured on film; their names were recorded. If they disappear now, it looks bad.”
“Public relations. What a bitch.”
“Right now, they’re quarantined for exposure to hazardous chemicals. Just like you.” Her smile was crooked, and a little sad. “You’ve complicated everything, Bryn. But I don’t blame you. You were trying to do right. Hell, we were all trying to do right. Even Harte, in her own megalomaniacal way.”
“So what are you going to do with them? With me?”
“We seized the supplies and the production line for Returné, and quite frankly, we’re debating about whether to destroy the lot and let the whole thing die. For now, I would imagine that most of the survivors will be kept on at what used to be Pharmadene, with the story that there was a takeover … not too far from the truth. If they talk, their supply of Returné disappears forever. That’ll hold almost everyone, and the few it doesn’t will just … disappear.” Riley cocked her head a little. “And a few are going to be released on other conditions.”
“What conditions?”
“That they work for us,” she said. “We still have a rogue producer of the drug to contend with. Mr. Mercer doesn’t seem like the type to just go away.”
“He still has Annie,” she said. “I have to get her back. You understand? She’s my sister, and I have to—”
“I know. Luckily, what I’m authorized to offer you helps us both,” Riley said. “You go back to Fairview Mortuary, and find a way to make contact with Mercer again. You get your sister back, and give Mercer to us.”
“Not good enough,” McCallister said. He was standing in the doorway—leaning, really. Riley had underplayed his cuts and bruises; he looked as if he’d been in a spectacular prizefight, and been thrown through a window. “She gets a written guarantee of a permanent supply of the drug from the highest levels. She and her sister.”
“I’m not going to bullshit you. There’s no such thing as permanent. Theoretically, the nanites could sustain her life indefinitely, after all. We need some natural end to this arrangement.”
McCallister looked at Bryn and raised his eyebrows, silently asking. She nodded. “A fifty-year guarantee,” she said. “Unless I revoke it first. I always have the right to opt out.”
“You mean, commit suicide.”
“Something like that. But I control it. Not you.” Bryn took in a deep breath. “And the government doesn’t own my mortuary, by the way. I own it.”
Riley smiled. “How exactly are you going to manage that? Pharmadene was bankrolling you. I’ve seen your assets, Bryn. You don’t exactly have the capital to invest.”
Bryn felt a hot burn of anger, and a little bit of shame. Of course she didn’t have the capital. There wasn’t any need to rub it in. “You can buy it and give it to me. My tax dollars at work.”
“She doesn’t need to,” McCallister said. “I’ve been informed that the McCallister trust has acquired Fairview as part of its very large and varied investment portfolio.”
“You bought the funeral home,” Riley said, frowning.
“Not me. The estate administrator controls the trust’s investments. You’ll have to talk to him about why he made that decision.” McCallister said it straight-faced, but Bryn knew exactly who the estate administrator was. Liam.
Riley’s frown intensified, and now she looked very serious. “What the hell are you up to, McCallister? I’m warning you …”
“Easy, Riley. I’m not up to much right now, and neither are you.” He sighed. “It’s been a tough few weeks for all of us. I’m not going to war with the government over any of this, I promise. I just want some peace—for me, for Bryn. Even for you.”
Riley clearly wasn’t convinced. “You’re trying to give Bryn a safety net so she doesn’t remain dependent on us.”
“Absolutely right. Budget cuts happen, especially in black ops. She can’t rely on having you in her corner for long, and we both know it. After all, to you she’s an asset, not a person. Give her some hope for her own destiny.”
Riley shook her head and smiled. “I thought you were smarter than that, Patrick. None of us controls our destiny. Not in this day and age. Especially someone with her … special challenges.” She looked straight at Bryn. “I can authorize a fifty-year guaranteed supply of Returné, provided you carry out any assignments you’re given to earn it—the first of which is that you track down Mercer and his operation, and shut it down. Agreed?”
“Do I have any choice?” Bryn asked.
“You could see if Mercer’s offering a better deal,” Riley said, and shrugged.
Bryn met McCallister’s eyes for a moment, and then said, “I’ll take it. One condition.”
“Which is?”
“You’re fired from Fairview.”
Riley laughed, a sound of real amusement this time, and left.
McCallister limped over and sat down on the edge of Bryn’s bed, sighing in relief. She put her hand over his, and their fingers twined together.
“We have to find Annie,” she said. “No matter what, I have to get her back. I have to make this right.”
“I know,” he said. “And we both know that no matter what Riley says, you’re running on borrowed time. They won’t honor their agreements. You noticed the caveat she slipped in?”
“About assignments?” Bryn nodded slowly. “They’ll use me.”
“Until they can’t use you anymore. Then they’ll cut you off.” He cleared his throat and looked down. “I know Manny informed on us, but he’s our best bet at this poi
nt to work on a reverse-engineered replacement for Returné. He’s close to cracking it.”
“I don’t trust him.”
“I don’t either, but he’s the only nongovernment game in town except Mercer, and we need him.”
“We,” she repeated. She closed her eyes and felt a wave of darkness and despair rise up to choke her from within. “Why are you even here? Pharmadene’s gone. It’s over. You can walk away now. You should.”
“My family’s trust has a significant financial investment in Fairview,” he said. “And in you.” That sounded calm and clinical, but there was nothing clinical about the way he touched her face, so gently, and when she opened her eyes she saw that he’d dropped his guard. All his armor, split open.
She saw the look in his eyes, and her heart shattered, and healed, and broke again.
“We can’t do this,” she said. “Why the hell would you want me? I’m not—”
He put a finger over her lips. “You’re not dying anymore. I, on the other hand, still am. So I think the question isn’t why would I want you. It’s why would you bother with me? If you intend to, of course.”
She stared at him, transfixed by the glow in his eyes, by the emotion flooding out of him, unexpressed but all the more real for that.
“I guess I will,” she said. “Bother with you, I mean. I’ve got fifty years to kill, right?”
“Well, I am a good conversationalist.”
“Really. That’s all you’ve got?”
His mouth pressed hers, warm and soft, and his tongue slowly stroked her lips until they parted in a soft breath. “Not all,” he murmured. “I have all kinds of skills I can share.”
“Oh,” she whispered back. “I think I can find a use for you after all, Mr. McCallister.”
She felt his lips curl into a smile where they pressed against hers. “Is this an interview?”
“Why, do you need a job?”
His smile widened. “Actually, I do seem to be temporarily underemployed.” And then he kissed her again, more urgently this time, and she felt her heart pick up beats and start to race. “What do you say?”