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“Bryn! Talk to me—tell me what you want to do!”
There was a white-hot snap of agony somewhere deep in her back, and she jerked and convulsed with it. When it subsided two breaths later, she felt pins and needles stabbing into her skin, and then she felt her legs moving.
Whatever had gone wrong in her spine, it was fixed now.
“Bryn, I’m coming up!”
“No,” she said raggedly. “No, you can’t. Stay down there, Joe. You can’t help. ” She scrambled up to her hands and knees. Her legs weren’t working well, but they moved, and she moved drunkenly toward the end of the hallway. Even then, the air felt thick and toxic, the smoke swirling as heavy as fabric around her face.
The break room was the last door. She slammed the entrance open and braced herself for the smell, but the stench of the fire had overwhelmed everything else. The plastic-wrapped bodies still lay in an orderly row, but the coffeepot had given up its struggle; electricity had shorted out. Fires burned at the outlets. This room would go up in minutes, and there was no safety here.
There was a window with daylight beyond it. A route of escape.
But it was barred on the outside.
Bryn screamed in fury. She grabbed a chair from one of the tables pushed against the wall; it was heavier than the cheap plastic ones melting right now in the reception area, and she swung it hard into the glass. The window shattered halfway down, and two more hits disintegrated the rest of the panes…but the sudden breeze sucked into the room made her realize she’d just screwed herself, hard.
The fire roared into the open room, sucked in by the rush of oxygen, and it leaped from carpet to walls to ceiling, licking everything as it went. Plastic-wrapped bodies began to smoke and sizzle.
There was no quick-release on the bars outside. They were fastened in hard. She wrapped her bloody hand around one and tugged. No leverage.
“Bryn!” she heard Joe’s voice in her earpiece, and it sounded taut with stress. “You have to get those bars off. It’s your only way out. ”
“I’m not the fucking Bionic Woman!” she yelled back. “How do I do that?”
“Find a lever!”
Lever. God. What the hell was she supposed to use? Something metal, something strong…
The chair. It had metal legs. She battered it in panic against the wall and floor until the plastic split, and one of the legs fell free with a rattle. Her lungs were burning, and her eyes; she coughed, gasped, and choked on a mouthful of rancid black air. The bonfire clawed at her back—no, that was just the heat, the heat.
She smelled meat cooking, but that was the dead people, not her, not yet.
She threaded the metal between the side of the window and the bars, and threw all her weight into it.
The leg bent. Not the bars.
Goddamnit!
“Fuck it. Get down!” Joe shouted in her ear, and she did, pressing her face flat to the floor.
Gunfire slammed into the outside of the building, a continuous rattle of firepower, and when it stopped, she scrambled up and took hold of the bars. He’d concentrated his fire into the brick on two corners of the window—beautiful and precision aiming—and the bars were loosened. She pulled and yanked and twisted, and they swung suddenly free. The whole grate came loose from the building and fell in a spiral down to clang and bounce on the street below. The air was being sucked in through the window, and as Bryn climbed up onto the sill, she realized that it was a straight drop. No fire escape. Nothing to break her fall. Just the merciless, remorseless concrete.
“Oh God,” Joe said in her ear. “Bryn, don’t, don’t do that. Christ—”
She didn’t have a choice. The fabric on the back of her jacket was burning now, and she could feel her skin starting to sizzle.
I’m not burning to death.
The jump was a vivid, conscious decision, and as she stepped off, she felt a sudden, absurd regret that she’d worn a skirt as it blew up around her waist. The last sensation she had was of panic, of the wind pulling through her hair and clothes, and then…
The landing, she supposed. But that, at least, she didn’t feel. Everything just went from hyperbright and chaotic to…black.
When she did feel something again, it was, of course, total bloody agony.
She tried not to shriek. Someone was holding her hand. She couldn’t see—Blind, oh God I’m blind—and then dim shapes began to ghost through the dark.
She made out Joe Fideli’s face as he loomed over her. He had a hand over her mouth. “Easy,” he said softly. “Easy, kid. I’ve got you. Had to move you. Cops are already here; so is the fire department. Couldn’t let you be found where you landed. You’re healing. I know it hurts, but you can’t scream, understand? You can’t attract attention. ”
She understood that, but it was a lot harder to control. She stopped trying to claw Joe’s hand free and instead pressed her broken fingers over his straight ones to keep the gag in place.
And she let the scream burn itself out against his muffling palm.
“Jesus,” he whispered, clearly shaken. “Okay. Okay, relax, relax. Let it go. …” His other hand stroked her hair. He didn’t say anything else. When she felt steady enough, she nodded, and he raised his hand, cautiously.
“Bones healing,” she whispered. “Help me. ”
“Uh…how?”
“Pull them in line. ”
“Fuck. Okay. Here, bite down on this. ” He shoved something between her teeth—leather, it felt like. She bit down hard, knowing what was coming, and felt him pull and twist her right leg. It was like dipping it into boiling lava, but the pain, while extreme, was brief enough. She hardly screamed at all. He did the left, then palpated up her body to find the rest of the damage. She had a broken pelvis, but that was clean enough. Her left arm needed resetting for the compound fracture. He straightened out her back for the spinal injury.
Then, last, her fingers, one sharp, star-bright snap at a time.
She passed out sometime before that, thankfully; when she came to, the pain was an ebbing burn, and everything felt straight, though weak. She spit out the leather strap—his belt—and concentrated on breathing in and out. If she had lung damage from the smoke, the nanites were thorough in cleaning it away.
In another twenty minutes, more or less, she felt human again—especially after the booster shot Joe gave her. Even the side effect rush didn’t seem so bad, comparatively.
“That,” Joe said in a hushed voice, “may be the most disturbing fucking thing I have ever done, and that’s…saying something. Bryn? You still with me?”
“I’m okay,” she said. That was a lie, but not as much of one as it would have been earlier. “I can walk. We need to get out of here. ”
“I can clean the blood, but your clothes are pretty much totaled,” he said. “You look like you’ve been in the fire. It’ll get noticed. ”
“Should have worn my cargo pants. ”
“Probably,” he said. “Turn your skirt and jacket inside out. It’ll do for a quick walk to your car. ”
“Had to leave my briefcase,” Bryn said. “Goddamnit, the FBI files were in there. I dropped it somewhere during the explosion. ”
“Then it’s toasted into little bitty pieces. You’re covered. ” He helped her take off her jacket and flip it to the relatively undamaged lining side; it looked weird, but not as strange as the smoke-damaged, fire-roasted fabric. She did the skirt by herself. It was almost presentable. Her shoes were weirdly misshapen around her feet, but they’d do. “I’m walking you to the car. Just hang on to me and don’t slow down. ”
“Wait. ” She reached inside her bra, and found the silver thumb drive; it looked undamaged. “Take this, just in case we get separated. ”
He nodded and put it into a zippered pouch. The hunter’s checked vest he was wearing concealed Kevlar—his version of street-legal flak gear. “You good to dr
ive?”
She laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “Sure,” she said. “Thirty minutes ago I was a leaking bag of broken bones, and now I’m good to drive. Nothing odd about that, is there?” The problem with living as a Returné addict wasn’t so much coming to terms with surviving as it was coping with the wrongness of it. Something inside just wouldn’t accept the terms on which she lived…and especially at times like these, when she was so frankly and nakedly not human. But therapy could wait, of course. She’d need mountains of it, in the end, but right now she needed to take the first step, then the next. Get in the car. Drive home. Collapse into Patrick’s arms and try, for a moment, to forget.
Find out what was on the thumb drive that seven people—eight, if she counted herself—had just died for. It had something to do with Pharmadene, something the FBI undoubtedly suspected and had kept from her. She didn’t think they’d known about the dead people, or the trap, but she couldn’t be sure.
She couldn’t trust anyone, except Joe and Patrick and Liam.
Certainly not Riley Block, or Zaragosa, who’d warned her about Riley in the first place.
Good to go, she told herself again. It was an order, and she followed it all the way home.
Chapter 8
The explosion was breaking news, but the FBI spokespeople were out in front of it, in a joint appearance with the local police. The official explanation was something crime related; Bryn didn’t pay much attention. It was all bullshit, and from the tense look on the agents’ faces, they were aware of that, even if they had no idea why it was bullshit.
Riley Block had the very same tense expression when she showed up at the gates of the McCallister estate, one hour after Bryn and Joe rolled in. Bryn was in the kitchen with Patrick and Liam when the FBI-issue sedan pulled up, and Riley got out to show herself to the camera. She didn’t speak, but then, she didn’t need to. They all recognized her face.
“Patrick?” Liam asked, standing next to the security controls. “If you’d like me to send her away—”