Terminated

Chapter 13

She was halfway up the steps when Jane’s limp body came crashing through the door, sending it spinning off its hinges. Jane hit the railing and spun like a rag doll, folding over the barrier and sliding off and down to plummet to the floor. She landed on her neck with a crack that sounded like a stiff branch being broken.

Good.

“Patrick?” Bryn raced the rest of the way, hardly feeling the steps, and stopped fast when she ran into the still-hot muzzle of a gun. Jane’s. It was in Patrick’s hands, and his eyes were wide and a little wild, but he took a deep breath, lowered the weapon, and nodded to her.

“Are you hurt?” she asked breathlessly. There was blood on his face, and after a second she spotted the cut on his head. It looked gruesome, but it probably wasn’t as bad as it seemed. He wiped at the mess impatiently to get his vision clear.

“I’m fine,” he said. “Is she down?”

“For now. I need to go put her down for longer. Are you sure—”

“Fine,” he said again, so flatly she wasn’t at all sure that he meant it in the least. “Check Reynolds.”

Reynolds—and there was no reason for Jane to have lied about it being the real man, not a double—was cowering in the corner. Broken arm, she noted without any sympathy; as a Revived, he’d heal. He just wasn’t enjoying himself. He curled in on himself defensively when she approached him, but she struck aside his flailing keep-away hand and checked the pulse on his neck. “He’s fine,” she said, and grabbed the man by his collar. “Get up.” She put the MP4 at his back to encourage it, and he practically sprang to his feet in a convulsive leap.

“You’re crazy,” he blurted. He looked scared, all right, scared and sweating and thoroughly convinced she’d shoot. “You’re all crazy. They’ll kill you. Don’t you get it? You’re surrounded. There’s no way out!”

He may have been right, but Bryn wasn’t convinced, not without some first-person recon. She pushed Reynolds back to Patrick, who took him in a hold that must have really hurt that broken arm more than a little. Good. Without any words exchanged, Bryn took the lead on the way down. One good thing about an open-plan modern house—there were very few blind corners or places to hide.

Jane was still down and motionless on the floor, but they’d have very little time before the rest of her team descended. . . . Bryn could hear them outside, running feet on stone and grass. “Knife!” she said to Patrick and he tossed her his; she plucked it out of the air and, in the same motion, slammed it down and into Jane’s left eye. The corpse jerked just a little bit in reaction. Maybe she’d only been playing dead. That would have been typical.

This time, she pulled the knife out and started grimly sawing through the skin, muscle, gristle, and bone to separate Jane’s head from her body.

“No time,” Patrick snapped. “Leave it.”

“I can’t. We have to finish her!”

“They’ll finish us first.”

He took the knife away and slammed it back into Jane’s already-healing eye, and hauled Bryn up by the elbow. She regretted losing not one but two knives in rapid succession, but he was right—they couldn’t wait, not even another breath. Speed and ruthlessness were their only allies right now. Reynolds didn’t look as if he was inclined to give them trouble, but he wasn’t helping, either. Her brain clicked through plans, rejecting each one. . . . The front was obviously out, the side where Jane had come in would be covered, and the back of the house . . .

Bryn took a single breath to consider it—those giant plate glass windows showed off the house’s best feature: its view of a sharp drop to the valley, and the glittering ribbon of the river. She didn’t ask Patrick. There wasn’t time for debate.

Instead, she grabbed one of the end tables—a blocky, heavy, square affair, very new modern—and whirled, lifting as she put her momentum into it. Then she let go.

The table sailed through the air as if on wings, hit the glass with one of those sharp edges forward, and thick as it was, the glass frosted with cracks and then shattered in a mighty crash. The end table sailed out into the void and took a comet-trail of glass shards with it. But that didn’t clear the window fully; there were still jagged blades sticking out. Bryn grabbed the fireplace poker on the fly and held it like a sword as she leaped closer; she broke the worst of it out and turned as Patrick joined her.

“This is crazy,” he told her. “That’s a hell of a drop. One of us isn’t really up to it. By that I mean me.”

Shit. In her rush, she’d somehow forgotten—forgotten!—that Patrick wasn’t capable of the same feats she was. Reynolds was Revived; he hardly mattered. But Patrick . . .

Bryn took hold of Reynolds and pulled him from Patrick’s grip. “How’s the arm?” she asked him. There would be flash-bangs deployed behind them in seconds, and then Jane’s shock troops would be inside, spraying the house with bullets and taking down anything that moved.

“Hurts,” he said.

“Good.” She threw him out the window, just like the table.

Then she wrapped her arms around Patrick and pulled him out held tight to her body.