Terminated

Chapter 15

She crawled out of the water and lay facedown on the riverbank, gasping for air. Pain had come back—and come back way too fast for any kind of sanity—and she shuddered all over, unable to move now, pinned under the weight of the agony. She felt someone taking her under the shoulders and dragging her. Jane’s people, maybe. She no longer knew, or cared.

Death would have been a blessing.

She didn’t get it.

The nanites must have been merciful, at some point, or her brain simply blotted out the worst of it, because the next time Bryn opened her eyes, she was lying in the backseat of a car, with the road vibration steady beneath her back.

I was dying, she thought. Burning alive.

But when she looked down at herself, she seemed better. Her skin looked angry and fragile, but it was healing. Her clothing must have been a total loss, because she was naked, wrapped in a blanket that was soaked through with blood. It smelled like smoke and disease, and even with the windows down in the car, the stench lingered.

“Patrick?” she whispered.

The speed of the car slowed dramatically, and she felt it veer over to the side and come to a stop. Ten seconds later, the door opened at her head, and she saw him leaning over her, upside down. The setting sun haloed him like a smoke-stained, bloodied angel. “Bryn? Stay still. You’re still healing.”

She didn’t feel inclined to move now, now that she knew he was safe. She held out her hand, which shook, and he took it in both of his. He pressed the back of her fingers to his lips, very gently. There was a terribly haunted look in his eyes.

She wasn’t the only one with permanent PTSD. The people around her, the ones who had to watch what happened to her—it was just as bad for them. And maybe worse.

“Reynolds?” Her throat rasped, and when she swallowed she tasted greasy smoke. Barbecue. Ugh.

“He’s fine. He’s tied up in the trunk,” Patrick said. “I need to buy you clothes.”

“Car?”

“Stolen from a campsite,” he said. “Nobody there. Some hikers are going to have a bad day. Bryn—”

“Am okay,” she said, and attempted a smile. It must not have been convincing. “Drive.”

He nodded. “We need to get the fuck out of here and someplace safe.”

She had no idea where that would be, now. They were far from Manny’s bunker. They’d lost their allies. They’d even lost Thorpe, ripped apart in an instant. Reynolds was all they had, and Jane was not going to let them have him. Not without one hell of a fight.

It didn’t look good.

Luckily, she was too exhausted to fully enjoy the landscape of how much their situation sucked.

She left it to Patrick to fully consider it, and fell back into a deep, dreamless rest, broken by flashes of pain, fire, and blood.

What had she done, there in the water?

She could only remember it in nightmares, after.