Terminated

Chapter 1

The real problem with becoming a monster, Bryn thought, was that you didn’t know whom to trust.

Bryn Davis, monster, paced the floor in silence, surrounded by her friends and allies, and she didn’t dare trust a single one of them. Not fully, not now. Only one of them knew the truth of what she’d become . . . and even though Riley Block already shared the secret, and the curse, Bryn didn’t know whether she could, or should, trust her.

As for the rest of them, they would be torn between horror and fury and pity, but someone would make it a mission to see her dead, and someone else would defend her, and it would tear everything, and everyone, apart.

Some secrets just had to be kept in utter silence.

“Bryn?” her lover, Patrick McCallister, said in the kind of voice one uses when the first few tries don’t break through the haze. She stopped and looked up to focus on his face. He’s tired, she thought, and despite how conflicted she was about her own situation, she wanted to comfort him. She loved him. It came from someplace deep inside, a wellspring she couldn’t block even when she tried. “Bryn, did you get anything from the Pharmadene lab to tell us what they were working on in there?”

She felt a wild urge to laugh, but it was the same self-destructive impulse one might feel standing on the edge of a cliff. Tell them, something mad in her whispered. Tell them, jump, just let it all go.

Because she certainly had something: proof. The problem was it was coursing through her veins, twisting her into something that was even further from human than she’d been before. It was a far cry from being a dead woman, revived with a miracle nanotechnology drug and dependent on it for daily survival, to whatever she was now. Because her little life-mimicking machines had new programming.

Military programming.

Can’t tell him that, she thought, and shook her head instead. “Didn’t have time to do much exploring, since they were trying extremely hard to kill us,” she said. “It looked like what I saw at the nursing home—they were using innocent people for nanotech incubators. Breeding more of the nanites. This was probably some kind of . . . factory farm.” Not a lie, not quite. The nanotech was real, and they had been breeding it in the unconscious, drugged bodies. It was just the type of nanotech she was silent about.

“Riley—” McCallister turned toward the FBI agent sitting silently with her back to the wall of the small room. Bryn had rescued Riley Block from a hospital bed in that terrible lab, and as different as the two of them were, as fundamentally antagonistic in many ways, they had this secret in common. Riley didn’t look up, but then, there were people in the way. Too many people. It felt terribly, oppressively crowded—this cheap motel room they’d rented as their temporary safe house was meant for a sweaty couple with no interest in anything save the bed.

Bryn felt constantly short of breath, on the verge of violence and screams. She wondered whether Riley felt the same.

Riley finally raised her head, and beneath the signature black bob, she seemed far away. Thinking, just as Bryn was, about her circumstances.

Patrick wasn’t done trying to elicit information, and he pounced on the opportunity. “Riley, did you get anything from the lab?”

“No,” the woman said, which was an outright lie. “No idea what they were doing, but Bryn’s probably got it right. I was unconscious most of the time.” She lied beautifully, Bryn thought, with just the right amount of flat indifference and just the right amount of eye contact. “How long do we have to stay here?”

McCallister shot a glance toward his old friend Joe Fideli, who was stationed at the window, looking through the quarter-inch slit between the glass and the curtain without disturbing the fabric. Those two men, Bryn reflected, had never lost their Army Ranger alertness, even though they’d cashed out years back—but then, Joe made his living guarding people. Fideli shrugged. “No way to know,” he said. “We’re still good for now.”

Meaning it appeared that their enemies hadn’t traced them here. Yet. It had been a hell of an escape from Pharmadene, the government-run drug company, and the chaos had worked to their advantage, but that didn’t mean that their enemies wouldn’t be on the case and tracking them down. Oddly, that probably wasn’t the government itself—only a rogue body inside of it. So they weren’t totally screwed yet.

Then again . . . it was impossible to know, but Bryn suspected that the nanites coursing through her body—Version 2.0, these tiny life-supporting machines—were fully trackable if the Pharmadene team still had the tech online to do it. Riley had the same issue. They’d done plenty of damage there, but had it been to the right equipment?

Despite the risk of discovery, she wasn’t sure how much they dared tell her friends and allies . . . but she needn’t have worried, because Manny Glickman, their burly mad-scientist-for-hire, was on it already. How in the world Patrick had first met the man was a mystery to Bryn, but one thing was certain: Manny had skills.

He also had a big backpack of stuff, and he’d unzipped it and handed his girlfriend, Pansy Taylor, a syringe from its depths. “Better safe than sorry,” he said. “That’s a frequency blocker for the nanites. Bryn, you and Riley had better take it. I’m not sure they can lock on you anymore, but I’d rather assume they were smart and we are smarter.”

Of all the people Bryn didn’t want knowing about her involuntary nanite upgrade, Manny was at the top of the list. Manny was brilliant, but he was also paranoid as hell, and although she wasn’t sure he could kill her by himself, he’d damn well try, and he’d have something hidden in that bag that would be a nasty, premeditated surprise. Manny didn’t like being at anyone’s mercy and he didn’t trust anyone, except possibly Pansy and Patrick McCallister.

Pansy herself was a bit of a puzzle, because she seemed so . . . damn normal. Forthright, sweet, and yet fully capable of handling herself in a fight if necessary. She eased past Patrick and Joe, and stepped around Riley’s outstretched legs to crouch next to the woman and give her an apologetic smile. “Large-gauge needle,” she said. “You’ll feel it—sorry.”

“I wish that was the worst thing that’s happened to me today,” Riley said, and rolled up her sleeve. Pansy administered the shot into Riley’s bicep, then safety-capped the needle and approached Bryn with the same needle—no point in worrying about infection with the nanites on the job. Bryn took it without comment. It did sting, and then it burned, but as Riley had said, it wasn’t the worst thing in her day. Not by a long shot.

“Excuse me, but can we discuss our resources?” That question, diffidently offered, came from the tall older man, Liam, standing near the bathroom . . . and Bryn realized she had no context for Liam now. Before today, she’d known him as the urbane administrator/butler at Patrick’s family estate—an Alfred to Patrick’s uncostumed Batman, in a way. But since she’d seen him firing an automatic weapon while coming to her rescue, and looking as calm doing that as greeting guests at the front door, she wasn’t sure she had any handle on him at all.

“Go ahead, Liam,” Patrick said. “Let’s get all the bad news out now.”

“I can get us funds from the black account, but they’ll cut us off soon enough. I initiated transfers to dump cash into various offshore accounts before I joined you today. They’ll find some of it, of course, but not all. I estimate we may be able to count on a few million, no more—at least until this is resolved.”

That sounded like a lot of money to Bryn, who’d grown up poorer than most, but she guessed that when you were expected to support a group of this size of fugitives on the run, and fight along the way, what seemed like a fortune might dwindle quickly. But then, Patrick’s family had been insanely wealthy, in a way that made most of the legendary one percent look comfortably middle class. Oddly, Patrick didn’t control the cash; his parents had put it all into a foundation administered by Liam. For being disinherited with prejudice, though, Patrick still did well for himself. Thankfully. The only thing worse than running for your life was doing it flat broke.

Bryn’s sister Annalie had been uncharacteristically silent, huddled in the corner near Liam, but now she said, “Where are we going to go? Where can we go? They’re going to find us, aren’t they?” She sounded scared, but more together than Bryn would have expected her to be. Annie had never been tough—she was the flighty, impractical sister, the kindhearted one who constantly picked up good causes and dropped them in favor of even better causes. Never quite doing the right thing but trying for the right reasons.

And also, she was terrible with money. Terrible.

But none of that mattered anymore, because Annie, like Bryn—and Riley—was effectively Dead Girl Walking. The nanites—originally developed as a pharmaceutical called Returné, with the ambitious aim of reviving the recently dead on the battlefield—did their programmed job and kept them all breathing and talking and having a simulation of life, but something in their bodies was . . . broken. What kept them going wasn’t resuscitation; it was life support. Annie still needed daily shots of the drug to keep going.

And Bryn and Riley had needed them, too . . . until the newly upgraded nanites had taken over back in the Pharmadene secret lab. Before they’d gotten away, Riley had claimed that these new, improved bugs powered, repaired, and reproduced themselves without any supporting shots at all.

She’d also said they were infectious. And Bryn supposed she had firsthand proof of that, because God only knew, someone had infected her with the stuff.

Now she had about thirty days to find a way to stop it or she’d pass on the nanites to some other poor bastard who was susceptible, once they’d matured within her. She’d infect someone. Spread the . . . the disease. Increase the army of nearly invincible soldiers for their enemies—at least, that was supposed to be the goal of the whole twisted program.

The implications of her condition were only just beginning to take hold . . . and the dangers. I need to tell them, she thought, and looked at Riley.

Riley was looking at her, too. As if she knew what Bryn was thinking. She gave Bryn a small shake of her head. Don’t.

“I need—” Bryn said, but Riley spoke at the same time, louder.

“We need some food,” she said, and that was true; it woke an instant and uncomfortable surge of hunger inside of Bryn that shocked and horrified her. Because what she craved wasn’t just food. The nanites powering her now—these nanites needed protein. Meat. A lot of it. And they weren’t picky about its source. The scientists had been hideously practical in their design of the little monsters . . . because one thing you could always find on a battlefield was meat.

“We’ll eat once we’re safe,” Joe Fideli said, still staring out the window. “Can’t exactly call out for pizza right now.”

The prospect of having to wait to satisfy that craving was, frankly, terrifying. Bryn tried to ignore the hunger clawing at her, but she knew what it signified: the nanites needed power. And sooner or later, the nanites would take her conscious decision making out of the equation and simply find food—and look, there was a whole room of meat on the bone right here. Between her and Riley, it could be a bloodbath.

“Bathroom,” Bryn said, and lunged for the door. She slammed and locked it, and dry-heaved into the sink, then raised her head and looked at her chalk-pale face. Her mouth felt dry, and she drank a few handfuls of water from the sink. Cold and fresh. It wasn’t much, but it might help. She sank down on the toilet seat and put her head in her hands, shaking now. Trying not to think too hard about what her life had become.

Dead Girl Walking. That had described her before. But what was she now? A supercharged, meat-craving freak capable of passing on her sickness.

Say it.

Okay, then.

She was now a fucking zombie.

The worst thing about it was that she couldn’t even really make a choice to end her own threat; the nanites that had kept her together before had made her mostly invulnerable, but these—these were military grade. She couldn’t even count on killing herself if things got worse.

She was pretty sure the nanites wouldn’t let her.

And she was pretty sure it would definitely get worse.

There was a soft knock on the door, and Patrick’s voice. “Bryn? You okay?”

“Sure,” she said. She wiped her face, although she was sure she hadn’t shed any tears, took a deep breath, and stood up to unlock the door. He blocked the exit for a second, studying her, and she met his gaze without flinching. “I’m just exhausted.”

“Do you need a shot? You look pale.”

“I’m okay for now,” she said. God, the shots. If she didn’t own up to her new condition, she’d have to figure out how to explain to him about the shots. “It’s just been—a lot to handle.”

“I know,” he said, and stepped in to give her a hug. “I’m sorry.”

He felt so good, so warm, so solid . . . and she felt herself relax against him, just a little. He smelled good, too, as unbelievable as that might have been, after the day’s fighting. He smelled like . . .

Blood.

Meat.

He smelled like food.

Bryn broke free and stepped back, suddenly cold again, and said, “Sorry, I need a minute.” She slammed the door on him and locked it again, and took another look around the bathroom. I can’t do this. I can’t handle this. I can’t be around people I like, people I love . . .

Because it wasn’t safe.

The bathroom had a small frosted-glass window, but there were bars on the outside. The motel hadn’t heard of fire regulations, evidently, because there was no quick-release on the bars, either.

It didn’t matter.

Bryn smashed the window, pushed the bars out from their moorings with one hard shove, and slithered out through the narrow opening. Her hips fit, though the concrete bricks scraped them raw, and the rest was easy enough. She thumped to the weedy, trash-strewn ground, took a second to get her bearings, and then headed for the eight-foot concrete wall a few strides away. A single leap took her to the top, right about the time she heard the door breaking down inside the motel room. She looked back in time to see Patrick at the broken window. He looked stunned.

Then he looked worried.

“Bryn, don’t!” he called. “What are you doing? Don’t!”

“I have to,” she said. “I’m sorry. I can’t explain right now, but please. Just let me go.”

She dropped down on the other side, into a four-foot ditch below the wall’s level, and then scrambled up and across the road. Not a lot out here in the country, but the road did have relatively brisk traffic with lots of long-haul trucks. Most truckers were wise enough not to stop for hitchhikers, but that wasn’t what she was looking for.

She started jogging along the gravel edge, picking up speed to a flat-out run—and then, as the front of an eighteen-wheeler passed her, she leaped sideways.

Her timing was almost perfect. She landed on the hydraulic connectors for the trailer behind the cab and immediately slipped off, having miscalculated her momentum—then caught herself just before she slid underneath the wheels.

Bryn scrambled to a balance point and braced her back against the cold corrugated metal of the trailer, then settled herself against the bumps. It wouldn’t be necessary to stay with the truck for long—in fact, it might be counterproductive, since Patrick would be dedicated in his search. She tried not to think about what might happen if her perch shook her loose—it probably wouldn’t kill her, but it’d be unpleasant for sure.

When the truck slowed down at a crossroads twenty minutes later, she jumped, landed and rolled into the low ditch next to the pavement, then stalked another truck and did the same jump-on maneuver. This one was easier, or she’d perfected the maneuver; either way, she settled in comfortably for a fifty-mile ride west. No particular destination in mind, because she had no idea what her plan was going to be, but putting space between herself and Patrick seemed like the only thing she could think about. She needed to know herself better before she took the risk of hurting him, or Annie, or any of the others.

But what about Riley? Isn’t she just as dangerous? That worryingly practical part of her brain nudged at her, but the truth was, she didn’t think Riley was as much of a threat. For one thing, Riley seemed to thoroughly understand her new condition, and she’d learned how to manage it. She’d been dealing with it longer and had made some kind of mental accommodation.

But Bryn didn’t trust herself. Not yet.

Not when she was hungry.

She hopped off when the truck paused at a rest stop, one of the big complexes that catered to long-haulers; the luck of it was that it was like a shopping mall, full of clothes to replace the stained things she was wearing, and after she’d showered in the bathroom facilities and changed, she took the rest of her limited bankroll to the restaurant.

“What’s your biggest steak?” she asked the waitress—a faded American beauty rose with gray streaks in her blond hair and a friendly smile.

“Well, that’d be the Big Tex, seventy-two ounces, but it’s a stunt, honey; we serve it to those big-boy truckers and drunk frat boys, free if they finish it, which they hardly ever do. Otherwise, it’s a cool forty bucks. Most don’t even make it to the parking lot before they throw it all up. Maybe something like a porterhouse. How does that sound?”

“No,” Bryn said. “I’ll take the Big Tex. Rare as you can make it and not get closed down by the health department.”

The waitress waited for the punch line. When Bryn didn’t deliver one, she shook her head and wrote it down on her order pad. “Your ambulance ride, honey. Want any sides with it?”

“Just water,” Bryn said. She tried for a charming smile, but the waitress had probably seen it all, and tilted a skeptical eyebrow before heading for the kitchen window. She and the cook had a conversation, and a balding man in stained whites leaned out to give Bryn a look. He, too, shook his head, but in a couple of minutes she heard the steak sizzling, and the hunger she’d tried to leash began to snarl with real ferocity.

Bryn squeezed her eyes shut. Just wait. Wait. It’s coming.

She didn’t know how long she sat there, struggling for control, but it snapped when a plate landed with a thump on the table in front of her—and there it was, seventy-two ounces of pure meat, drenched in watery blood. Just cooked enough to be legal, as she’d ordered. The waitress put down a glass of ice water and stepped back. “Okay, now, when you start feeling full, you just tell me and—”

Bryn didn’t even use the knife and fork.

She grabbed the steak off the plate and held it in both hands, and bit into it. The waitress made a startled sound and took a bigger step back, but that hardly registered at all, because Bryn gnawed at the beef, tore at it, chewed and swallowed without even registering the taste except as blood and salt and flesh, and she didn’t pause until she’d teethed the last threads of gristle from the bone. Then she broke the bone open with her hands and sucked out the marrow.

Something in her brain registered then—that refueling had been accomplished—and she dropped the fragments to the plate, sat back, wiped her mouth and chin with the napkin, and drank the entire glass of water in one long, convulsive gulp.

The silence got to her in the next few seconds, and she looked up to see the waitress standing ten feet away, back pressed to a wall, mouth open. The cook was leaning out the window with an identically shocked expression. Other diners were completely still, and every set of eyes in the place was fixed on Bryn.

One kid had his cell phone out and was recording. He stopped, put it down, and slow-clapped. “That was awesome.”

“I—” Bryn swallowed, tried again. “I really love a good steak.”

Someone laughed. But not the cook, and not the waitress. They’d seen a steady parade of tough guys in here trying to eat this steak, and Bryn imagined that most of them had left half on the plate.

And nobody had ever swallowed it in five minutes flat, ripping into it like a wild dog.

Bryn threw a generous tip on the table, and got out fast. She stopped again in the restroom to clean herself up. In the harsh lights, she looked—surprisingly fine. She wiped off the remaining grease and splatters of juice, but she felt good. Better than good. She felt . . . great.

I can do this, she told her reflection. A steak a day. Or any kind of meat, as long as it isn’t . . . alive. It’s strange, but I can do it. There’s a way to deal with this. I don’t have to be a monster.

But she couldn’t shake the expression she’d seen on the waitress, either. Her definition of in control might be someone else’s of insane. Either way, it was going to be hard to masquerade in normal life now, when hunger drove her to these kinds of extremes. And how often would it do that? How much would she have to eat? She’d have to ask some hard questions of Riley to find out, but she suspected that the amount of fuel she took on would have quite a lot to do with how much effort she put out.

And considering they were right now on the unprepared, unarmed side of a war . . . effort would probably be considerable.

You can’t run away from it, Bryn. This is what you are. Deal with it, because it isn’t going away.

She went to the pay phones outside in the hallway—ancient things, but still working, thankfully—and phoned back to the motel. She asked for the room where they’d been staying, and was put through, and there was only half a ring before the call connected and Riley Block said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Bryn?”

“You knew it’d be me.”

“Of course I knew—I’m not an idiot. Where are you?”

“At a truck stop off Route 70,” Bryn said. “I ate an entire seventy-two ounce steak in five minutes. I think I set the new record.”

Riley was quiet for a moment. “Are you sure that was smart?”

“Almost certainly wasn’t. But I couldn’t—I wasn’t sure I could control it, Riley. Around Patrick. Around Joe. And I can’t stand that. I needed to eat, and waiting around for a trail bar and OJ wasn’t going to cut it. You understand.”

“You think it’s safer out there? You’re going to attract attention ordering those kinds of meals; you know that.”

“I know,” Bryn said. “But I had to have a little bit of time to myself. Just to test myself. To know—know if I can really control myself.”

“I can see that. But you can’t be out there on your own; you’re going to get hurt.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m calling.”

“We’re ready to leave here now,” Riley said. “We’ll pick you up. Stay in plain sight in the restaurant, and we’ll find you. Have some pie. Live a little. It’s not like you have to worry about your weight. No matter what you eat, it’ll burn right off.”

“Bright side to everything, then.”

“Damn right,” Riley said, and hung up.

Bryn went back to the restaurant, took her seat again, and ordered a piece of apple pie à la mode. Because Riley was right about the calories, this time her body was perfectly capable of enjoying the taste of a good pie. And it was good. Extraordinary. Or maybe that was just all her newly upgraded senses coming online.

She was tempted to order a second piece, but saw a large black van pulling into the parking lot. It flashed its lights twice, and she started to get out of her booth.

The waitress blocked her path. She was flanked by a tall, skinny man in a flannel shirt and jeans with a camera. “Just a sec, hon. We need to get your picture for the wall. This is Matt. He’s the manager here.”

Bryn was able to get her hand up just in time to block the flash, and shoved forward, knocking the waitress and the manager—who was still angling for a shot—out of her path as she headed for the door. “Wait!” the manager yelled. “It’s part of the deal. We have to get a picture of anybody who eats the steak. Wait—”

She didn’t. She was out the front doors, across the parking lot, and moving without pause into the black van, whose sliding door had opened for her. Bryn slammed it shut and said, “Drive,” and Joe Fideli, behind the wheel, put the van in gear and accelerated smoothly away onto the access road.

There was a moment of silence, and Bryn looked around. Everyone—absolutely everyone, even Joe, in the rearview mirror—was studying her.

“Enjoy your meal?” Manny asked.

Riley was watching her, too, and after a bare second, she gave an almost imperceptible nod.

Bryn sighed. “I have to tell you something. You’re not going to like it.”

She was certainly right about that last part.

Bryn chose her words carefully, because she knew what she said next would change everything, forever. And she also knew that Riley was using her as a stalking horse . . . and that whatever she said about her own condition, she couldn’t implicate Riley.

Not yet.

“You know that the version of Returné I originally was given needed daily shots,” she began. “Manny improved the formula and edited out some of the programming to get past the less fun aspects, like being a slave operated by remote control. But the best he could do was extend the amount of time needed between shots.”

Manny said, “You say that like someone else has done better.”

“They have,” she said. “Back there at Pharmadene. But it’s a little bit more complicated. You know they were engineering the drug originally for the military, and the military had a problem with the shot-a-day barrier, which—along with the chancy conversion rate—was why they canceled their support. What we didn’t know was that the project was still under way by a rogue department working for outside contractors, and that was what I stumbled into at that nursing home . . . a farm for advanced nanites, incubated in the unconscious bodies of people who didn’t have anyone to look out for them.” She still had hideous flashbacks of that place—of the quiet horrors that went on there.

“We know all that,” Manny said. “What does this have to do with you running out for a fucking steak dinner?”

Riley turned her head toward Bryn, very slightly, but didn’t make eye contact. Didn’t give any kind of a signal.

“When Annie and I went to Pharmadene for safety, we found out they’d made headway on the military priorities,” Bryn said. “We found out . . . the hard way. I’m infected with the upgrades now. I don’t need shots anymore. What I do need—desperately—is high protein meals. So you can’t just stash me in a motel with a granola bar from now on. Sorry, but it’s a . . . medical condition.”

There was a frozen, electric moment of silence.

“Upgrades,” Manny finally repeated. “That’s why you survived that fight at Pharmadene. But what do you mean, you don’t need shots?”

She took a deep breath, and took the plunge. “They’re self-replicating, the upgraded nanites. When they mature, they’ll reproduce, and that colony will need to migrate to a new host.”

Silence again, heavy this time, and finally, Pansy Taylor was the one who spoke up. “Okay, if nobody else wants to, I’ll say it. What you mean is that you’re infected, and you’re going to be infectious. And when you say you need protein, you mean you need meat.”

“Jesus Christ,” Joe Fideli said. He sounded grim, and he looked it, too. “Fucking eggheads. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency engineered the same tech into their robot battle dog. Official press release says that it could power itself from available proteins, but nobody who looked it over was fooled. It eats corpses. Or, theoretically, live prey, if it can bring it down. That’s what you’re afraid of. You’re craving meat, because that’s how the nanites are powered. You’re afraid you’re going to . . . what, eat us?”

“I—” She couldn’t lie. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. But I needed food, and I couldn’t take the risk of staying with you. Manny, the incubation period is thirty days, so I think I’ve got until then to figure out how to stop this thing. I don’t want to spread it. I promise—I don’t. But I’m going to need your help.”

“Yeah,” he said, “you damn sure do.”

And he drew his gun and shot her in the head.

Bryn saw the flash, but she never heard the sound; it was far too late.

The world blacked out.

When it came back, it did so in a thick, red rush of pain—a cascading signal that swept through her brain and out through every part of her body. The machine, coming back online, and bringing with it twists of agony that curled through her like whip-cracks.

She was aware she was convulsing—and then it was over, and she sucked in a cold breath of air and tried to sit up. She failed, but only because someone was holding her down. There was a smell of burned hair and blood and gunpowder, and voices shouting.

Violence in the air. The van had stopped moving.

“No,” she said, or thought she did; she managed to fight the hands trying to hold her down. “No! Stop!”

It would have come as no shock to anybody in the van that she could return from a shot in the head, but still, it made them pause long enough for her to struggle up to a sitting position. “Don’t hurt him,” she said. Somehow, the words came out right, which was a surprise; she hadn’t thought she’d be capable of stringing a sentence together, around the massive, wretched headache. The bullet must have gone straight through and not bounced, she guessed. That would have been a much bigger mess that would have taken time to heal, but even so, she’d have some explaining to do about the blood all over her brand-new clothes. “It’s not his fault. He’s responding to what he sees as a real threat.”

Manny had been tackled, she saw, and Liam was zip-tying his hands behind his back. Pansy had surrendered, but her face was tense and her eyes glittered with fury. Riley Block was holding a gun on her, and paying attention to everyone else in the van as well.

“You know I’m not wrong,” Manny said. “Bryn needs to be eliminated, and we need to get the hell away from her. Far away. Did you hear her? She’s infectious.”

“Then so is her blood, Manny,” Patrick said. He was holding her, Bryn realized; she was now propped against his shoulder, and his arm was around her, holding her up. “Everybody touched by blood spatter could be infected now. Including you.”

“It doesn’t work like that,” Bryn said. She felt sick and weary now, and throbbing with pain that wasn’t entirely physical. “Can’t infect just anybody. Has to be one of the already Revived, according to what I heard back at Pharmadene. Otherwise, normal human immune systems will just kill the nanites.”

It wasn’t like Manny to react quite that violently, but they were dealing now not with the rational, brilliant scientist, but the man who’d once been buried six feet under in a coffin—buried alive. The same man, but one at the mercy of all his paranoid fears and phobias . . . and Bryn had run headlong into that wall of razors. So had Patrick, because all his observation accomplished was to provoke panicked yelling and thrashing from Manny, until Liam put him in a compression hold and sent him unconscious.

“That won’t last long,” Liam said. “He needs a sedative.”

“Drug him and I’ll kill you,” Pansy said in a low, level voice. “Promise.”

“Would you rather I continue to choke him out? Because I’m fairly sure that risks brain damage,” Liam snapped, and Pansy, still smoldering, looked away. “Agent Block, the sedatives, please.”

Riley reached down for a backpack leaning nearby, and rummaged through it to find a small zipped case. In it was a syringe and several vials of drugs. She prepared a shot and handed it to him. Liam slid it home and injected Manny just as the other man started to come to, and Manny subsided into unconsciousness again with a soft sigh.

“What about her?” Liam asked Patrick. Patrick studied Pansy for a moment, then shook his head.

“No. Pansy understands that Manny can be dangerous to himself as much as anybody else when he’s in this mood. She knows that this is for his own protection.”

“Fuck you, McCallister. He’s your friend.”

“He just shot my girlfriend in the head. I think I’m displaying some amazing restraint, Pansy, and you need to understand that we’re up against the wall now. No room for bullshit and personal problems, all right? Those bastards at Pharmadene bought out part of the FBI, which is generally not known for its ability to be bribed or coerced. So think, and stop blindly reacting. We need a safe haven, one where we can test what’s going on with Bryn and see what we’re really up against. And we need to get off the grid, because sure as hell’s on fire, my ex-wife, Jane, is coming for us and she’s bringing an army with her.” Patrick had never sounded so intense and certain, Bryn thought. And he was right. What they needed right now, more than anything else, was a safe place to plan.

Jane. She was their enemies’ frontline general—one who really loved getting her hands dirty. Bryn shuddered. The smiling, cheerfully pathological face of the woman—no, the monster—loomed in her mind at the best of times now; she’d endured terrible things at Jane’s hands, and the idea of ending up in that situation again was definitely not appealing.

That wasn’t helped by the fact that Jane was Patrick’s ex—something that, frankly, Bryn still couldn’t think about without a stabbing jolt of betrayal.

She pushed the issue of Jane aside. Moving as a team meant getting Manny on their side . . . or at least Pansy. Pansy could manage Manny, if she had to do it.

Pansy glared back for a long, long moment, then said, “Manny’s never going to trust any of you again; you know that.”

Patrick shook his head. “Manny can stuff it for all I care, because once again, he just shot my girlfriend in the head. You see the problem? I can’t trust Manny, either. So we’re even. But Manny’s safe houses are the only shot we’ve got at staying alive at this point. Even if you both walked away, they’d find you eventually. He can’t earn money if he can’t work, and he can’t work if these assholes are on his trail and the world’s falling apart. So you have to do this, Pansy, out of pure self-interest. We have to win. There’s no other option.”

She was silent for a long, long moment, and then she nodded and took a deep breath. “I may just have broken up with Manny, but I have to admit, you’ve got a point,” she said. “Okay. Where are we, exactly? Geographically, not metaphorically.”

Joe Fideli—who Bryn realized was still in the driver’s seat, but turned to face them since he’d stopped the van—lowered a gun that he’d been keeping ready, and said, “Exactly? You want GPS coordinates?”

“Highway and nearest town.”

He gave it to her, and she nodded and spewed back directions, which Bryn couldn’t follow, because her headache was literally blinding her. Hold on, she told herself, as her stomach roiled in protest. It’ll pass. It’ll pass. It didn’t feel like that. It felt like dying, not healing.

She missed the moments that agreements were reached and plans made, so the next thing she was directly aware of was the van whipping a U-turn and speeding back the way they’d come, which did not seem like so much progress to her, but she was willing to give up control to the powers that be at the moment, and just rest. Bullet in the head still takes it out of me, she thought, and was briefly, painfully amused. God, I need a shower. I reek of death. Again.

Oddly enough, though, she didn’t feel hungry. Not yet. So maybe the seventy-two ounce steak had actually done some good.

They drove for what seemed like hours—steady, fast speed, curves that must have been freeway changes. By the time Bryn’s lingering headache had vanished, Joe Fideli was pulling the van onto an off-ramp and slowing down. “Almost there,” he said. “Haven’t seen any pursuit. I think we’re good so far.”

“Either that, or they’re just surveilling us and waiting for us to go to ground,” Patrick said. “Easier and neater to take us out once we’re in an area that can be controlled. So keep your eyes open, Joe.”

“Don’t I always?” For normally cheerful Joe, that was positively grumpy. “Keep your drawers on. Ten minutes.”

It was a long, tense ten minutes; none of them believed they were going to make it, Bryn realized, and so it was an immense relief when the van slowed and stopped. “Pansy, we’re at a gate,” Joe said. “Looks like a pretty serious gate, actually.”

“That’s my cue,” she said, and climbed over them to the sliding door. She slammed it shut behind her and about fifteen seconds later, the van moved on. The daylight outside the tinted windows darkened to shadow, and then went away completely as the angle of the van’s progress changed to a downward slope. It took another two minutes for Joe to pull it to a halt, and then Pansy pulled the van’s door open from outside and gave them a tight, wary smile.

“Welcome to the Batcave,” she said.

She wasn’t kidding.