Two Weeks' Notice

Chapter 14

When Bryn woke up, fuzzy and sick, it all seemed that much worse. She’d wasted a lot of bullets on Jane, and it seemed pretty annoying to be kicked to death by her afterward. But somehow, in the rearview mirror, Bryn couldn’t understand why she hadn’t just assumed it from the beginning, that Jane was Revived; half of those she’d met were clinging to sanity with both hands, and the other half had lost their shit entirely.

Jane was the same order of psychopath as Fast Freddy Watson…someone whose darker tendencies had been liberated by the drugs, who wasn’t afraid of death or pain or reprisals.

It wasn’t good news, and the worst part came when Bryn realized just where she was.…

Back in her original predicament.

Bryn’s gaze focused up on the same grimy ceiling light, the same cracked paint, the same fluttering spiderweb. The same spider sitting patiently in the center, waiting for a new, juicy snack to wander by.

She didn’t bother trying her restraints, or even turning her head to see if Jane was there. She knew the woman would be.

“Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to Revive you?” she asked the ceiling, but she meant it for Jane, and turned to look at the woman’s dim shape in the dark where it sat comfortably, legs crossed.

Jane shrugged and flipped a light switch, and Bryn winced. The damage from the tear gas had healed, but she still felt unusually sensitive to the brightness…but then, the nanites were overworked now, struggling to keep pace with both the body’s natural self-destruction and that imposed on it from the outside. She could expect to be hurting soon…and for any further damage to be slow to heal.

“I’m useful,” Jane said. “To the right people. Cheer up, Bryn. You can be useful, too, if you work hard, study, eat your vegetables, and, above all, stop fucking around with me.”

“Sorry,” Bryn said. “That’s just never going to happen. Maybe you’d better get your badass little spoon again. Or raise your game to a full-on spork.”

Jane leaned over her, and what was in her eyes was like looking through a peephole into the darkest, emptiest hell Bryn could ever imagine. “You,” Jane said, “are going to tell me anything and everything. You’re going to beg me to ask you a question. You’re going to want to tell me so bad you’d crawl over hot coals to lick my ass. Understand me, sweetie?” Her tone continued to be warm, sweet, bizarrely likable. “You are mine for as long as I want to play with you. Nobody’s coming to get you. Nobody’s taking you away. There’s no hiding.”

“Prove it,” Bryn said. She didn’t blink. She’d let go of all that fear, all that pain, all that anguish that had been haunting her since she’d woken up screaming for the first time with the taste of that plastic bag on her tongue. She had life, unlimited life, for as long as those nanites could scurry their little mechanical asses through her tissues and give it to her.

And she was going to use it to spit in Jane’s face for as long as possible. If it was insanity, it tasted sweetly metallic, as if she were chewing tinfoil. She didn’t care anymore. Couldn’t care anymore.

I think I broke myself, she thought, and almost laughed.

Jane blinked first. Then she took a step back, cocked her head, and frowned, just a little. “You’re a weird little thing,” she said. “I mean that completely as a compliment. But—Oh, damn it! Does this happen to you? You’re getting really focused and there goes the cell—” Jane’s phone, Bryn realized, was ringing. The ringtone was Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” If that wasn’t appropriate…

“Yes?” Jane asked, and put the phone to her ear as she turned away. She strolled toward the door. Bryn focused up on the spiderweb, on the spider, on the cocooned future lunch. Maybe she wasn’t the spider or the fly. Maybe she was the web. Sticky and impossible to tear apart, no matter how hard the struggle.

“Are you kidding me?” Jane said, lowering her voice to a hard whisper. “No! No, I’m telling you, this is the one. You do not want to waste this opportunity—trust me. We need—” She stopped talking and stood very still. “All right. You’re the boss.”

Those last words didn’t sound like her at all. None of the cheer. None of the macabre joy. Just flat syllables. Jane hung up and dropped her phone back into her pocket, put her hands behind her back, and spun around to face Bryn with her face pulled into an utterly false smile.

“Aren’t you just the luckiest damn girl in the world?” Jane asked. She was smiling with teeth, and it looked as if she wanted to bite chunks out of something. Maybe Bryn. “I think maybe you are. Sweetie. Well, I have my orders. Let’s get this fucking show on the fucking road.”

She lunged for the bed, and Bryn tensed all over to get ready for the pain. It didn’t come. Jane stomped on something on the bottom of the gurney’s rails, and Bryn felt the bed lurch as the brakes released.

Then Jane shoved the gurney out from the wall and steered it toward the door.

Bryn’s breath rushed out, and she felt every muscle in her body tighten. No, no, don’t take me to the incinerator.…She knew what was coming; she’d seen it. But she wouldn’t beg, not Jane. Never.

“Relax,” Jane said, and gave her a bright, delighted, upside-down smile. “You look so tense, baby. We’re just going for a little fresh air.” She opened the door and pushed Bryn’s bed out into the hall, which still smelled of gun smoke and spilled blood. They’d be a while cleaning up the considerable property damage, which gave Bryn a bizarre sense of satisfaction. She’d hurt them. Not as much as they’d hurt her, but still. She hated to go down without a fight.

“Why are you doing this?” she asked breathlessly. “What the hell broke you this bad?”

She surprised Jane, for once; the woman glanced down at her, and there was a momentary gleam in her eyes that wasn’t driven by madness, chaos, or bloodlust. It almost looked…human. “It’s never just one thing,” Jane said. “It’s like falling out of love. You look back and suddenly you don’t know who that person was that fell in love with him, because it isn’t you. You know what I’m talking about, Bryn. A year ago, who were you? Not who you are right now. And you’ll keep changing, because out here on the fringes, there’s no gravity left to hold you down.”

One of the nurses was dead, and two were wounded; she saw the sheeted body, and one on a gurney while the other was being bandaged. The survivors glared. Not in the Revival club, Bryn thought. Not important enough to whatever this bizarre cause might be.

Jane kept pushing her right through the door at the end of the hallway, out into the night air. There was a thin, tentative blush of dawn on the horizon. “I found the old man’s cell phone, by the way,” Jane said. “In the drawer. Still on.”

“Good for you.”

“If you think they’re going to come running to find you, they won’t,” she said. “I had a guy drive it south of the border. Ought to be deep in Cartel Land by now. With any luck, your white knights will go riding into a bunch of machetes and get mailed back in wet little pieces.”

“Don’t pretend like you’re not fucked,” Bryn said, very pleasantly. “The signal got out, and they will have traced it, because those phones like that? The ones for old people? They make them very easy to locate. In case someone falls and can’t get up.”

Jane looked pinched around the mouth this time, and pushed the bed faster. “You think they’ll come rushing into some old folks’ home, guns blazing? Don’t be stupid. By this time, there’s no trace of you in the main building to find. They’ll think it was a decoy.”

“It’s hard to cover up the damage back there. All those bullet holes. All that blood.”

“That’s why, in fifteen minutes, a fire is going to gut the inside,” Jane said. “Terrible tragedy, all those innocent people caught like that. Three of our staff are going to die trying to save them.”

“Three? I only killed one.”

“Well, you wounded two, and I don’t want to explain it to the cops. Much easier if they die selfless heroes. Do you know what the word verisimilitude means?”

“You’re hard on your minions.”

“Oh, baby, you watch too many bad movies, and I don’t have minions. I have coworkers. Being paid by the same company doesn’t make us family, and they’d shiv me in the back for an extra dollar an hour. Just like in any other business.”

Bryn realized they weren’t heading for the main building—or for any building, come to that. They were heading for the square, blocky shape of an ambulance that sat flashing its lights in the parking lot—probably a very common sight here. No one would remark on it at all, even if anyone noticed. A uniformed paramedic in a ball cap was standing at the rear of the vehicle, and as Jane wheeled her gurney up, he nodded and took control to load Bryn inside. He locked her wheels down into braces on the floor, then jumped down to talk with Jane in a low voice.

Jane climbed inside and leaned over to look into Bryn’s face. “This is where we say our sad little good-bye. It’s been fun, Bryn. Don’t blame yourself for how this turned out; sometimes you’re the windshield, and sometimes, you’re the bug.” She squeezed Bryn’s shoulder and winked. “I just got my new assignment. I’ll be paying a visit to the Fideli family. Just in case little Jeffy remembers something he shouldn’t.”

Bryn lunged against her straps. “You fucking bitch!”

“Oh, sure, look who’s talking. If you ask me nicely, I’ll go easy with the kids. They won’t feel a thing. Can’t promise the same thing for the parents, though, since I owe you one. Here’s something on account.”

She tapped Bryn on the forehead, hard, and gave her that eerily warm smile again, then reached over to a gurney lying across from Bryn’s and tugged the sheet loose as she climbed out of the ambulance.

Bryn hadn’t really registered the fact that there was someone lying across from her until that moment when the sheet pulled off the body.

It was Carl. And Carl was really, sincerely dead. His head had been severed, not very neatly, and the gurney was soaked in fresh red blood. The ambulance reeked with it, Bryn realized. The loose head had been tucked beneath his left arm to keep it from rolling free, and Jane had positioned it for maximum effect, facing directly toward Bryn. Gravity had opened his mouth and made it seem as if he’d never stopped screaming.

My fault, she thought. She’d thought it unlikely she could feel shock again, but it swept over her in a cold, numbing wave. This one’s my fault. She’d left Jane out there alive and free to go after innocents. Carl had died horribly. A whole hallway full of confused old people would burn to cover up her disappearance.

Now maybe the whole Fideli family was going to pay for her mistake, too.

God, she had to kill that bitch forever.

But she couldn’t get out of the goddamn restraints.

The ambulance took off and drove for about five minutes before slowing down, and Bryn thought, They’re not bothering to dismember us very far from the crime scene; it showed a kind of stunning, unsettling arrogance that made her worry that Jane not only could keep her promises but might outdo them. Carl had gone down screaming, but Bryn decided she wouldn’t; if anything, when her head came off, she’d go down biting. Maybe she could take a piece off her killer, at least.

The ambulance came to a stop, and for a moment she thought Carl’s head would roll off the gurney, but it stayed in place. That was a strange relief that evaporated as she heard the engine shut off, the driver’s door open, and footsteps move around to the doors.

Get ready, she told herself. But how did you get ready for this final moment when all hope was gone? It seemed crazy and absurd, that she’d survived Jane only to die like this, for no good purpose.

The doors opened, and the paramedic climbed in. He pulled off his cap and crouched down next to Bryn, and she was treated to a big, toothy smile…

From Fast Freddy Watson. The man she’d shot at the marina. The one who’d killed, and then kidnapped, her sister, Annalie.

Her own original murderer.

“Hey, Bryn,” he said. “What’s shakin’, bacon?” He flipped open a long-bladed knife, hesitated for a few seconds with his gaze on her face, and then neatly began slitting open her Velcro restraints. “Welcome to your rescue party.”

She sat up fast as he methodically finished with the last of the straps, ready to defend herself if he decided to go psycho on her…but after Jane, Freddy weirdly seemed quite normal. Her scale of crazy had definitely undergone some vast expansion.

He cast a look at Carl and said, “Guess we’ll be leaving him.” He patted Carl’s bloodless cheek. “Sorry, buddy. Sucks for you, I know.”

With that, Freddy folded his knife and jumped down from the back, and Bryn followed, feeling shaky with a toxic mix of adrenaline, relief, uncertainty, and decaying nanites. The ambulance was parked on a small side road off the main one leading down the hill; they were surrounded on three sides by swelling dark hills.

And they weren’t alone. A blue sedan idled nearby, and Freddy walked over to it and opened the back door. When she hesitated, he said, “The ambulance is stolen. If you go joyriding around for long, especially with your headless friend in the back, you’ll be having some fun with the local yokels real soon. C’mon, Bryn. Could have hurt you already if I was going to do it—oh, and if I leave you here, Jane’ll find you soon. You don’t want that. Trust me.”

She really didn’t. After another second or two, she slid into the backseat of the sedan. Freddy shut the door and got into the passenger seat.

The man in the front seat said, “Hello, Bryn,” and she realized that it was no surprise, really.

Jonathan Mercer was driving the car. Fast Freddy’s boss…

And the inventor of Returné.

“I came to save your life,” he said. “How am I doing so far?”

“Great,” Bryn said. She lunged forward over the seat, put him in a headlock, and said, “Give me your cell phone or I’ll break your fucking neck, you psycho.”

He choked, flailed, and pointed wildly at Fast Freddy…who dug a phone from his pocket and held it out. Bryn let go of Mercer’s chicken-thin throat, took the phone, and sank back against the cushions as she dialed with lightning-fast fingers.

Patrick answered on the first ring, this time.

“It’s Bryn,” she said. “I’m out. They’re coming for Joe and his family. Get everyone safe, right now. Don’t worry about me.”

“Does Mercer have you?” Patrick asked. She could hear the tension in his voice.

“Did you hear me? Kylie and the kids—”

“Are safe,” Joe said, clicking in on another line. “Liam’s okay, too. So’s your dog, in case you’re wondering, although he’s getting a little pissed at you for all the inconvenient abductions. It’s hell on his routine. Does Mercer have you?”

This was so confusing it made her head hurt. “Is he supposed to have me?”

“Yes,” said Patrick. “It was the best way we could get you out of there safely. They were looking for us. Not for someone we’d shoot on sight.”

She was feeling a little out of her depth, suddenly. Back was front. White was black. And Jonathan Mercer and Fast Freddy, apparently, were allies. “How the hell…?”

“Long story,” Fast Freddy said, and plucked the phone out of her hand. “No time. We’re coming in,” he said into it, and hung up the call. “You can chat all you want later, but right now, we need to go. When Jane gets where she’s heading and figures out it’s a trap, she’s going to come looking for us, and I really don’t want to be found.”

Mercer turned around and glared at Bryn. “It probably goes without saying, but try grabbing me again and you’ll end up headless in a ditch. Got it?”

Bryn glared back at him in the rearview mirror and didn’t make any promises.

“Seat belt,” he said. “And shut up. You too, Freddy.”

It was a silent drive.

It was a long drive, as they veered northeast from San Diego and out into the desert landscape.…Not much traffic in the predawn hours, especially as the car headed into what wasn’t much more than wilderness. Bryn watched the sky turn from cobalt blue to lapis as the sunrise drove away the night. Now that she had time to think without the masking veil of adrenaline clouding everything, she couldn’t believe she was still alive—well, still functioning.

She’d met a true, nearly soulless psycho killer and walked away. For now, some part of her whispered. And you’ll never really leave that room, in a whole lot of ways that matter. She could feel it, the damage Jane had done to her. Not physically—that would heal—but in other, subtler, more awful ways. The idea of being touched by anyone made her feel sick and light-headed. She could feel her body trying to process out the stress in random twitches and shakes, but they were like the lightest possible surface tremors, and deep inside, tectonic plates were shifting, crashing, re-forming. The damage had to go somewhere, and it turned inward.

She thought that was what Jane had been trying to tell her, there at the end. It changes you.

Bryn had a new, desperate fear that it would change her, rip her apart and cobble her back together into something that was human only on the outside, like Jane—something that had lost all sense of what it meant to love and be loved in return. Something that understood only pain. Because right now, that was all she could see, smell, hear, touch, taste, be. Psychic, raw pain.

Bryn leaned her forehead against the cool window glass and stared blindly out at the dawn. Mercer and Fast Freddy tried to talk to her, but she ignored them; eventually, Freddy settled on an oldies rock station on the radio, and that was oddly soothing. She might feel like an alien in a human suit just now, but the Rolling Stones were always relevant.

The car passed a billboard reading SALTON SEA RECREATION AREA. It was an ancient, decaying, leprously peeling artifact of a far different era: 1950s hopeful families, finned cars, and a would-be resort that now existed only in faded postcards…and ruins.

Bryn leaned forward, but not enough to put a headlock on Mercer. Yet. “Where are we going?” She’d expected to head back to the estate, or, failing that, some locked-down location in the city. Instead, they were heading out to the literal middle of nowhere.

“Bombay Beach,” Mercer said.

“Isn’t that abandoned?”

“For years now, except for addicts and thrill seekers,” he said. “You know, you haven’t asked anything yet. Not even why I’m suddenly your best friend, coming to your rescue.”

“I don’t figure you’ll tell me the truth,” she said.

“Oh, Bryn, after all I’ve done for you? That hurts.”

“I don’t think you’ve earned any trust points. You sent my own sister to try to kill me.”

“Granted, but things have changed. It’s not a fight for market share for my product; it’s survival. Jane’s employers are taking away my customers, not just targeting your Pharmadene drones on the government dole. I need my customers.” Jonathan Mercer had, she’d heard, started out as an idealistic scientist, but something about Returné had broken him, too—not in the literal sense, because he wasn’t on the drug (and was still alive), but because he’d lost that rosy glow of belief. He’d been betrayed by his own, and his response had been to betray them back, over and over.

The only thing that really mattered to him now was money, lots of it, acquired as quickly as possible. He was the one who’d started illegally running Returné in a blackmail scheme with Lincoln Fairview, Bryn’s former boss; indirectly, he was responsible for Bryn’s murder and rebirth.

And directly responsible for Annie’s.

Mercer stared at her in the rearview. Pharmadene’s brand of psychotic idealism meant using the drug to turn all the best people—in their opinion, of course—into the Revived, living forever, and owing their very existence to the great corporate god. The only good thing that Bryn could say about Mercer was that he wasn’t a kingmaker; he didn’t try to judge who should get the drug and who shouldn’t. He believed that if you could pay, you should play.

It wasn’t egalitarian, except in the very commercial sense, but at least it had been better than Pharmadene’s “new world order” plans.

Mercer had gotten tired of her silence. “The point is, I have no quarrel with you personally, Bryn. Nor with Mr. McCallister. My fight with the government’s control of my business will have to wait for a better time, because they have absolutely no clue about what they’re facing.”

“Do you?” Bryn asked.

“Oh yes,” Mercer said. “Quite a bit of one, and trust me when I tell you that however afraid you are right now, you are not afraid enough.” He glanced over at Freddy. “We’ve arrived. Make the call.”

Freddy pulled out a cell phone and dialed, and just said, “Ready,” before hanging up again.

“This seems very spy-friendly,” Bryn said. “Please tell me if I’ve joined the Impossible Missions Force.”

“I think you did that the day you died,” Mercer said—and sadly, she thought, he was probably right. “You’re looking quite gray, you know. If you want a shot, then be quiet and do as you’re told. If all works well, you should have most of your answers in under an hour. I don’t think you’ll enjoy them, but you will have them.”

They passed Salton City, which was about the only claim in the whole area to civilization; the Salton Sea Recreation Area had been a half-assed attempt to create a tourist trap by sheer force of will, on an inland saltwater lake that was in the process of ecological crash. The creators had envisioned a California version of Las Vegas, only without (presumably) as much gambling.

What was left of that utter failure was sunbaked, dry, and defeated; the boarded-up, crumbling motels looked postapocalyptic, and the few stores and restaurants struggling to stay open seemed like places to avoid, not frequent.

And that was the thriving part of the area. Bombay Beach was much, much worse.

The sedan slowed down as they entered the real devastation. Most of the eyesores around Salton City had been quietly bulldozed, but here, in Bombay Beach, they were the landscape. If anyone still lingered here, it was because there was no way out for them. Where there were actual houses, they’d been left to the elements, windows broken out and ragged, sun-rotted curtains flapping in the breeze. The departing owners must not have made much of an effort to take their furniture, because many pieces lay broken and dismembered. A disemboweled sofa with chunky sixties-style lines bled tattered foam where it lay half on, half off a sagging porch.

They kept going, past row after row of utter destruction and neglect. No sign of people, just circling, wheeling birds over the flat, harsh lake. The white spots she’d initially taken for foam on the water’s surface were, in fact, dead fish. Hence the greedy birds.

It was beyond any doubt the most blighted and depressing area Bryn could imagine that hadn’t been bombed out of existence.

Mercer slowed the sedan finally, as a chain-link fence appeared ahead. It was ancient, but still upright and doing its job—odd that it hadn’t been ripped apart by vandals, as so many others had been. Behind it lay a large, square cinder-block building that looked beaten, but not quite as broken as the others.

Mercer parked. Freddy got out of the car and slid back a section of the fence that had been cut loose from the post; Mercer scraped through with only a minor loss of paint, and Freddy restored the fence and twisted some kind of fastener back in place to hold it. That was why vandals hadn’t bothered to rip it down.…They didn’t need to do so. Easy access.

They parked in front of the building. It had a single closed door, and a faded, illegible sign that Bryn couldn’t make out. She thought it looked like the ghost of a sailboat, and water, but this place was like a real-world Rorschach test—you could impose your own meaning on anything you saw here.

“Out,” Freddy said, and opened her car door. She didn’t like it, suddenly, didn’t like this.…It was rarely good news to be driven to the middle of abandoned nowhere and marched out of a car. But in truth, if Mercer had wanted her dead, he could have let her go to the incinerator and not put forth the effort.

So she went…although she remained acutely aware of Fast Freddy’s knife and where he kept it. In a crisis, she’d go for that.

She also didn’t let anyone touch her. Not at all.

Mercer walked right up to the door and knocked. Three strong, steady bangs of his knuckles, then three more, as if it was some kind of signal. Bryn listened. There was no sound out here at all except the unearthly crying of the gulls diving on the fish and the rattle of wind. The smell of the place struck her hard—a hard-to-stomach aroma of pure, rotten death. Recreation area my ass. The only recreation still thriving out here was conducted in the dark, fueled by booze, drugs, and violence.

The door opened on shadows, and Fast Freddy tried to push her inside; that was a mistake. As he reached for her, Bryn stepped into the gesture, grabbed his arm, and twisted it behind him, then frog-marched him over the threshold as a human shield. “Touch me again,” she whispered in his ear, “and I’ll cut things off you, asshole.”

He laughed. Laughed. “I forgot,” he said. “You’ve met Jane.”

She twisted harder and got a wince out of him. “What do you mean by that? You think I’m her?”

“I think nobody is the same after they meet Jane,” Freddy said, and for once, there wasn’t any mockery in his voice. “I damn sure wasn’t.”

Mercer entered behind her, and Bryn backed to the side, taking Freddy with her; she didn’t want Mercer at her back any more than she did anyone else just now. He didn’t comment, not even to ask her to let go of his sidekick; he just shut and locked the door.

A rank of lights flickered on overhead—old fixtures, dirty bulbs. It was amazing any of it still worked. The room itself was just a rectangular box that vaulted up into a curved concrete roof spiderwebbed with cracks and peeling turquoise paint.

There were two people standing in the center of the room, and both of them were armed.

One of them was Liam. It was very odd seeing him here, dressed in his sweater vest and dress pants under Kevlar, with what looked like a .380 semiautomatic pistol in his hand—what was even odder was that he looked completely comfortable with it, especially as he aimed it two-handed with impeccable form at Mercer’s head. “Please don’t move,” he said. “This might not damage your friend, but I understand it would greatly hamper your future plans.”

Mercer, looking amused, shrugged and raised his hands. “And here I thought we were all friends.” He glanced at Bryn. “You can let him go now. You’re safe.”

She released Fast Freddy, because the other armed person was Pat McCallister. No comfortable sweater, no dress pants. He was dressed for war and death, and he looked very intimidating. His dark, very cold stare fixed on Fast Freddy as Bryn let go of him. “Hands,” he said. “Up on your head. Down on your knees.”

“Do it, Freddy,” Mercer said. “Let’s not start off our collaboration with so much drama. Please have your man stop posturing. You can’t afford to kill me, McCallister. You need what I know.”

“Not as much as I’d like to blow your brain stem out the back of your skull for all the misery you’ve caused,” Pat said. “Don’t underestimate how much I hate you, Mercer.”

Mercer made it look like the prisoner-of-war pose was his own idea, even as Pat slammed him facedown onto the concrete, zip-tied his hands and ankles, and flipped him over on his back to search him. He came up with two guns, which he added to his own arsenal, and then repeated the process with Fast Freddy. He didn’t miss the knife.

Only after the two men were down and helpless did he nod to Liam, who relaxed and stepped back.

And then he finally looked at Bryn.

She didn’t remember him moving, but suddenly he was there, within touching distance, arms open for her, and McCallister was the only safe place she could imagine left in the world. The only solace.

But she flinched when he reached out. It was sheer gut reaction, utterly beyond her control; she saw the flicker of shock in his face, and then the understanding, which was worse. He didn’t try to embrace her.

Instead, he slowly, carefully put his hands on either side of her face. They felt sunshine-warm. So did his voice. “I’m sorry,” he said. It was little more than a whisper, and his eyes were fierce and desperate. “I’m sorry I couldn’t come for you myself. It was safer this way. We didn’t have the firepower to take that place, Bryn. The only thing we could do was trust that Mercer could pull this off. I hated leaving you there even an extra second, believe me.”

“I know,” she said, and wrapped one hand around his wrist. His pulse was tapping hard against her fingers. “It’s okay. Everything’s okay now.” She was lying—to him, to herself—but she couldn’t say anything else. Nothing else would help that anxious, tense look on his face. “Where’s Joe?”

“With his family. I wouldn’t ask him to leave them now, not after—”

“After Jeff went missing,” Bryn said, and felt a horrible surge of fear. “He’s all right, isn’t he? They let him go? He wasn’t hurt, was he?” That was the one rock to which she’d clung through all that horror with Jane—that at least she’d saved Jeff. If she hadn’t…if she hadn’t, the tide would rush her over the cliff.

“He’s fine. Scared as hell, like his mom. Kylie was going out of her mind, and Joe—” McCallister cut himself off, and shook his head. “I can’t let him put them at risk anymore. Or himself. Joe’s out of this—he has to be.”

“Yes,” she said. “I don’t want him hurt, either.” She took a deep breath and said, “I also don’t want you putting yourself at risk. Or Liam. This isn’t about you; it’s about me, and Annie. About the Revived. You’re just going to get hurt, Pat. These people…they’re not like Pharmadene, as bad as that was. They’re something else. Something far worse.”

“She’s right,” Mercer called from where he was on the floor. “You have no idea how much worse this really is. I’m nothing. Pharmadene is nothing. Widen your scope of disaster, McCallister.”

Patrick stepped away from Bryn and walked to Mercer. He put a booted foot on the man’s chest, and said, “What do you know?”

“More than you.” Mercer gave him a chilling smile. “If you want a clue, then I’ll give you one for free. The nursing home where they were holding your girl is just a start. Just a tiny little air bubble on the tip of the iceberg, if you will. But to give you an idea of scale, they’ve killed at least fifty people there. Old, sick people. Who misses them? Who cares, when they’ve got nobody left? It’s inevitable progress—they’re dying anyway. But they’re still useful for one thing.”

“Test subjects,” Bryn guessed.

“Oh no,” he said. “Incubators. In a way, you really have to admire their ruthless efficiency, don’t you? And all I had to use were chimpanzees.”

Pat’s expression had gone just a little bit unhinged, and he pressed down hard with his heel, driving the breath out of Mercer’s chest with a pained gust. “Start making sense while you still can.”

Mercer made some wheezing attempts, and Pat finally eased up on the pressure to let him draw in a whooping gasp. “Can’t tell you here,” he said, and coughed. “No time. We need to get out of here and find a safe haven before her tracker starts sending a signal.” He read the frown on their faces, and shook his head. “Idiots. Of course they know about the trackers. They know about the nanites, and the frequencies they broadcast. And they’ll be listening.” He jerked his chin at Bryn. “You’ve got about two hours before that happens, at the most. It’ll start out as a weak, intermittent signal, so maybe three hours for them to get a firm lock. But she’s a beacon, and she’ll pull them straight at us.”

“Pat?” Bryn asked anxiously. “Is he right? Can they track me?”

“It’s possible,” he finally said. “And it’s possible this piece of shit is lying to make us go where he wants.”

“Listen, G.I. Jarhead, if you want to reacquaint yourself with the lovely Jane, just go ahead and—”

Patrick went utterly, completely still, and then he put his full weight on the boot on Mercer’s chest and barked, “What did you just say?”

“Pat! Pat, you’ll kill him!” Bryn blurted. From the sharp cry Mercer let out, a rib had already snapped. And Patrick clearly didn’t care. “Pat!”

Even Liam was looking alarmed and moving toward his boss with the clear intent of pulling him off—until Pat sent him a look that stopped him cold in his tracks. “Mercer,” Pat said. “I’m only going to say it one more time, and then I will stomp on your chest as many times as it takes to splinter your breastbone and get your complete fucking attention. What did you say?”

“Jane,” Mercer wheezed. He’d gone gray with pain, and a good deal of actual fear. “They have Jane working for them. She’s one of them.”

Patrick took his foot off Mercer and took two long steps back, as if he didn’t trust himself not to follow through, regardless. There was something black and totally out of control inside him, something that shocked Bryn down to the core; she’d known he was capable of violence, but this was beyond all that.

This was feral.

“Pat?” she asked. He looked up at her, then down, as if he couldn’t hold her stare. “Pat, who’s Jane?”

“My wife,” he said. “Jane was my wife.”