Two Weeks' Notice

Chapter 16

There was a time for fighting for their lives, and it came as they stepped outside the conference room.

Annie had been the first one out, and her flinch and attempt to pull free of the guard holding her was Bryn’s first clue that something was wrong—more wrong. Then she caught a glimpse of the two medical gurneys lined up in the hallway, complete with restraints, and experienced a horrible flashback of being strapped down, Jane, the spoon, the surveillance video of Jason screaming in the incinerator’s flames.…

And Bryn snapped. Hard and clean.

Her elbow caught the first guard right where it should—squarely in the nose, shattering it and sending him reeling back off-balance. Bryn spun and followed with a sharp heel-of-the-hand blow that drove the broken bone up into his brain.

His eyes rolled up to show whites, and he dropped. Dead, or so badly disabled it wouldn’t matter in terms of the fight. Bryn went down with him, which led to a confusion of people tripping over their bodies as she wrestled the gun out of his limp, warm hand.

She rolled, sending another guard reeling for balance, and while he was gaining it, she shot him three times. The bullets entered under his chin and exited through the top of his skull in a bright red mist.

Two down, but her window of opportunity had snapped shut. These weren’t mall cops; they were highly trained security personnel, most likely with military backgrounds themselves. As she reached to retrieve the second guard’s gun, she took fire from the third, the one holding Annie as a shield.

The bullets hit her in the side, the back, and the shoulder—not the head, which would have stopped her. The damage was probably fatal, but not immediately so, and she didn’t fucking care. At all. Bryn’s legs went numb, but she twisted around and aimed left-handed.

The agent was almost completely covered up by her sister, and he fired again, missing Bryn’s head by inches.

“Annie, drop!” she yelled, and shifted her aim to Robinson, who was in the process of drawing his sidearm. She killed him with three shots to the face, counting on the fact that it would take Annie a second to process her instructions, and sure enough, her sister had just decided to release her knees and drop when Bryn guided the muzzle back.

The agent was pulled inevitably forward to hold on to Annie—off-balance and with too many things on his mind. He fired, but missed, and then his hostage’s head dipped, and Bryn had a good, hard target.

She fired three more shots, and he fell backward, dragging Annie with him. She fought free of his limp arms, grabbed his gun, and stumbled over to Bryn. “Get up!” Annie screamed, and dragged at her elbow. “God, Bryn, get up!”

“Can’t,” Bryn said. She felt terribly calm just now. “One of the bullets hit my spine, it’ll take time to repair. Go, Annie.”

“Go where?” Her sister was crying, on the verge of hysteria. “Bryn, get up!”

“Try to get to the loading docks—that’s probably the best chance of an open exit.” There, on the opposite side of the hall, was the locked door with the ominous biohazard sticker. “Drag Robinson down there. Hurry!”

Annie grabbed the fallen Robinson by the collar and dragged him over the guards’ bodies, then down the hall. There were alarms sounding, and it was a matter of seconds before this would all be for nothing.

“Use his palm on the scanner!” she said. “Then swipe his card!”

Annie did it, but she had to swipe twice before the lock clicked open. She grabbed the door and swung it open, propped Robinson’s body against it, and came back to grab Bryn under the arms and drag her in that direction. Then she kicked the dead agent out of the way and slammed the door shut. “They can get in,” she said. “And we kind of left a trail.” Of blood. Bryn’s blood.

“I know that,” Bryn said. They were in an air lock with thick glass inset into the next door, and another scanner and—this time—a numeric keypad. Beyond that glass was another room.

It looked like a hospital ward. Gurneys, each docked at a medical monitoring station with readouts.

Hundreds of gurneys, all full. Most of them were occupied by elderly people, but there were a few younger ones…and Bryn recognized two of the faces.

Riley Block and Chandra Patel. Hooked up to machines, lying as still and silent as all the others in that room. There were two people awake, wearing negative-pressure biohazard suits, checking machines and making notes on clipboards.

Bryn raised her gun and fired into the glass, one pull after another. The first two only cracked the surface; the fourth punched straight through, and the fifth broke half the glass free of the mounting.

A new alarm started sounding. The two Pharmadene employees inside the room turned to stare in confusion, but Bryn wasn’t worried about them; they were lab dweebs, unarmed and about as dangerous as the Pillsbury Doughboy in those inflated suits.

Annie didn’t need prompting on this one; she reached through the broken glass and turned the inner handle on the door, and silicone seals broke with a sound that made Bryn think of lips smacking, as if the room itself were consuming people. Annie dragged Bryn inside and slammed the inner door again, not that it would help, and propped her up against the wall.

Bryn’s body tingled and zinged as the nanites zipped around frantically trying to repair her damage. She could feel one of the bullets, the one in her shoulder, being pushed slowly back out through the wound track. Nauseating. “Unhook Riley and Chandra,” she said. “Get them out of there.”

Annie rushed to do it, and pulled the central line free from Riley’s bone-pale arm. There was a gout of blood, and then…

Then it almost instantly healed before Annie could even press her fingers over the spot.

“What…?” Annie said, and looked to Bryn for some kind of explanation. “Okay, that’s weird, right? Even you don’t heal that fast.…”

Riley Block sat up with an indrawn gasp and screamed. That was a very familiar sound, a lost and awful wail that trailed off into confusion, and then Riley opened her eyes.

Even from the distance of several feet away, Bryn could see how wrong those eyes were. They were almost…metallic, though after a few blinks the color changed and grew darker.

But there was something eerily reflective about them still.

“Get Chandra. The next bed over,” Bryn said, and Annie went to the next bed where the small woman lay. She pulled out the IV, with the same instant-healing result.

Chandra’s shriek was unearthly, and familiar.

“Riley?” Bryn said, and the woman’s head turned toward the sound of her voice. The focus of those eyes woke something primitive inside Bryn, something that recognized a dangerous predator and went very, very still in the hopes it would go away. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even try to move, although now she felt a jolt of agony in her lower back that meant the spinal column was trying to reconnect severed nerves. Spinal cord damage took almost as long as brain injuries to heal; she’d be effectively paralyzed for fifteen minutes or more, depending on the extent of the carnage back there.

Now Chandra was sitting up in the bed next to Riley, graceful and feline. She swung her legs off the bed and stood up. She was naked beneath the sheet, and didn’t seem to notice or care.

“Get out of here,” Riley whispered. “Hurry, Bryn. Go.” She tried to get up, but it seemed she wasn’t as well-off as Chandra; she almost fell as she stood up.

Chandra walked straight to Bryn with calm, firm, unhurried strides. That darkly metallic shine was in her eyes, and it was more pronounced than it had been in Riley’s. Bryn wanted, very badly, to curl up into a ball and hide her eyes, and she didn’t even know why. Don’t. Don’t do it. Her instincts were whispering, not screaming, as if they were afraid to be heard. Don’t let her touch you.…

When Bryn tried to pull herself back, Chandra simply closed the distance and grabbed her arm.

“No!” Riley shouted, and lunged forward, but she went down, hard. “No, don’t—”

A shattering wave of heat cascaded into Bryn, agony that started exactly where Chandra’s skin touched hers, and she couldn’t keep back a raw, thin scream. Annie pointed her stolen gun at Chandra, but that was useless and she knew it; she didn’t even try to fire.

This is impossible, Bryn was thinking. It felt as if Chandra’s very touch was injecting waves of nanites into her. The same burn she was used to feeling, but bigger, stronger, more. She could almost see the thin silver threads of transference between their two bodies, but it had to be imagination, had to be—she couldn’t see something that small.…

And then the heat, the agony, turned into waves of blessed cool bliss as the nanites traveled through her veins, her nerves, soothed every injury, every pain, like the golden touch of God himself.

Chandra let go of her arm, and her suddenly blank eyes rolled up into her head to show the whites…and she collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Bryn blinked in confusion. Everything looked so bright, so very bright and sharp and clear. She felt as though if she focused, she could see, and see, and see, all the way down to the very tiniest particle. The excitement of that was so heady that she felt she might laugh. I’m high, she thought. Higher than a fucking kite. Nothing scared her. Nothing mattered—not the horrified look on Annie’s face, or the fact that the door to the lab was being opened by their enemies, and they were all seconds away from being taken prisoner or shot to temporary death.

And then she saw Jane.

Patrick’s wife.

That mattered.

Jane opened the inner door, careless of cuts from the glass, and stepped inside. She was armed with a P90, but she didn’t point the lethal little machine gun; it hung on the strap around her chest. She wasn’t smiling this time; Bryn had seen her look insane, and hungry, and delighted, and vicious, but this was a whole new expression.

She was afraid.

“Damn. You spoiled the harvesting,” Jane said. “Someone’s going to be very upset with you, Bryn. You took nanites that weren’t meant for you, and we can’t get them back now until the new colony matures.” She stepped back behind a couple of the guards. “Concentrated fire on all of them, on my mark.”

Riley stood up, as she finally got her balance. So did Bryn, in an absolutely effortless motion like levitation.…She didn’t even feel her muscles working at all. Annie was staring at the two of them, then at Jane and the guards behind her, and she clearly had no idea what to do now.

But Bryn did. And as she exchanged a glance with Riley, she knew the agent knew it, too. “Is Chandra dead?” Bryn asked.

“No,” Riley said. “Just traumatized. She’ll be all right in about an hour.” It was an hour they didn’t have. “I’m sorry she infected you, but her nanites were ready to be harvested. It’s not a choice. It’s a compulsion, to pass them on. Like the hunger.”

Bryn’s feel-good wave crested and began to fall; it left her with a healed, finely calibrated body. She even felt that she could think faster. Possibly even react faster. It was her body, but…perfected.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Whatever she did to me, it feels great.”

“For now,” Riley said. “We’ll discuss downsides later. For now—” She shot a glance at Jane, and the armed men who’d filled the rank behind her. “That’s the only exit.”

Bryn bared her teeth in a grin. “Then let’s take it.”

Jane said, “Mark,” and two of the guards started shooting.

Bryn didn’t even see Riley move, but suddenly she had closed the distance, and she was holding both of the guards’ necks in her hands and squeezing. Bones snapped with a gruesome popping sound, and the two men’s bodies jerked, danced, and went limp except for residual tremors.

Dead.

By that time, Bryn—without even consciously willing it—had crossed the room and grabbed another one. She was aware he was shooting into her, but it didn’t hurt, and it didn’t even figure into her calculations. She was razor-sharp aware of the terror in his face, though.

That made her happy, for the approximately five seconds he was alive to actually feel the fear. It didn’t occur to her then that she’d killed him with her bare hands, with one blow, until she was dropping the next one, and then the next. She was aware she was bleeding, but it was minor leaks, quickly closing up.

One of them fired straight into her face, and that stung; it took a second for the darkness to clear from her eyes, but then she was ripping his arm away at the elbow, and the blood, the blood was so red and clear and amazing that she involuntarily raised her fingers to her lips and tasted it.

Iron and fear.

Jane was gone. She’d run. And the guards were dead in pieces.

And Riley was eating one. She had an arm, raw and bloody, and she was chewing on it. That should have shocked Bryn, but it didn’t; it seemed…right.

And the blood in Bryn’s mouth, the blood she’d licked from her fingers, tasted so good. She reached down for one of the pieces of meat, not even thinking that it was part of a person, because the desire to refuel was so…so…

Someone was screaming.

Annie.

Bryn jolted back to herself with a shock. Annalie was huddled against the wall, hiding her face, still screaming like a little child. When Bryn touched her shoulder, Annie flinched and scuttled away, still screaming. The stark horror in her made Bryn freeze in place.

Riley dropped the arm she was holding. She didn’t look surprised, or particularly shocked. She walked to a tray that held towels and took one, which she used to wipe the blood from her hands and mouth, then brought a clean one over to Bryn. “Here,” she said, and pressed it in her hands. “Wipe your face. You’re scaring your sister.”

“What—” Bryn stared blankly at the towel, then raised it to her face and swiped it over her mouth. It came away red. Bloody. She felt a little surge of revulsion, and cleaned up in earnest, scrubbing her hands, her neck, her face, until the skin tingled.

There was a taste in her mouth, iron and fear, and it horrified her that she still liked it. Didn’t want to consider the consequences of that at all. “What happened?” she asked, and didn’t really want to know, she realized. “Riley, what did she do to me?”

“Put you one up on the food chain,” Riley said. “Let’s go.”

The hallway outside the lab was deserted except for the bodies of the agents Bryn had killed before…before. She felt as if someone had drawn a dividing line across her life. Someone had, of course, the first time she’d died and been Revived, but this felt like an even bigger break. She didn’t know what was ahead, but she knew it was different. “What about Chandra?” she asked.

Riley shook her head. “We can’t carry her,” she said. “She’ll be too weak to move for a while. We have to leave her.”

The entire lab floor was locked down; every door was sealed shut. Riley finally recognized that she was naked, and stripped pants and a shirt from a fallen guard; she didn’t bother with shoes. She did, however, pick up a gun—another P90 like the one Jane had been wearing. Someone had used it, Bryn thought; she could see the heat rising from the barrel. Maybe it was one of the bullets that Jane had left littering the floor behind her.

Whatever Chandra’s invasive touch had done to her, injuries were processing much faster than before. She didn’t even bleed much.

“They’ll pump in gas,” Riley said. “Try to suffocate us and keep us down until they can move us to the incinerators.” She checked the clip in the gun. “It works. They managed to take down two others that way. We need to get off this level.”

“What did she do to me?”

Riley didn’t even glance her way. “I think our best bet is the elevator shaft. We can pry the doors and climb, but we need to start now. They’ll be pumping the inert gas in soon, if they haven’t already.”

She was right, Bryn realized; there was a breeze coming from the air vents, and a slightly sweet smell to it. Annalie seemed especially vulnerable to it, because she slowed down as they headed for the elevators; Bryn had to pull her along in a stumble, and then carry her.

As Riley pried open the doors, she said, “It wasn’t Chandra’s fault. It was the nanites; they were ready for harvesting. Normally the docs come in and draw them off in a syringe when they mature, but they’re programmed for self-transfer if the host is awake and mobile. They transfer the excess supply to the nearest identified ally.” The elevator shaft was empty, the car somewhere up above and likely locked down. Riley took a breath and jumped. She grabbed the cables and looked up. “Let’s go,” she said. “Can you handle her weight?”

“Yes,” Bryn said. She wasn’t sure—Annie wasn’t exactly skin and bones—but Bryn 2.0 felt capable enough. Riley was climbing the steel cables bare-handed, which should have been impossible; since it wasn’t, Bryn jumped and grabbed on. Annie’s weight overbalanced her and almost sent her tumbling down the open shaft, but she clung to the cables with sudden, panicked strength, and began to inch her way up.

It wasn’t hard. It hurt, but it wasn’t hard at all.

Above her, Riley jumped like a cat and landed on the tiny metal ledge with her hands outstretched to either side to lock herself into the narrow space. She balanced herself and began to pry the doors apart.

They were waiting on the other side, and as the metal doors screeched apart, Bryn saw the hail of bullets hit Riley, punch through her body, and tear open bloody holes in their wake.…

But the holes didn’t bleed more than a few drops, and Riley lunged forward.

Bryn kept climbing, careful of her balance, and once she’d gotten to the opening, she swung around the cable, building momentum, and jumped as she held Annie tight against her shoulder.

She landed on bodies. It was a good thing Annie was still out, because it was gruesome. Riley was the only one still standing, and she looked…feral. There was a silvery, reflective shine deep in her eyes, and as Bryn watched, she lifted a raggedly severed arm and…

And ate until the shine went away. Then she dropped the gnawed flesh, wiped her mouth on her shirtsleeve, and looked away. “It’s not a choice,” she said. It was the second time she’d mentioned that, Bryn thought. “The nanites need energy. They take it how they can get it, it’s part of the programming, and protein is what they crave.”

She was right, horribly and awfully right. Bryn should have found the heap of dismembered limbs sickening, but when her stomach complained, it was rumbling, not heaving. Dear God, no, no, let me not be hungry.…

She licked her lips and tasted blood. It was delicious.

“Keep moving,” Riley said.

This level was empty, too, but Bryn thought that there must have been personnel still alive and sealed up behind doors, because there was no attempt to gas them. Annalie woke up—groggy and confused, which was good because it meant maybe she wouldn’t remember what had happened before so clearly. The stairs that Riley headed for were locked up, but that didn’t seem to pose a problem anymore to Upgraded Riley. She just smashed the locks, picked out the pieces, and led the way up.

They met Jane halfway to the next level. She was standing on the landing. “You know I can’t let you leave,” she said. She must have been afraid, Bryn thought, but there was nothing of that on her face, or in her body language. She just looked…hard and uncompromising. “Sorry.”

“You did this,” Riley said. “We’re just the lab rats. You’re the ones who conducted the experiments. Can’t blame us if it goes wrong.”

“You’re not stupid, Riley, and you’re not vicious. You know what happens if you get outside the Pharmadene building; you know the risk of vector infection. The government knows, too. If you make it even one floor closer to the world, they’ll vaporize this place with a nuclear strike, because that’s the only way. And I wouldn’t bet that you and Bryn can survive that. You’ll be taking most of San Diego with you in the process. Innocent lives.”

“Well, on the upside, we’d be taking you,” Bryn said. “What do you mean, vector infection?”

Jane actually smiled a little. “Those nanites inside you are self-replicating. That was what Fountain Group was tasked to create—self-replicating, self-powering nano-soldiers that don’t need injections, and can convert others as they go. The only thing they haven’t mastered yet is how to program them accurately for combat situations, but you know what? You’re doing just fine without it.”

“You called it harvest,” Bryn said. “You were using those people in the lab as incubators for the nanites, and harvesting the crops.”

“I told them that if they made them touch-transfer enabled, it would be a mistake,” Jane said. “But too late now. The rat’s out of the cage, and all that crap. You can’t leave here, Bryn, because you’re a walking colony that’s going to replicate, and when that happens, you’ll pass it on. Vector infection. It’s not even a choice.”

“It can only pass to someone without a live immune system,” Riley said. “Don’t let her spook you. You can’t infect the living, only someone already Revived.”

“You sure about that?” Jane asked. “Because I’m not. And the consequences are a global plague the likes of which only Revelations predicted. So you’re not leaving. Are you?”

Bryn was dizzy with the imagined horror of it. Riley hadn’t been able to control the impulse to transfer the nanites, and the hunger…“Self-powering,” Bryn whispered. “The hunger. We’ll eat anything, won’t we? Even other people.” She wanted to be sick, but her body refused to allow it. No, the nanites refused. They were in charge now.

“Protein,” Jane said. “Think about it. In battle, there’s always a source of protein around. Living or dead. It’s just good strategy.”

Bryn leaned against the stairwell wall, suddenly faint. She collapsed to a sitting position on the stairs.

“Don’t give up,” Riley said. “Bryn, don’t give up.”

“Let Annie go,” Bryn said. “She’s not infected. Let her go, and I’ll stay. I swear.”

“Oh, sweetie,” Jane said softly. She had a remorseless look in her eyes. “It isn’t even vaguely a possibility that we’re negotiating here.” A door opened above her on the landing, and she glanced up, but not with any surprise; she was clearly expecting reinforcements. “See? You’ve got zero shot here, ladies. Absolutely ice-cold zero.”

“I’d recalculate that if I were you,” said Patrick McCallister, as he leaned over the railing and pointed a P90 directly at Jane’s forehead. “Hello, Jane.”

“Hello, Pat,” she said. Other than a flicker of her eyelids, and a slight tightening of muscles, her self-control was impressive. “How’d you get in?”

“I had help,” he said. “On your knees, Jane. Face the wall, hands up and flat—you know the drill.”

“You’re a fool if you think you can take them out of here. Oh, it can be done, but you have got to ask yourself, Pat—should it be done? Because what you’re taking out of here isn’t your sweet little not-quite-dead girlfriend. This thing inside her skin, it’s not really human anymore. And it’s weaponized.”

Patrick’s face tightened, and he failed to hide his fury; it shone in his eyes, impossible to miss. “Not going to say it again. Knees. Wall. Hands.”

Jane shrugged and followed his orders, and that was when Bryn realized that McCallister wasn’t alone. Joe Fideli was at his back, and Liam, and—dear God—Manny Glickman, wearing body armor and carrying a truly badass machine pistol. Pansy Taylor was with him.

“Joe,” Patrick said. “Secure that bitch.”

“Securing the bitch, aye. Hey, how ya doing, Jane?” Joe jumped down onto the landing, pulled Jane’s right arm behind her, snapped on cuffs, and then the left. He made sure they were tight, then zip-tied her ankles. “I thought you were dead.”

“I was,” Jane said. “And you’re going to wish you were, too. Especially if you don’t listen.”

“Knew I forgot something,” Joe said, and pulled a strip of duct tape from a row of them stuck to his pants. He put it over Jane’s mouth. “Now you’re secure.” He wasn’t taking chances. He searched her and removed anything that could have possibly constituted a weapon, or a lockpick, and propped her into the corner. She was trying to yell through the gag, and her eyes glittered furiously.

“You shouldn’t be here,” Bryn said. She felt horribly numb now and resigned. “None of you should have come.”

Joe turned to Bryn and gave her the warmest, most heartbreaking smile she’d ever seen. “Hey,” he said. “Come on, cheer up. This is a rescue, not a wake.”

Riley put her hand on Bryn’s shoulder and said, “If we stay here, they’ll burn us. There’s no question about it. Annie, too.”

“And if we go?” Bryn raised her head and stared into Riley’s face, saw the flash of silver in her eyes. Knew it was in her own. “My God, Riley. Look at what we are.”

“We’re what they made us,” Riley said. “And we’ll have to deal with that. But we will.”

“No,” Bryn said. “I can’t. I won’t take the risk.” She pulled in a deep breath. “Patrick. Jane’s right. You can’t take us out of here. We’re infected.”

“I know,” Patrick said. “Manny figured out the incubations, and what they were planning to produce. We’ll take precautions, but I’m not letting you stay here and burn, Bryn. I can’t.”

“You can’t trust me. And I can’t trust you,” she said, and met his eyes. She saw him flinch, and knew he was having the same reaction she’d felt on recognizing Riley’s change. “Go. Take Annie and go.”

“Shit,” Riley said. “You mean that, don’t you?” She looked past Bryn, and her eyes widened. “Annie, don’t!”

It was a bluff, and it worked, because for a split second Bryn took her attention off the threat in front of her, and looked toward her sister…who looked utterly shocked, and definitely not attacking her.

Damn it.

Even her nanite-fueled reaction time wasn’t enough to stop Riley from crushing her neck.

Bryn came back to life strapped down to a gurney—not with Velcro, but with heavy-duty leather and chains that would probably have held a ship’s anchor, much less a somewhat woozy woman. Without leverage, there was no way to break free.

She was in the back of a van, and the van was moving.

Patrick McCallister was sitting next to her, staring down at her face. Annie and Riley were next to him, and Joe Fideli. She didn’t see Liam, Manny, or Pansy; she guessed they were up front in the cab of the truck.

“How?” she asked. “How did you get us out?”

“I had help,” he said. “The FBI wanted in; they knew something had gone wrong in there. I just tagged along. They were looking for a missing agent who’d tipped them to problems.” He glanced aside at Riley. “I let them know she was probably still inside and in grave danger.” He looked grim and tense, and didn’t quite meet Bryn’s gaze. “I knew you were headed to Pharmadene, and once we understood that Riley had gone missing, we knew that was no longer safe. Mercer talked about the new generation of nanites they were brewing; that was enough for the FBI to make the decision to move on them.”

Then how…“They don’t know about me and Riley,” Bryn said. “You didn’t tell them about us. About the nanites we’re carrying and incubating.”

“I couldn’t,” Patrick said. A muscle jumped in his jaw, and he tried to relax it. “Riley says you won’t be contagious, either of you, for about thirty days. It takes that long for the new generation being built inside you to mature.”

“Riley lies. You should remember that.”

“Sitting right here,” Riley murmured, but she didn’t dispute it.

“I did remember,” he said. “Manny pulled files from the servers, and she’s telling the truth. We’ve got about thirty days to stop you and Riley from replicating. If we don’t make it, Manny says he can still safely remove the excess nanites to storage and start over.”

Bryn realized she was crying—slow, inevitable tears of fury and failure. Her head was strapped down in place. She couldn’t even shake it. “You cannot take this risk. You have to turn us over. God, Patrick, we eat people and we can’t be stopped. Did Riley tell you that? Did she?”

He didn’t say anything to that. None of them did until finally Joe said, “If it comes to burning you down, I won’t let him get in the way, Bryn. But it ain’t gonna come to that.”

“Trust me,” McCallister said, and took her hand. “Please.”

“You should have told me about Jane,” she said. The pain she was feeling inside was nothing the nanites could fix. “God, Patrick, why didn’t you tell me?”

“I would have, but it’s not a pretty time of my life. I wanted—I wanted you to think better of me, just for a while. And I had no idea she was alive.” He shook his head. “Doesn’t matter. What matters is that I love you. And I’m not letting it end like this. We will stop this.”

It’s too late, she thought. She could feel the nanites inside her, building their own future generations and destroying her life in the process. What if Jane was right? What if the nanites could infect regular, living people? What would stop them?

You will, she told herself. And Riley. And Patrick. And Joe. And even Annie and Manny and Pansy. We will stop them.

Patrick was holding her hand, and after the instinctive flinch of horror that she might somehow transfer her doom to him, she was grateful for that. For the warmth and the silent promises. She knew he hadn’t lied to her about Jane; he would have told her. And she knew he didn’t love Jane.

We will stop this. We have to.

She opened her eyes and met Patrick’s steady, warm gaze. She didn’t need to say what she was thinking. He knew. His fingers brushed the hair back from her forehead, and he pressed a gentle kiss there in a bloom of warmth. “We will,” he said.

It was a promise she would have to trust.