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.