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When he finally relaxed, Harte looked at her watch. The guards didn’t move as the minutes ticked by, waiting for her word. When she finally nodded, the bag came off, leaving the dead man’s damp, stark face, eyes wide and bloodshot, lips blue. A trickle of blood came from the corner of his mouth. He’d probably bitten his tongue in his panic.
The guards left, taking the bag with them, and took up posts outside the room. Now a medical team came in, three gowned and masked people who hooked up monitors and oxygen and all the things necessary to saving a life.
Not that there was a life to be saved. Not anymore.
Not until they gave him the shot of Returné.
The scream of his revival penetrated even the solid barrier of the glass to Bryn’s death cell. She watched him come back, full of horror and pity and anger, and then, then, Irene Harte finally turned and looked at her.
She triggered some kind of intercom outside of Bryn’s room.
“You seem to have something to say. ”
“You have a funny way of retraining people around here. ”
Irene Harte laughed—a real laugh, full of amusement and little bit of admiration. “I’m consolidating my position, that’s all. One thing we cannot have, from this moment on, is any hint of disloyalty. We can’t take any risk of harboring traitors and whistle-blowers. Like, I suspect, Patrick McCallister. ”
“You’re killing your own people!”
“I’m ensuring they’ll never betray us,” Harte said. “From the moment our researchers discovered that this drug could revive and maintain dead tissues, there was no going back. It isn’t about a market share; it’s about power. Someone’s going to have it. Someone will control how this drug is manufactured and used. It will change the entire world. Wars will be fought. Whole civilizations will be destroyed, because right here, in these rooms, we have stopped the one thing that man never conquered: death. ”
There was a glow in her face now, an almost religious ecstasy that Bryn found scarier by far than the corporate bullshit she’d seen before.
“As long as Pharmadene controls how this gets out, we have a chance to make this change rational. To dispense revival to the people who can make a difference. And that’s what we’re going to do. Choose who lives on, and ensure their loyalty. ”
God. Harte made an eerie kind of sense, from a megalomaniac’s point of view. If one power—say, Pharmadene—controlled the release of the drug, they could pick and choose the movers and shakers in all areas: politicians, bankers, technologists, the capitalist and political royalty of the entire world. They could manipulate markets, topple—or simply puppet—governments, rig the entire game of life and death in their favor.
And she was right about something else: if Returné got out uncontrolled into the world, it would cause chaos— every grieving parent screaming for his or her children to come back, every husband, father, wife, sister, daughter. Politicians would tilt revivals in their political favor. Armies would become indestructible.
It was a vision of a future in which everybody died, and everyone lived, and nobody really survived. No matter how it played out.
“Pharmadene can still control all this,” Harte said. Her voice had gone soft now, and very sure. “We will control it. First in our own house; then we broaden our goals to include political and financial leaders immediately after. We’re starting with our top ranks today. We’ll work our way down through the corporate structure and have everyone on board in the next few days. ”
The man across the hall had finally stopped screaming, but he was weeping, a desolate and lonely sound. Irene Harte moved to shut off the intercom.
“I’m not dying in here,” Bryn said. Harte hesitated, smiled, and shook her head as she flipped the switch. Bryn hit the glass. “Hey! I’m not dying in here! I’m going to stop you!”
Harte turned to watch as the newly reborn vice president was led away, and another executive-level victim arrived to take his place.
For two days, the room across the hall saw a steady parade of people, and it was always the same—the indignation, the don’t you know who I am, the fear, the terror, the death, the scream. Bryn stopped watching. Stopped listening, except to note the scream and keep count of how many had been … processed. It went on twenty-four-seven, and after a while she fell asleep. It felt obscene to sleep while people were dying, but all the self-loathing in the world couldn’t keep her awake.
She got thirsty first, then hungry.
No one came. She received nothing at all.
On the morning of the second day, she noticed that her skin was starting to get dry. It might have been the lack of humidity in the room, but she didn’t think so. The nanites couldn’t manufacture water or energy for her muscles; dehydration would render her helpless first.
But what scared her much, much more than the dryness and her cracked lips and parched mouth were the ominous dark bruises that formed under her skin. She woke up from a restless nap on the afternoon of the second day and noticed discoloration on the side of her palm, where it had been resting against the floor. She rubbed at it, and it gradually faded; when she unsnapped the coverall and checked the hip she’d been lying on, it, too, had a bruise.
Lividity.
“No. ” She massaged the bruise away with trembling fingers. “No, no, this isn’t going to happen. It’s not. ” He promised.
She couldn’t count on him anymore. McCallister was on the run, a fugitive at best. She was inside Pharmadene, in a fortress, and they were killing everyone here, systematically. McCallister would be an insane fool to set foot in this place ever again. He had to cut his losses and run, get help from the government or the military or the FBI or the fucking SEC. Anyone, to shut this down before it was too late.
Harte’s plan was moving along nicely; someone had posted an org chart printout on the wall that Bryn could just barely make out, and it looked like they’d gotten through the executive ranks. Now there were two rooms in use, one just visible at an acute angle down the hall—two that Bryn could see, constantly processing live people in, revived people out. She couldn’t afford to care, not even when one of the women—only a little older than Bryn, pretty—broke free and ran screaming and ended up banging uselessly on Bryn’s glass, staring into Bryn’s face. In her struggles, she hit the intercom, and for a deadly thirty seconds Bryn had to listen to the woman plead for help, for mercy, for her children.
Then, pathetically, scream for her mom, like a terrified child.
