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“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 ar
m. 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.
