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All they had to do was make it just a little farther.
She saw Patrick at the edge of the tree line, and he spotted them; he started to run toward them, but she shouted at him to get back, get back, and as Reynolds stumbled and dragged her down, his shirt bursting into open flame, she let him go. She kicked him into a rolling, messy tumble down the slope toward where Patrick anxiously waited. Stop, drop and roll, she thought, and an insane giggle tickled the back of her throat. She swallowed it, because there were things to do. Serious things.
She risked a look at the fire, and froze.
It was . . . terrifying. And beautiful. A monster the size of a building, moving with easy grace and fluid speed. Trees were combusting so fast that their trunks exploded as sap boiled. Animals raced around her—mice, rabbits, what looked like a fox but it was hard to spot in the thick, curling smoke.
Her shirt was on fire now. So was her hair.
No. God. The nanites would keep her hideously alive, of course—hideously alive as the flames burned through skin and muscle and fat. At some point, there wouldn’t be enough of them left, and they’d shut down, but the last of them, the very last, would keep her brain sending and receiving signals while the rest of her burned away. She’d know. She’d know every single second of the agony.
There was no way out, because the flames had caught her now.
The pain was enormous. Mind-melting. She knew she was screaming, and she couldn’t stop, couldn’t begin to think how to stop, and the flames were alive, alive and eating her alive, eating her like a lion with a wounded gazelle. She could feel its eagerness, its hot-breath hunger, and she snarled out a challenge as she felt her skin sizzle and pop, and she turned and ran blindly through smoke, flames, past blazing torches of pines. A bear was running with her, its fur on fire, making grunting howls of pain. They trailed smoke and tongues of yellow and red like streamers, and suddenly someone was there, a shadow, and she felt a crack that hardly registered over the fury consuming her body and soul, and then . . .
Then she ran headlong into one of Jane’s soldiers, who had just shot her. More than once, she supposed; she couldn’t feel it. Couldn’t feel much of anything, as her nerves shorted and fried from the overwhelming assault.
She hit him as a fireball and took him to the ground, and as they rolled over and over down the rocky slope, they hit damp, sandy ground, and the motion smothered most of the flames, and then they rolled into the river itself, and steam exploded up in a cloud as the last of the fire went out on her body and clothing.
She dragged him underwater. He was struggling, panicked, and she saw the wide, white-rimmed flare of his eyes as she dragged him deeper. It didn’t take long before the last silvery bubbles burst out of his mouth, and his eyes took on the dull, flat look of death.
His blood was a rusty cloud in the water, and she needed it. Needed it so badly.
She was on him like a shark in the next, breathless second. She needed to breathe, but she didn’t care except to note it as additional things to heal.
For healing, she needed . . .
. . . She only needed.
No thought.
Just flesh.
Chapter 15
She crawled out of the water and lay facedown on the riverbank, gasping for air. Pain had come back—and come back way too fast for any kind of sanity—and she shuddered all over, unable to move now, pinned under the weight of the agony. She felt someone taking her under the shoulders and dragging her. Jane’s people, maybe. She no longer knew, or cared.
Death would have been a blessing.
She didn’t get it.
• • •
The nanites must have been merciful, at some point, or her brain simply blotted out the worst of it, because the next time Bryn opened her eyes, she was lying in the backseat of a car, with the road vibration steady beneath her back.
I was dying, she thought. Burning alive.
But when she looked down at herself, she seemed better. Her skin looked angry and fragile, but it was healing. Her clothing must have been a total loss, because she was naked, wrapped in a blanket that was soaked through with blood. It smelled like smoke and disease, and even with the windows down in the car, the stench lingered.
“Patrick?” she whispered.
The speed of the car slowed dramatically, and she felt it veer over to the side and come to a stop. Ten seconds later, the door opened at her head, and she saw him leaning over her, upside down. The setting sun haloed him like a smoke-stained, bloodied angel. “Bryn? Stay still. You’re still healing. ”
She didn’t feel inclined to move now, now that she knew he was safe. She held out her hand, which shook, and he took it in both of his. He pressed the back of her fingers to his lips, very gently. There was a terribly haunted look in his eyes.
She wasn’t the only one with permanent PTSD. The people around her, the ones who had to watch what happened to her—it was just as bad for them. And maybe worse.
“Reynolds?” Her throat rasped, and when she swallowed she tasted greasy smoke. Barbecue. Ugh.
