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“Easy,” Riley said. “We need to hear this. ”
“Thanks,” Pansy said, and frowned as she rubbed her bruised arm. She looked—fine. Well fed, well rested. Tense, but otherwise completely normal. “Well, I was going to tell you all how excited we were you were still with us, but . . . ”
“Annie,” Bryn said. “I want to know what’s happened to my sister. ”
“Annie’s fine, Bryn. What did you think, that Manny—” Pansy got it, then, and covered her mouth with her hand. “No. No. He wouldn’t do that. He’s not Jane, for God’s sake!”
“Then how does he know this cure is so effective?”
“Because I convinced Brick to help us out with data mining. He found another Alzheimer’s facility being used as a Fountain Group farming operation,” she said. “The people there couldn’t be helped, Bryn. So Manny gave it to Brick, and—he tested it there. It wasn’t what he wanted to do; it was what he needed to do. But it works. Effective on both those with the basic nanites, the ones on Returné, or those with the upgrades. ” Pansy glanced at the helicopter. The pilot was gesturing to her. “We need to go. Now. ”
Bryn was not a fan of helicopters, and this ride didn’t make her feel any better about them; she clung to the hanging strap as Patrick asked more questions. She couldn’t hear much over the constant noise, but he seemed satisfied enough with the answers from Pansy.
Joe silently offered her a thick piece of beef jerky. Peppered. She took it and chewed; she hadn’t even realized she was hungry, but she quickly downed six pieces from his stash, to his evident amusement. Riley needed less, but she ate, too. Bryn thought about asking where they were going, but it honestly didn’t make much difference, because the only alternative was a jump out the door, and from this height she didn’t really look forward to the recovery.
It was a relatively short ordeal, at least, and the aircraft touched down again within an hour’s flight. Still desert, so they’d likely gone west, though Bryn’s sense of direction was never good in the sky. There was an excellent reason she’d never signed up for the air force.
Once they were out of the bird and on solid, sandy ground, she realized they’d been let out . . . nowhere. There was a single small concrete building, well pitted with age and wind. Big enough to be a small closet, nothing more. No windows. One thick steel door that had once been painted some color, but had now faded to a dull off-tan that matched the sand.
The helicopters weren’t landing here, she realized; once the five of them were out, they immediately dusted off again and beat rotors on the sky heading east. The silence of the desert was stunning, after they’d disappeared toward the horizon. One of the quietest places in the world, she’d always thought, and it seemed even more hushed here than she expected.
Pansy said, “Welcome home. ” She spread her hands to indicate the expanse of nothing that surrounded them. It was inhospitable as hell, and Bryn couldn’t imagine who’d want to call it home beyond snakes and lizards. It felt ancient here.
And it felt unwelcoming.
Pansy walked to the small concrete structure, pressed her hand flat on the c
enter of the door, and waited. After a few seconds, the door sagged open, with an audible hiss of air.
“Hope you’re all okay with stairs,” she said. “It’s a long way down. Watch out, it’s steep. ”
Inside, the lighting was dim, from inset wire-covered fixtures that had a distinctly cold-war era look to them. Concrete, and narrow, steep stairs descending. Nothing else except a bright yellow sign, only slightly faded, that read HIGH SECURITY AREA—KEEP ID VISIBLE AT ALL TIMES.
Bryn pulled the door shut behind her, and felt a shiver as it locked with a heavy, forbidding clunk.
Then she followed the rest of them down the steps.
She counted more than a hundred before she gave up. There were periodic flat landings, which helped them all catch their breath, but by Bryn’s estimate they went more than six stories down . . . and then arrived in a large, bare room with nothing but another door.
This one, though, had no keypad, no sensors, no handle on the door. Pansy simply waited, face upturned to a domed observation camera above the entrance, until it clicked open as well.
Another missile base, Bryn thought, but it turned out she was wrong.
“Welcome to BHC-One,” Pansy said, and led them down a clean, arcing hallway with blue carpeting. “That stands for biohazard containment, by the way. Back in the day, this was where the government tinkered around with nerve gas, and then it was refitted to explore infectious agents like anthrax, botulism, lethal influenza, and hemorrhagic fevers. Anything with a rapid infection rate and high kill percentage ended up getting grown and evaluated here, all the way through the late eighties,” she said. “When they mothballed the place, they disavowed it ever existed. Most of the equipment was too expensive to remove, and nobody wanted to take responsibility for destroying the place, so it just . . . stayed here. Manny took it over ten years ago. It’s been our home ever since. ”
“Home,” Bryn repeated. “I thought you didn’t actually have a home. ”
“It’s where we keep what’s important to us,” Pansy said; she sounded more serious than Bryn had ever heard her. “It’s our last stand. So yes. Home. ”
The upgrades to the facility must have been made in the late sixties or early seventies . . . It had that vaguely futuristic, sterile, spaceship feel to the design, including the oddly shaped doorways. Everything had, no doubt, started off sleek and white, but the plastic hadn’t aged well . . . most of it looked yellowed now.
“Yeah, I can see why you love it,” Joe said. “Comfy. ”
That made Pansy finally smile, a little. “This way. ”
She took a turn to the right, down another weirdly curving hall, and then opened up a door on the left.
The room was circular, midcentury modern in style, and finished out the same way, with a round bed and vaguely futuristic chairs and desks. A wall-mounted flat TV didn’t look out of place in all that.
