sleeve underneath, the thing that took the place of my arm didn’t look human. Muscle striations stood out in bands under the gray skin, webbed with a network of black veins. Just the sight of it brought back memories I’d give anything to forget, memories of that damp, dark pit and the cold hands that held me down as they …
I overrode the JZI and eased another dose of relaxant into my bloodstream. Warmth and numbness crept through my body as I closed my eyes and counted back from ten. My teeth chattered as I sucked air through my teeth and let it out slowly.
“You can’t—” he started to say; then I clamped that gray hand down on his neck. His skin felt hot underneath it, the signals jumping up through the grafted nerves like sparks of electricity. His eyes popped open as the fingers squeezed.
“What was going on in that basement?” I asked him in a low voice.
“Fuck you.” He grunted. I willed the dead hand to squeeze tighter, and it responded. His face turned darker, and blood began to bloom through the gauze over his right cheek.
“Tell me,” I said.
“Fuck …”
He grabbed the forearm and pushed, but I leaned into it. As he struggled, in my head I heard Sean’s voice from long ago, back in the grinder. I was underground, where they’d dragged me. Their cold fingers dug into my skin from all around.
In my mind, I heard the crunch as the first set of teeth bit down. I felt the impact of a knee in the side of my head, and that cold hand that clamped down on my face.
Rafe threw a punch that thumped into my ribs, but there was no power behind it. He threw two more, then tried to kick me, but got tangled in the blanket.
“I want to know what was going on down there,” I said. I eased up on his throat, and he gasped in a breath, then coughed through strings of spit.
“I don’t know anything,” he wheezed.
“You know who you worked for.”
He got one leg free from the blanket and thrust his knee into my side, but again, there was no power behind it. He was weak and injured. An IV tube still trailed from one of his arms. I didn’t need to strong-arm him, but something was building inside me, out of my control.
Still feeling like I was moving through a haze, I let go of his neck and reared back the fist. I fired it down like a piston, and his teeth broke against the knuckles of the dead hand. A front tooth and canine disappeared into his mouth and he coughed through a spray of blood, both red and black. He held one hand between us as I hammered his face again.
“Hey!” someone shouted from the hall. The person worked the handle and found it locked.
I grabbed Pena and hauled him off the gurney, carrying him across the small room before slamming him back into the wall. My fist thudded into his cheek, and the gauze tore away to show a deep bite wound underneath. I fired my other fist into his gut and the breath went out of him. He slid down onto the floor, where he doubled over and vomited.
I raised my foot and stomped down on his left shoulder. He screamed as his collarbone broke and the joint dislocated. Blood was running from his mouth and nose, drops bleeding into the splash of puke in front of him. He put his other hand down in it and slipped forward on the floor.
“Get that door open!” a voice shouted outside.
The dead hand grabbed him under the armpit and I heaved him up until his toes brushed the floor. Red drops pattered down onto my shirt as I flipped him over my shoulder and down onto his back. His head struck the tiles and his eyes swam.
“Wait—” he started to say, but I hit him again. The dead fist went up, leaking black blood, then hammered his face again and again. Even when his hand stopped clawing me and his body went slack, I kept driving that gray fist down. In my mind, I was back in the grinder, back down in that hole, and they were around me, pushing their faces in closer.
Pins and needles pricked through my knuckles, pulsing each time they connected with meat and bone. The sensation was muted and flat, as if the nerves in the skin registered pain, but not like before. It reached my brain through a filter, sanitized and scrubbed.
Distantly, I remembered once telling Faye that revivors didn’t feel pain. She hadn’t looked sure then. There had been some part of me that was never sure either, but I knew now. I was right.
“Stop!” a voice shrieked, a woman’s voice.
I felt blood under my fists with each impact. I’d forgotten who Pena even was or what he was. He became the thing that had transformed a piece of me into what I hated and feared more than anything else. Something primal wanted to destroy the thing underneath me, to pull that meat from the bone, like they had done to me.
“Stop!” the woman screamed again.
There was panic in her voice, and it snapped me back. I blinked something salty from my eyes and registered the scene in front of me.
I was kneeling on the floor over Pena, who wasn’t moving. His lips were split, and his mouth was filled with blood. His face and the floor around it were a mess of red and black, and I saw thick drops of nanoblood dripping from between the fingers of my closed revivor fist that was still poised for another strike. At some point, they’d gotten the door open and come inside. A crowd of people had gathered to my left.
My jaw was pulled open, teeth bared. A string of drool hung from my lip.
It was like an itch, deep in my brain. When it registered, I felt my stomach begin to turn. I wiped the drool away and closed my mouth, resisting the urge I couldn’t explain. Having a revivor limb didn’t make you a revivor. It didn’t …
I slammed my good fist into the wall, and the people around me jumped. One of Pena’s eyes was sealed shut, but the other one moved. He was still conscious, barely. I leaned in close so he could hear me.
“Names,” I said in his ear. He gagged and choked up blood onto my collar.
“Deatherage,” I heard him whisper.
“Who else?”
“Let him go, Agent!” the woman’s voice shouted.
“What were they doing down there?” I said.
“He’s …going to …wake them …up …”
“What?”
He choked again. He couldn’t speak. I scanned through his wrecked face, past hematomas and chips of bone. I was looking for augments—a camera eye, anything that might give me more information. A small object stood out behind two teeth lodged near the back of his throat. He had an implant, some kind of slimmed-down JZI.
I used a ’bot to drill through its security and began pulling data. There wasn’t much stored there, but I got three names: Harold Deatherage, Ang Chen, and Dulari Shaddrah.
“Ang Chen,” I whispered. I knew that name. Ang Chen was one of the high-level Heinlein researchers that was helping to develop the virus that would hopefully shut down Fawkes’s network, when the time came. How did his name end up in Pena’s JZI?
“What about Ang Chen?” I said in his ear. He didn’t answer. “Who is Shaddrah?”
The connection between us dropped as the implant shut down. Rafe’s vitals began to dip.
“Damn it! How are they involved in this?”
Pena’s remaining eye closed, and blood bubbled at the corner of his mouth. My fist, still in the air, tightened.
