Working Stiff

This place was designed for easy cleanup.

Stay calm, she told herself. They’d taken her clothes. She was in a baggy, thin coverall, snaps up the front, that rustled uncomfortably with every movement. It, like she, was disposable. There was a number printed on the breast of the coverall: 00061.

Bryn’s legs suddenly folded as the reality of it overwhelmed her.

They were leaving her in here to dissolve, under the merciless stare of that camera. Nobody was coming to help her. Nobody would care. She was 00061, not a person. She was a dying lab rat. Once life left her rotted remains, they’d flush the room, disinfect, and throw her bones in some incinerator somewhere.

She’d just vanish without a trace.

Get up, she told herself. Get up and fight.

But there wasn’t anything or anyone to fight. She couldn’t fight for her life. She didn’t have one. Without the shots, she had no chance at all.

McCallister—

She couldn’t count on him, not anymore. Fideli was out of the picture; McCallister was missing, maybe on the run. She had no allies here, no help, and no hope.

They didn’t put you in here just to kill you. Harte wants to know what McCallister is up to. They’ll question you. When they do, there will be an opportunity.

She didn’t really care. The bleakness of the situation was overwhelming.

Get up!

She did, just because it was something to do besides lie down and die.

A careful inspection of the room didn’t make her feel any better. There was a door, but it opened only from the outside; there wasn’t even a hint of a handle or hinges in here. Bryn tried the drain, but it wasn’t nearly big enough to fit her head through, which meant it was useless for escape purposes, even if it didn’t narrow below the floor. Plus, a nightmare crawl through a drain full of the decomposing tissues of numbers 1 through 60 … No. That was definitely a last resort.

The glass was ballistic quality, and she had nothing to use to break it in any case. Battering her fist against it would only snap her own bones.

As she stared out, she realized that she did have a view, after all—of another room, identical to this one, except that it contained a fixed metal table with thick restraint straps. I guess I didn’t fight hard enough to rate that, she thought. Bryn wasn’t sure whether she should feel happy about that, or disappointed, but all that fell away as a briskly walking figure suddenly crossed her field of vision outside.

“Hey!” Bryn yelled, and slapped the glass. “Hey!”

It wasn’t one person, but three—two blue-jacketed security men, and a third person being escorted in. He looked nervous. Very nervous. Tall, good-looking in that bland GQ way; he was wearing suit pants and a crisply ironed white shirt, a snazzy tie, suspenders, but no jacket. She couldn’t hear him, but he was talking to his guards, trying vainly to pull away. He had a Pharmadene ID hanging from his belt, one with a green stripe; one of the guards took it, ran it through a scanner, and put the ID in his pocket.

Then they unlocked the room across the hall and hauled the unfortunate man inside.

He screamed and fought when he saw the table, but it wasn’t any use, and he wasn’t very good at it anyway. He was yelling so loudly now that a faint whisper traveled to her through the glass. When she pressed her ear to it, she could make out some of what he said.

“—can’t do this! I’m not some nobody you can make vanish; I’m an important man. Do you hear me? I’m a vice president, damn it! Take your hands off of me!”

The guards nodded to each other, and in one smooth move had him down on the table. They were a well- coordinated team, locking down his arms and legs in fast, sure motions. He kept on yelling, but Bryn wasn’t listening anymore, because a new person had entered the picture.

Irene Harte.

She’d changed into a different suit, and her hair and makeup looked fully restored. Not even a spot showed to prove that Bryn had marked her—and she didn’t so much as glance Bryn’s way. Her full attention was on the man strapped to the table across the hall.

Bryn didn’t need to hear him to know what he said next; his lips were easy to read. You bitch! The rest was probably threats, not that it would do him any good; maybe next he’d try to bribe her, if intimidation didn’t work. The last thing would be begging.

It didn’t get that far.

Bryn had been expecting this to be some sort of interrogation; maybe Mr. Vice President had made a serious security error, or was even the leak they’d been looking for … but instead of pulling out interrogation drugs, or even a decent torture tray, one of the guards pulled out …

A clear plastic bag.

Bryn gasped and stepped back from the window. “No …”

The bag slipped neatly over the man’s head, and was cinched in place with a deft twist of the guard’s wrist.

“No …”

She saw it from two angles, like some nightmare … from where she stood, watching the man’s panicked eyes widen under the film of plastic before his breath clouded the bag, and from inside the bag at the same time. Déjà vu. Panic roared up inside her, flattening her defenses. She pressed both hands against the glass, trying desperately to help him, help him, because she knew how it felt; she knew the agonized terror that drove him to suck in all the available air and compress the plastic around his skin.

She knew the taste of that toxic panic, and how it felt to gasp for the last tiny bit of oxygen. To watch the diffused light go out.

It hurt—oh, God, it hurt—and it seemed to go on forever as the man struggled, twitched, thrashed, and fought against death.

No one helped him.

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