Working Stiff

they flew open.

She went flat to avoid the hail of gunfire that followed, and was only partially successful. She felt more bullets striking, and this time, the shock didn’t really protect her as much. The bright, razor-edged net of pain fell over her and tried to pin her down, but Bryn fought her way back out of it. She rolled, stumbled upright, and dropped three men in jackets, one after another. One got her with yet another round, but it was a flesh wound in the upper arm. Still, it made Bryn’s vision gray out for a moment.

That was just long enough for Irene Harte to step up and shoot her in the chest, twice, point-blank. This time it was bad enough to stop her. Bryn went down flat on her back, unable to breathe, unable to think. The wave of agony was crippling. Her brain seemed to be covered in a red and silver storm—red for the pain, silver for the nanites trying desperately to abate it.

“I knew it’d be you,” Harte said, from a great distance away. “Not McCallister. You. Because you never understood the good we were going to do here.”

Bryn blinked, and the world steadied and sharpened just a little. Irene Harte was standing over her with the gun, staring down. She didn’t say anything else as she cocked back the hammer of the revolver and aimed it at the center of Bryn’s forehead.

Bryn couldn’t breathe, and she couldn’t think, but she could tilt the gun that was still in her right hand, and with the last of her strength, she pulled the trigger.

She hit Irene Harte in the chin, and the bullet exited the top of her skull in a shattering explosion of blood, bone, and brain.

Harte stared blankly down at her and tried to squeeze the trigger—or at least, that was what it looked like, in that split second of frozen time. But then Harte’s eyes rolled back, and she folded like a paper doll, and the shot, when it came, bored into the floor an inch from Bryn’s head.

The next security wave poured in, looked at Harte’s body, and went still in confusion. Bryn rolled up to her knees. She could breathe only in shallow hitches, and she knew the nanites were working overtime to keep her moving, but it was enough.

Harte had invoked protocols, but she’d specified only that they were supposed to protect her. With Harte dead, they had no real direction to follow. Nothing to work for. Nothing to achieve.

Nobody paid attention to Bryn until she gasped out, “Evacuate the building. Get everybody outside. If they resist, knock them out. No killing. Go.”

Five security personnel dashed out to do her bidding, and she hadn’t even tried to invoke protocols. Her ability to get up wavered when she achieved a kneeling position, so she stayed there for a long few moments, wondering how much time was left, wondering whether she had the strength to make it to McCallister. She wanted to. She wanted to get him and Joe safely away, before it was too late. The FBI would allow them to go. They weren’t … infected. They were still alive.

Harte was safely and permanently dead. Bryn checked. There was no sign of any nanites trying to heal her wound. Her eyes remained open, fixed, with uneven pupils. Like Mareen, she hadn’t taken the shot; she’d wanted to be the puppet master, not the puppet.

Thank God.

It took five long minutes before Bryn could make it to her feet, and another three before she could manage to crawl up the stairs. She left a bright trail of blood behind. The hallways were chaotic now, Pharmadene people with conflicting orders, all trying to carry them out.

Gunfire was still coming from the area where McCallister was pinned down. Someone had given this batch of security personnel orders to take down the intruders, and somehow, even the bomb threat hadn’t altered that order.

Bryn made it to the doorway, leaned against the jamb, and methodically put rounds into the backs of six guards who were firing at McCallister’s barricade. The last one turned and tried to shoot her, but then he hesitated. She knew him. It was the man who’d escorted her through Pharmadene on her first day.

“Get out,” she told him. “Just go. Go now, before it’s too late.”

He thought about it, raised his gun, and then lowered it again. There was confusion in his eyes, and fear.

Then he ran.

Bryn collapsed.

McCallister lunged forward as he came around the barricade and caught her on the way down.

“She’s dead,” Bryn said. “Harte’s dead. You have to go now. Get out before it’s too late; the government’s cleaning all this up. Please go. You have to go while you still can….”

“Fuck,” McCallister spat. He picked her up, turned, and said, “Joe! We are leaving!”

“About fucking time,” Joe said. “Harte?” He slid around the barricade, carrying a shotgun.

“Bryn says she’s down. Move your ass.”

“Hey, you’re the one who just gained weight, not me.”

McCallister gave him a wild-man grin, and Bryn relaxed against him, thinking, If we go now, it’s all right. Everything’s all right.

They made it to a fire exit. The alarms went off screaming. Bryn had a confused impression of the buses in the parking lot, still full of silent Pharmadene revivals, waiting for the end. I should save them, she thought. As many as I can.

But before she could, a black limousine pulled up to block McCallister’s path, and Riley Block stared at them. She had a semiautomatic pistol aimed right at McCallister’s head, and held it there for a long few seconds before she sighed and said, “Oh, fuck it. Just get in.”

McCallister threw Bryn inside and dived in after, with Fideli close behind. The limo sped away without even waiting for the door to close.

Bryn turned her head away just as there was a screaming sound from overhead, and a tremendous shove at the back of the limousine, and the world exploded into fire around them.

“… worst explosion in the city’s history,” a tinny voice was saying when Bryn swam up out of the dark. “Gas company officials continue to say that the incident is under review, but according to recent information from government sources, gas officials were warned about the dangerous state of the pipes under the Civic Theatre as long as a year ago. Clearly, this could have been much worse had the rupture occurred during a major event….”

Bryn cracked her eyes, widened them, and blinked to try to get things clear again. She was lying in a hospital bed, hooked up to monitors, and a television was playing. The thin flat-screen was sitting on top of a rolling cabinet across the room. She blinked and fixed on the picture, which was of a rolling ball of fire rising up into a cloudless blue sky. Burning buses. A wrecked limousine.

Her wrecked limousine.

She felt surprisingly good, but then she would, wouldn’t she? Goddamn nanites. She could have been shredded by the blast and might have come back together again.

Maybe.

An alarm went off on her monitor, and she squinted at it, trying to see what emergency it was sensing. Before she could, the door opened, and a doctor looked in.

No, not a doctor. A woman in a lab coat.

Riley Block, with a livid bruise on half of her face, and a patch over one eye.

Riley turned the alarm off and said, “I’ve been waiting for you to wake up.” She poured Bryn a glass of water and handed it over. “Drink.”

She did, almost choking at first, then draining it eagerly. “More.” She coughed. Riley poured. “McCallister?”

“He’s all right. You got the worst of it—shrapnel through the door. He had cuts and bruises, and Fideli got a broken leg, which he hasn’t stopped griping about.” Riley touched the patch with one fingertip. “I got this. Glass. It’s just scratched, though.”

“Sorry.”

“Better than losing my life.” She regarded Bryn in silence for a second, then sat down on the bed beside her.