Two Weeks' Notice

“Uh…how?”

“Pull them in line.”

“Fuck. Okay. Here, bite down on this.” He shoved something between her teeth— leather, it felt like. She bit down hard, knowing what was coming, and felt him pull and twist her right leg. It was like dipping it into boiling lava, but the pain, while extreme, was brief enough. She hardly screamed at all. He did the left, then palpated up her body to find the rest of the damage. She had a broken pelvis, but that was clean enough. Her left arm needed resetting for the compound fracture. He straightened out her back for the spinal injury.

Then, last, her fingers, one sharp, star-bright snap at a time.

She passed out sometime before that, thankfully; when she came to, the pain was an ebbing burn, and everything felt straight, though weak. She spit out the leather strap—his belt—and concentrated on breathing in and out. If she had lung damage from the smoke, the nanites were thorough in cleaning it away.

In another twenty minutes, more or less, she felt human again—especially after the booster shot Joe gave her. Even the side effect rush didn’t seem so bad, comparatively.

“That,” Joe said in a hushed voice, “may be the most disturbing fucking thing I have ever done, and that’s… saying something. Bryn? You still with me?”

“I’m okay,” she said. That was a lie, but not as much of one as it would have been earlier. “I can walk. We need to get out of here.”

“I can clean the blood, but your clothes are pretty much totaled,” he said. “You look like you’ve been in the fire. It’ll get noticed.”

“Should have worn my cargo pants.”

“Probably,” he said. “Turn your skirt and jacket inside out. It’ll do for a quick walk to your car.”

“Had to leave my briefcase,” Bryn said. “Goddamnit, the FBI files were in there. I dropped it somewhere during the explosion.”

“Then it’s toasted into little bitty pieces. You’re covered.” He helped her take off her jacket and flip it to the relatively undamaged lining side; it looked weird, but not as strange as the smoke-damaged, fire-roasted fabric. She did the skirt by herself. It was almost presentable. Her shoes were weirdly misshapen around her feet, but they’d do. “I’m walking you to the car. Just hang on to me and don’t slow down.”

“Wait.” She reached inside her bra, and found the silver thumb drive; it looked undamaged. “Take this, just in case we get separated.”

He nodded and put it into a zippered pouch. The hunter’s checked vest he was wearing concealed Kevlar—his version of street-legal flak gear. “You good to drive?”

She laughed, but there wasn’t much humor in it. “Sure,” she said. “Thirty minutes ago I was a leaking bag of broken bones, and now I’m good to drive. Nothing odd about that, is there?” The problem with living as a Returné addict wasn’t so much coming to terms with surviving as it was coping with the wrongness of it. Something inside just wouldn’t accept the terms on which she lived…and especially at times like these, when she was so frankly and nakedly not human. But therapy could wait, of course. She’d need mountains of it, in the end, but right now she needed to take the first step, then the next. Get in the car. Drive home. Collapse into Patrick’s arms and try, for a moment, to forget.

Find out what was on the thumb drive that seven people—eight, if she counted herself—had just died for. It had something to do with Pharmadene, something the FBI undoubtedly suspected and had kept from her. She didn’t think they’d known about the dead people, or the trap, but she couldn’t be sure.

She couldn’t trust anyone, except Joe and Patrick and Liam.

Certainly not Riley Block, or Zaragosa, who’d warned her about Riley in the first place.

Good to go, she told herself again. It was an order, and she followed it all the way home.

Chapter 8

The explosion was breaking news, but the FBI spokespeople were out in front of it, in a joint appearance with the local police. The official explanation was something crime related; Bryn didn’t pay much attention. It was all bullshit, and from the tense look on the agents’ faces, they were aware of that, even if they had no idea why it was bullshit.

Riley Block had the very same tense expression when she showed up at the gates of the McCallister estate, one hour after Bryn and Joe rolled in. Bryn was in the kitchen with Patrick and Liam when the FBI-issue sedan pulled up, and Riley got out to show herself to the camera. She didn’t speak, but then, she didn’t need to. They all recognized her face.

“Patrick?” Liam asked, standing next to the security controls. “If you’d like me to send her away—”

“She won’t stay away,” Patrick said. “Let her in. I want to know what the hell is going on, and she’s the only one who might be able to tell us.”

“Don’t tell her we recovered anything,” Bryn said. She felt…good. It was such a bizarre fact of her unlife, that she could jump to her death from eight stories up and feel fine a couple of hours and a hot bath later. “Everything but that.”

He nodded. “I’ll let you do the talking, since I’m still a little off.” Of course he was. She wasn’t the only casualty of the morning—just the only one who’d come back from it so quickly. “Go on, Liam. Let her in.”

Liam didn’t seem pleased with the ruling, but he hit the control and activated the speaker to say, “Please drive to the front, Agent Block.”

“Thank you,” she said, and got back in her car. Well. She was in a polite mood—that was something, at least.

Liam turned the screen off and gathered up the coffee cups she and Patrick had been using. “I’ll bring a light lunch,” he said. “Enough for the three of you.”

Joe wasn’t here; he’d stopped off to hand back the thumb drive, then headed home to see his family and get to the funeral home to cover for Bryn. Patrick shook his head. “Never mind lunch. Go watch Annie. I still don’t trust her to stay put, even sedated and restrained.”

Liam looked disapproving, and before he left, he set out a tray of chilled finger-food sandwiches—cheese, cucumber, roast beef. “I’ll get the door and send Riley back here.”

“All right, Mom,” Patrick said. Liam gave him a downright dour look.

“I believe your friend is having a bad influence on you. Sir.”

“Don’t sir me, Liam, or I’ll dock your pay.”

“I write the checks, if you recall. Sir.”

“Game, set, match.” Patrick’s moment of levity passed, and so did Liam’s. “Careful up there.”

“Careful in here,” Liam said, and included Bryn in that as well; he’d taken her ruined clothing away without commenting on the blood or smoke and fire damage, but the looks he gave her were worried and reproachful. “Ring if you need me.”

“I think I can handle Riley Block,” Patrick said.

“One-handed, sir?”

That evoked a smile—a thin one—that showed no lack of confidence. Liam nodded and disappeared from the doorway. He was back a moment later, ushered in Riley, and left again.

Riley was, in fact, not in a polite mood, at least not by the time she arrived in the kitchen. She looked very official, Bryn thought; she was wearing a navy blue suit with a gray blouse that practically shouted FEDERAL AGENT. The only thing missing was the visible shiny badge. She stared at the two of them for a moment, then yanked a chair out from the table and sat down without an invitation. “Don’t even fucking try to tell me you weren’t there,” she said, leveling a finger at Bryn. “What the hell happened? I have seven dead bodies, Bryn! And we’re damn lucky there aren’t more. And I know good and well that this has something to do with Pharmadene.”

“If it had been anybody else but me, you would have had eight bodies,” Bryn said. She shoved the plate of sandwiches toward her. “Lunch?”

Riley’s glare was hot enough to toast the bread. “What. Happened?”