Rachel Caine - Terminated

Joe’s eyes slowly fixed on Patrick’s. “Been friends a long time,” he said. His voice was soft and lazy-slow. “Brothers.”

“Brothers,” Patrick agreed, and took Joe’s weakly upraised hand.

“She said she was fucking you,” he said. “I pretty much had to shut her up, you know?”

Patrick shut his eyes for a moment and went very still, but he somehow kept smiling. Bryn couldn’t imagine the strength it took to do that. “Rest, man. We’ll get you help.”

“Help’s not coming; we both know it. Don’t fucking lie to me,” Joe said. “You tell Kylie I love the hell out of her. You tell my kids the same, all right? And you take good care of them.”

“I will. But you stay with me, man, stay—”

It happened just that fast, like a switch turning off. Joe went still, and a slow, uncontrolled breath bled out of his mouth. His eyes were still open, still damp, but they didn’t move their focus as Patrick said his name.

He was gone. Just . . . gone.

“Fuck!” Patrick snarled, broken and angry and desperate all grinding together in that single word. “No, Joe, don’t you fucking do this—”

Riley had vanished, and Bryn hadn’t even noticed her departure until she came back what felt like an eternity later. She stepped into the room, crouched down, and held out a capped syringe to Pat.

“From Jane’s stash in her bag down the hall,” she said. “Do it. Give it to him.”

It was a shot of Returné. He wouldn’t want this, Bryn thought. He’d want to die clean and stay that way. She believed that, and she knew that Patrick did, too, but she also knew it was impossible just now, in this raw, painful place, to make a rational decision.

Not when there was a chance . That was the awful thing about the drug . . . about having a choice at all. Because, in the end, love wanted more time.

Patrick grabbed the syringe from Riley’s open palm, uncapped it with his teeth, and jammed it without a pause into the motionless vein in Joe’s neck. He pressed the plunger, withdrew the needle, and threw it violently away, spitting the cap after it.

Revolted by what he’d just done, but desperate for it to work, all the same.

“Come on, Joe, come on—you’ve never given up a fight in your whole life. . . .”

Nothing. Bryn could—on some weird meta-mechanical level—actually feel the nanites in Joe’s blood, moving through his body, but there was something wrong. Something not quite . . . adaptive. They were going too slowly—underpowered, perhaps. Maybe the shot was flawed. Maybe the drug was too old, past its sell-by date.

But in any case, it wasn’t going to work. She knew that.

From the sick despair in Patrick’s eyes, he knew it, too.

Bryn felt it all spiraling up inside her, all the pain, desperation, hunger, anger, frustration, black despair, and raw, pure anguish of losing someone else—someone else who did not fucking deserve it . She was shaking, she realized. Shaking and desperate and something . . . something was driving her now, something beyond her control.

Riley had told her in the first, horrifying moments of her own infection: The nanites are programmed for self-transfer if the host is awake and mobile. They’ll transfer the excess supply to the nearest identified ally.

What was Joe, if he wasn’t her ally?

She walked over to Patrick and Joe, and that, too, was beyond her control.

“Bryn!” She heard Riley say from behind her. “Bryn—”

She felt something moving inside her, under her skin, inside her flesh, a horrifying sensation of something breaking free, splitting off, becoming . . . and she could not control the hands that pushed Patrick away.

She grabbed Joe’s arm in one hand, raised it to her mouth, and felt a rush of heat through her blood, through her entire body , that seemed almost orgasmic in its intensity, though it hurt, hurt horribly . . . and she bit down, into flesh and muscle, all the way to the hard crunch of bone. She didn’t have to bite to infect him, but . . . but she needed to. Some sick part of her craved it.

And the activation would be faster than simple skin-to-skin transfer.

She knew Patrick was trying to pull her away, but there was no part of her that cared about self-preservation just then; her attention was only on one thing.

This.

The nanites rushed out of her, into Joe’s open wound—an army of microscopic warriors charging into a battle almost lost. It wasn’t that she chose it, any more than he had asked to receive it. . . . Riley had warned her that the nanites would mature, would reproduce, and would force implantation.

But it was a small mercy that at least it was to save someone she loved.

Patrick finally succeeded in tearing her away from Joe, and he flung her into the wall hard enough to draw blood from her banged head. She didn’t care. The rush left her exhausted, and she couldn’t react when he hauled her upright and shook her hard enough to send blood drops flying from her head wound.

“What are you doing ?” he was asking her, but he knew. He knew all too well. “Bryn, Jesus . . . ”

Joe didn’t move. Silence fell. No one spoke at all. The sound of a drop of Bryn’s blood hitting the floor was the loudest thing in the room . . . and then Patrick let her go and collapsed on his knees at Joe’s side to check his pulse.

He shook his head.

“Wait,” Bryn said. She felt unnaturally calm now. It was—was almost as if she could feel those nanites that had left her body, feel them spreading and working, reviving and reinforcing the tiny army that the first shot had delivered. “Wait.”

A minute passed. Riley shifted uneasily at the door. “Something’s wrong—it shouldn’t take this long. We have to go,” she said. “Bryn—”

“Are you feeling it yet?” Bryn asked. “The compulsion to spread them?”

“No,” Riley said, which didn’t make sense. They were both nanite factories, both primed to infect others; Riley ought to have been ahead of her on the harvesting curve. “Guys, I’m sorry, but we have to get out of here.”

“Wait.”

“He’s gone,” Patrick said, and sat back. “It didn’t work. He’s dead.”

“I’ve been dead,” Bryn said. “Have a little faith.”

They waited another full, agonizing minute before Joe’s eyes opened, and he let out that horrible, mind-shattering scream—the scream of a newborn, dragged from safety and comfort into a raw, painful world.

Or the shriek of a soul dragged out of peace and into hell.

Patrick took his hand and held it tight. “Easy, Joe, easy. I’m here. We’re here. Breathe. Breathe.”

Joe did, big, whooping heaves of air that rattled with liquid. He coughed out blood. The next panicked set of breaths was clean.

Riley nodded and left the room.

Patrick checked his gut wound. It was still raw, but it was already better. The bleeding had stopped.

“Jesus,” he said, and it was half a prayer. “I know I’ve seen it before, but—” He shook his head. “We have to move. Joe, can you get up?”

“Pat?” Joe blinked and, for the first time, really focused. “That bitch stabbed me, Pat. Wish I could say I got her back, but—”

“Easy, man, she’s done. Come on. Get up.”

Bryn helped get Joe to his feet, and after an unsteady few seconds, he started shaking in earnest. His face went pale, and his eyes . . . strange. Empty and yet very focused.

He said, in a low, rough voice, “Hungry. I’m hungry.”

Of course he was. Bryn realized with a jolt that he’d used up whatever energy the nanites had brought with them in this massive healing effort, and he’d need food. Fast.