Rachel Caine - Two Weeks' Notice

She didn’t find her, which meant either she’d never been here or it was far too late.

She just barely had time to make it back to Carl’s room and strip away his restraints fast before more gunfire sprayed her way. He was staring at her uncomprehendingly, and for a few panic-stricken seconds she thought they’d drugged him so thoroughly he wouldn’t be able to move, but then he snapped out of it and said, “Bryn? Oh my God, are you here to rescue me?”

She laughed. It rang hollow in the room, and had a bitter, wild edge. “Sure,” she said. “Why not? Get up, you ass. We have to get out of here.”

“I’m sorry about…you know,” he said, as he slid off the bed. They hadn’t let him keep his own clothes, either; he was wearing—of all things—some dirty pair of denim overalls that sagged around him, and an equally dirty T-shirt.

“Selling me out?” she asked. “They used your Protocol. You didn’t have a choice. Never mind. Get down in that corner.” She shoved him toward it and backed to cover him, facing the door. She’d locked it, but she couldn’t have taken the only set of keys, and even if by some miracle she had, these weren’t the type to play a waiting game. “Did you see Chandra in here?”

“I didn’t see anybody ,” he said, “except that woman. Jane.”

“Jane’s dead now.”

“Thank God.” His voice was trembling, on the edge of cracking. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t. I couldn’t—”

Bryn couldn’t really blame him; she’d been forced to cooperate, too. That didn’t mean she had to like it. She checked the clip in her gun. Only three shots left, and she had the strong feeling that wouldn’t go far. Damn , she was missing her riot baton. It made a great close-quarters weapon.…

She spotted the aluminum cane in the corner a few seconds later, and laughed. It was the adjustable model—press in the round button, and the bottom section slid up and down. She slid it all the way out, weighed it, and then decided the top part of the cane was better weighted—more momentum from the heavy plastic grip.

She was back to being the spider, waiting for the fly…until the fly arrived.

The door banged open, and two tear gas grenades rolled inside. Bryn tried to kick them out again, but doubled over, coughing and choking on the fog, and through her tears she saw someone stride forward with a gas mask covering half her face.

Jane. There was no mistaking those eyes. Of course. How could it have never occurred to Bryn to think she was one of the Revived?

“Surprise,” Jane said, but it wasn’t really. And then she kicked her in the head, several times, until Bryn went dark.

When Bryn woke up, fuzzy and sick, it all seemed that much worse. She’d wasted a lot of bullets on Jane, and it seemed pretty annoying to be kicked to death by her afterward. But somehow, in the rearview mirror, Bryn couldn’t understand why she hadn’t just assumed it from the beginning, that Jane was Revived; half of those she’d met were clinging to sanity with both hands, and the other half had lost their shit entirely.

Jane was the same order of psychopath as Fast Freddy Watson…someone whose darker tendencies had been liberated by the drugs, who wasn’t afraid of death or pain or reprisals.

It wasn’t good news, and the worst part came when Bryn realized just where she was.…

Back in her original predicament.

Bryn’s gaze focused up on the same grimy ceiling light, the same cracked paint, the same fluttering spiderweb. The same spider sitting patiently in the center, waiting for a new, juicy snack to wander by.

She didn’t bother trying her restraints, or even turning her head to see if Jane was there. She knew the woman would be.

“Who the hell thought it would be a good idea to Revive you ?” she asked the ceiling, but she meant it for Jane, and turned to look at the woman’s dim shape in the dark where it sat comfortably, legs crossed.

Jane shrugged and flipped a light switch, and Bryn winced. The damage from the tear gas had healed, but she still felt unusually sensitive to the brightness…but then, the nanites were overworked now, struggling to keep pace with both the body’s natural self-destruction and that imposed on it from the outside. She could expect to be hurting soon…and for any further damage to be slow to heal.

“I’m useful,” Jane said. “To the right people. Cheer up, Bryn. You can be useful, too, if you work hard, study, eat your vegetables, and, above all, stop fucking around with me.”

“Sorry,” Bryn said. “That’s just never going to happen. Maybe you’d better get your badass little spoon again. Or raise your game to a full-on spork.”

Jane leaned over her, and what was in her eyes was like looking through a peephole into the darkest, emptiest hell Bryn could ever imagine. “You,” Jane said, “are going to tell me anything and everything. You’re going to beg me to ask you a question. You’re going to want to tell me so bad you’d crawl over hot coals to lick my ass. Understand me, sweetie?” Her tone continued to be warm, sweet, bizarrely likable. “You are mine for as long as I want to play with you. Nobody’s coming to get you. Nobody’s taking you away. There’s no hiding.”

“Prove it,” Bryn said. She didn’t blink. She’d let go of all that fear, all that pain, all that anguish that had been haunting her since she’d woken up screaming for the first time with the taste of that plastic bag on her tongue. She had life, unlimited life, for as long as those nanites could scurry their little mechanical asses through her tissues and give it to her.

And she was going to use it to spit in Jane’s face for as long as possible. If it was insanity, it tasted sweetly metallic, as if she were chewing tinfoil. She didn’t care anymore. Couldn’t care anymore.

I think I broke myself, she thought, and almost laughed.

Jane blinked first. Then she took a step back, cocked her head, and frowned, just a little. “You’re a weird little thing,” she said. “I mean that completely as a compliment. But—Oh, damn it! Does this happen to you? You’re getting really focused and there goes the cell—” Jane’s phone, Bryn realized, was ringing. The ringtone was Britney Spears’s “Toxic.” If that wasn’t appropriate…

“Yes?” Jane asked, and put the phone to her ear as she turned away. She strolled toward the door. Bryn focused up on the spiderweb, on the spider, on the cocooned future lunch. Maybe she wasn’t the spider or the fly. Maybe she was the web. Sticky and impossible to tear apart, no matter how hard the struggle.

“Are you kidding me?” Jane said, lowering her voice to a hard whisper. “ No! No, I’m telling you, this is the one . You do not want to waste this opportunity—trust me. We need—” She stopped talking and stood very still. “All right. You’re the boss.”

Those last words didn’t sound like her at all. None of the cheer. None of the macabre joy. Just flat syllables. Jane hung up and dropped her phone back into her pocket, put her hands behind her back, and spun around to face Bryn with her face pulled into an utterly false smile.

“Aren’t you just the luckiest damn girl in the world?” Jane asked. She was smiling with teeth, and it looked as if she wanted to bite chunks out of something. Maybe Bryn. “I think maybe you are. Sweetie. Well, I have my orders. Let’s get this fucking show on the fucking road.”

She lunged for the bed, and Bryn tensed all over to get ready for the pain. It didn’t come. Jane stomped on something on the bottom of the gurney’s rails, and Bryn felt the bed lurch as the brakes released.