Rachel Caine: Two Weeks' Notice

Even from the distance of several feet away, Bryn could see how wrong those eyes were. They were almost…metallic, though after a few blinks the color changed and grew darker.

But there was something eerily reflective about them still.

“Get Chandra. The next bed over,” Bryn said, and Annie went to the next bed where the small woman lay. She pulled out the IV, with the same instant-healing result.

Chandra’s shriek was unearthly, and familiar.

“Riley?” Bryn said, and the woman’s head turned toward the sound of her voice. The focus of those eyes woke something primitive inside Bryn, something that recognized a dangerous predator and went very, very still in the hopes it would go away. She couldn’t speak. Couldn’t even try to move, although now she felt a jolt of agony in her lower back that meant the spinal column was trying to reconnect severed nerves. Spinal cord damage took almost as long as brain injuries to heal; she’d be effectively paralyzed for fifteen minutes or more, depending on the extent of the carnage back there.

Now Chandra was sitting up in the bed next to Riley, graceful and feline. She swung her legs off the bed and stood up. She was naked beneath the sheet, and didn’t seem to notice or care.

“Get out of here,” Riley whispered. “Hurry, Bryn. Go.” She tried to get up, but it seemed she wasn’t as well-off as Chandra; she almost fell as she stood up.

Chandra walked straight to Bryn with calm, firm, unhurried strides. That darkly metallic shine was in her eyes, and it was more pronounced than it had been in Riley’s. Bryn wanted, very badly, to curl up into a ball and hide her eyes, and she didn’t even know why. Don’t. Don’t do it. Her instincts were whispering, not screaming, as if they were afraid to be heard. Don’t let her touch you. …

When Bryn tried to pull herself back, Chandra simply closed the distance and grabbed her arm.

“No!” Riley shouted, and lunged forward, but she went down, hard. “No, don’t—”

A shattering wave of heat cascaded into Bryn, agony that started exactly where Chandra’s skin touched hers, and she couldn’t keep back a raw, thin scream. Annie pointed her stolen gun at Chandra, but that was useless and she knew it; she didn’t even try to fire.

This is impossible, Bryn was thinking. It felt as if Chandra’s very touch was injecting waves of nanites into her. The same burn she was used to feeling, but bigger, stronger, more . She could almost see the thin silver threads of transference between their two bodies, but it had to be imagination, had to be—she couldn’t see something that small.…

And then the heat, the agony, turned into waves of blessed cool bliss as the nanites traveled through her veins, her nerves, soothed every injury, every pain, like the golden touch of God himself.

Chandra let go of her arm, and her suddenly blank eyes rolled up into her head to show the whites…and she collapsed in a heap on the floor.

Bryn blinked in confusion. Everything looked so bright, so very bright and sharp and clear. She felt as though if she focused, she could see, and see, and see, all the way down to the very tiniest particle. The excitement of that was so heady that she felt she might laugh. I’m high, she thought. Higher than a fucking kite. Nothing scared her. Nothing mattered—not the horrified look on Annie’s face, or the fact that the door to the lab was being opened by their enemies, and they were all seconds away from being taken prisoner or shot to temporary death.

And then she saw Jane.

Patrick’s wife.

That mattered.

Jane opened the inner door, careless of cuts from the glass, and stepped inside. She was armed with a P90, but she didn’t point the lethal little machine gun; it hung on the strap around her chest. She wasn’t smiling this time; Bryn had seen her look insane, and hungry, and delighted, and vicious, but this was a whole new expression.

She was afraid .

“Damn. You spoiled the harvesting,” Jane said. “Someone’s going to be very upset with you, Bryn. You took nanites that weren’t meant for you, and we can’t get them back now until the new colony matures.” She stepped back behind a couple of the guards. “Concentrated fire on all of them, on my mark.”

Riley stood up, as she finally got her balance. So did Bryn, in an absolutely effortless motion like levitation.…She didn’t even feel her muscles working at all. Annie was staring at the two of them, then at Jane and the guards behind her, and she clearly had no idea what to do now.

But Bryn did. And as she exchanged a glance with Riley, she knew the agent knew it, too. “Is Chandra dead?” Bryn asked.

“No,” Riley said. “Just traumatized. She’ll be all right in about an hour.” It was an hour they didn’t have. “I’m sorry she infected you, but her nanites were ready to be harvested. It’s not a choice. It’s a compulsion, to pass them on. Like the hunger.”

Bryn’s feel-good wave crested and began to fall; it left her with a healed, finely calibrated body. She even felt that she could think faster. Possibly even react faster. It was her body, but…perfected.

“Don’t be sorry,” she said. “Whatever she did to me, it feels great.”

“For now,” Riley said. “We’ll discuss downsides later. For now—” She shot a glance at Jane, and the armed men who’d filled the rank behind her. “That’s the only exit.”

Bryn bared her teeth in a grin. “Then let’s take it.”

Jane said, “Mark,” and two of the guards started shooting.

Bryn didn’t even see Riley move , but suddenly she had closed the distance, and she was holding both of the guards’ necks in her hands and squeezing . Bones snapped with a gruesome popping sound, and the two men’s bodies jerked, danced, and went limp except for residual tremors.

Dead.

By that time, Bryn—without even consciously willing it—had crossed the room and grabbed another one. She was aware he was shooting into her, but it didn’t hurt, and it didn’t even figure into her calculations. She was razor-sharp aware of the terror in his face, though.

That made her happy, for the approximately five seconds he was alive to actually feel the fear. It didn’t occur to her then that she’d killed him with her bare hands, with one blow , until she was dropping the next one, and then the next. She was aware she was bleeding, but it was minor leaks, quickly closing up.

One of them fired straight into her face, and that stung; it took a second for the darkness to clear from her eyes, but then she was ripping his arm away at the elbow, and the blood, the blood was so red and clear and amazing that she involuntarily raised her fingers to her lips and tasted it.

Iron and fear.

Jane was gone. She’d run. And the guards were dead in pieces.

And Riley was eating one . She had an arm, raw and bloody, and she was chewing on it. That should have shocked Bryn, but it didn’t; it seemed…right.

And the blood in Bryn’s mouth, the blood she’d licked from her fingers, tasted so good . She reached down for one of the pieces of meat, not even thinking that it was part of a person , because the desire to refuel was so…so…

Someone was screaming.

Annie.

Bryn jolted back to herself with a shock. Annalie was huddled against the wall, hiding her face, still screaming like a little child. When Bryn touched her shoulder, Annie flinched and scuttled away, still screaming. The stark horror in her made Bryn freeze in place.

Riley dropped the arm she was holding. She didn’t look surprised, or particularly shocked. She walked to a tray that held towels and took one, which she used to wipe the blood from her hands and mouth, then brought a clean one over to Bryn. “Here,” she said, and pressed it in her hands. “Wipe your face. You’re scaring your sister.”