They were never going to let her out of this room. Her water clock was going to fill up and spill over and she was going to sit here and rot. Literally. She imagined that it was going to hurt.
“Bryn.”
“I’m listening,” she said. She didn’t want to, but she couldn’t seem to block out his voice. Her own sounded remote and odd, disconnected from the rest of her, but it seemed to reassure him.
“I’m going to put you back in Fairview Mortuary.”
That called for another laugh, but she couldn’t dredge one up. “As a corpse in the prep room?”
“No,” he said. “As the new owner. Inheriting it from Mr. Fairview. You’re his niece.”
“I’m not.”
“You are now, on paper; he didn’t have any other living relatives. You’ll go back to work, oversee the necessary repairs, start up the business again. Make it known you’re carrying on your uncle’s work in every way.” McCallister glanced over at Fideli. “You’ll hire Joe as a funeral director. He’ll help you out if you have any trouble, and make sure you get your shots on time. Your job is to go through Fairview’s records, and try to make contact with Fairview’s underground supplier of Returné and bring him—or her—out into the open so we can shut down the leak who’s selling the drugs, quickly and quietly.”
“And then what?” Bryn asked him. “I go back to being dead?”
“Bryn—let’s just take this a step at a time, all right? I’m doing what I can for you. This gets you back into the world and gives you a kind of normal life. Do well on this, and I’ll fight to keep your drug regimen in place. Deal?”
She didn’t answer. She stared at him mutely, feeling as if parts of her were just … shutting down. Falling away. Important parts of her, already gone.
Hope, for one. A sense of who she was.
All gone now.
“All right,” she said softly. “Deal. On one condition.”
McCallister hesitated, frowning just a little. Maybe he felt the increase in her pulse through her fingers. “What condition?”
“I get to have the gun. Not Fideli.”
“Joe’s trained—”
“So am I,” she interrupted him. “Four years surviving in Baghdad. And I get the gun, McCallister. Or you can sit here and watch me rot.”
He pulled back, baffled, frowning in earnest now. “Why do you want it?”
Fideli answered for her, face gone still and hard. “Because she wants to be able to end it,” he said. “Put a bullet through her brain. Do damage the nanites can’t repair. Right, Bryn?”
She didn’t answer, but it sounded pretty good to her.
There was a moment of silence, and then McCallister sighed. “Not a bad plan, but it won’t work. The only things that will truly end you are fire, dissolution, or dismemberment, and I can’t see you sawing off your own head. You’re tough, but nobody’s that tough.” McCallister tried for a smile, and almost made it. “If you put a bullet through your head, you’ll just be wasting bullets and screaming a lot.”
She felt her teeth bare in something that didn’t feel like a smile. “How about if I use one on you? Would that work?”
“Are you asking if I’m like you? Revived?”
“Revived,” she echoed, testing it out. It sounded innocent, like she’d just had a long rest. “Yes. Are you revived?”
“No. I’ve never died.”
“Him?” She glanced at Joe Fideli.
“No. The drug’s still highly classified, and highly experimental, not to mention expensive. Finding a way to keep you stable and on the drug constitutes extraordinary measures.” His dark eyes locked on hers, demanding a straight answer. “If I give you a gun, are you going to hurt yourself? Or others?”
She imagined doing it. First holding the gun to her own head … but if what they were saying was true, it’d just be painfully inconvenient. And temporary. And messy.
So could she shoot Joe Fideli? He’d brought her back to this. He probably deserved it. Or McCallister. Shoot him right in the heart, if he even had one, which she doubted. She could imagine it, but it didn’t hold any emotional warmth for her.
She’d just be spreading around misery.
“No,” she said, and for the first time, her voice sounded like her own. “No, I wouldn’t do that. I just want to be able to protect myself. It’d make me feel … safer.”
“Gee, thanks,” Fideli said drily. “I’m all flattered and shit.”
“Joe,” McCallister said. Just that, and Fideli went back to being a statue. “All right, you get a gun. And you get paid, Bryn. You run Fairview, and you spread the word that you’re continuing all of your uncle’s business ventures, including the one running out of the basement. I’ll supply you with a stock of Returné, both for yourself and for whatever unfortunates still need the shots, but you have to find his supplier quickly. I can’t guarantee an unlimited supply.”
“I’ll need more,” Bryn said.
“More. More what?”
“Money. If I’m taking over Fairview, I need clothes. Better shoes. A real operational budget.”
“You’ve got it. We’ll be depositing money in an account in your name. Joe will bring you the details. It’ll come through a network of shell companies, out of an annuity. You were left the money from your great-aunt Tabitha.”
“Tabitha? Seriously?”
“Tabitha Quick. She was a real person in Fairview’s family tree, just like you.” McCallister stood up, looked at her for a moment, then went to the door. It buzzed open for him, and he was outside for only a few seconds before coming back and shutting it again.
He had a small pneumatic injection gun in his hand, loaded with a clear vial of … something. “Your arm, please,” he said. When she angled her shoulder toward him, he cleared his throat. “Doesn’t work through cloth.”
Oh. In retrospect, dressing might not have been the best choice, because now it meant she had to slip off the button-up shirt; the sleeves were tight, and wouldn’t roll up that far. She unbuttoned it down the front and said, “I guess you’ve both already seen it anyway.”
Fideli promptly looked down at his feet. McCallister kept his gaze carefully on her face as she pulled the blouse aside and bared the flesh of her upper arm.
“What we saw was a body. It wasn’t you. You, of all people, should understand the difference,” McCallister said, very quietly, as he put the pneumatic gun to her arm. He pulled the trigger, and there was a star-sharp pain in her skin, then a heavy kind of warmth. “Done.”
She pulled her blouse back together, holding it in place until he’d turned away, then did up the buttons with fast, shaking fingers. “How many others have you done this to?” she asked. “Like that man in the video?”
“He was number four in the trials.”
“So four.”
“No,” McCallister said. “He was the first to make it. There have been six since then. Not including you, and whoever Fairview brought back. I told you, it’s top-secret and highly experimental.”
She met his eyes and said flatly, “Why me, then? Why did you bother?”
McCallister exchanged a look with Fideli, who shrugged guiltily. “I thought there was an outside chance—”
“You knew I didn’t know anything. You knew I’d just started.”
This was evidently news to McCallister, who straightened his already straight posture to give Fideli a long, measuring look. Fideli shrugged again. “No excuse, sir. She was a good kid, and I thought there was an outside chance she could be useful. My fault she ended up dead in the first place. I should have gotten there quicker.”
“We’re not in the business of cleaning up your conscience,” McCallister said, and then shook his head. “Done is done, but we’re having a conversation later.”
“Well, that’ll be fun.”
While he was distracted, Bryn slipped in the question she really wanted to ask. “So you wouldn’t have brought me back if I hadn’t been of some potential use to you? Even though you got me killed?”
For the first time, she got an unguarded reaction from Patrick McCallister. It was written all over his face, just for a second, and then the corporate drone was back, smooth and seamless. “Of course we would have tried,” he said.