“Hey!” Bryn yelled, and slapped the glass. “Hey!”
It wasn’t one person, but three—two blue-jacketed security men, and a third person being escorted in. He looked nervous. Very nervous. Tall, good-looking in that bland GQ way; he was wearing suit pants and a crisply ironed white shirt, a snazzy tie, suspenders, but no jacket. She couldn’t hear him, but he was talking to his guards, trying vainly to pull away. He had a Pharmadene ID hanging from his belt, one with a green stripe; one of the guards took it, ran it through a scanner, and put the ID in his pocket.
Then they unlocked the room across the hall and hauled the unfortunate man inside.
He screamed and fought when he saw the table, but it wasn’t any use, and he wasn’t very good at it anyway. He was yelling so loudly now that a faint whisper traveled to her through the glass. When she pressed her ear to it, she could make out some of what he said.
“—can’t do this! I’m not some nobody you can make vanish; I’m an important man. Do you hear me? I’m a vice president, damn it! Take your hands off of me!”
The guards nodded to each other, and in one smooth move had him down on the table. They were a well-coordinated team, locking down his arms and legs in fast, sure motions. He kept on yelling, but Bryn wasn’t listening anymore, because a new person had entered the picture.
Irene Harte.
She’d changed into a different suit, and her hair and makeup looked fully restored. Not even a spot showed to prove that Bryn had marked her—and she didn’t so much as glance Bryn’s way. Her full attention was on the man strapped to the table across the hall.
Bryn didn’t need to hear him to know what he said next; his lips were easy to read. You bitch! The rest was probably threats, not that it would do him any good; maybe next he’d try to bribe her, if intimidation didn’t work. The last thing would be begging.
It didn’t get that far.
Bryn had been expecting this to be some sort of interrogation; maybe Mr. Vice President had made a serious security error, or was even the leak they’d been looking for … but instead of pulling out interrogation drugs, or even a decent torture tray, one of the guards pulled out …
A clear plastic bag.
Bryn gasped and stepped back from the window. “No …”
The bag slipped neatly over the man’s head, and was cinched in place with a deft twist of the guard’s wrist.
“No …”
She saw it from two angles, like some nightmare … from where she stood, watching the man’s panicked eyes widen under the film of plastic before his breath clouded the bag, and from inside the bag at the same time. Déjà vu. Panic roared up inside her, flattening her defenses. She pressed both hands against the glass, trying desperately to help him, help him, because she knew how it felt; she knew the agonized terror that drove him to suck in all the available air and compress the plastic around his skin.
She knew the taste of that toxic panic, and how it felt to gasp for the last tiny bit of oxygen. To watch the diffused light go out.
It hurt—oh, God, it hurt—and it seemed to go on forever as the man struggled, twitched, thrashed, and fought against death.
No one helped him.
When he finally relaxed, Harte looked at her watch. The guards didn’t move as the minutes ticked by, waiting for her word. When she finally nodded, the bag came off, leaving the dead man’s damp, stark face, eyes wide and bloodshot, lips blue. A trickle of blood came from the corner of his mouth. He’d probably bitten his tongue in his panic.
The guards left, taking the bag with them, and took up posts outside the room. Now a medical team came in, three gowned and masked people who hooked up monitors and oxygen and all the things necessary to saving a life.
Not that there was a life to be saved. Not anymore.
Not until they gave him the shot of Returné.
The scream of his revival penetrated even the solid barrier of the glass to Bryn’s death cell. She watched him come back, full of horror and pity and anger, and then, then, Irene Harte finally turned and looked at her.
She triggered some kind of intercom outside of Bryn’s room.
“You seem to have something to say.”
“You have a funny way of retraining people around here.”
Irene Harte laughed—a real laugh, full of amusement and little bit of admiration. “I’m consolidating my position, that’s all. One thing we cannot have, from this moment on, is any hint of disloyalty. We can’t take any risk of harboring traitors and whistle-blowers. Like, I suspect, Patrick McCallister.”
“You’re killing your own people!”
“I’m ensuring they’ll never betray us,” Harte said. “From the moment our researchers discovered that this drug could revive and maintain dead tissues, there was no going back. It isn’t about a market share; it’s about power. Someone’s going to have it. Someone will control how this drug is manufactured and used. It will change the entire world. Wars will be fought. Whole civilizations will be destroyed, because right here, in these rooms, we have stopped the one thing that man never conquered: death.”
There was a glow in her face now, an almost religious ecstasy that Bryn found scarier by far than the corporate bullshit she’d seen before.
“As long as Pharmadene controls how this gets out, we have a chance to make this change rational. To dispense revival to the people who can make a difference. And that’s what we’re going to do. Choose who lives on, and ensure their loyalty.”
God. Harte made an eerie kind of sense, from a megalomaniac’s point of view. If one power—say, Pharmadene—controlled the release of the drug, they could pick and choose the movers and shakers in all areas: politicians, bankers, technologists, the capitalist and political royalty of the entire world. They could manipulate markets, topple—or simply puppet—governments, rig the entire game of life and death in their favor.
And she was right about something else: if Returné got out uncontrolled into the world, it would cause chaos— every grieving parent screaming for his or her children to come back, every husband, father, wife, sister, daughter. Politicians would tilt revivals in their political favor. Armies would become indestructible.
It was a vision of a future in which everybody died, and everyone lived, and nobody really survived. No matter how it played out.
“Pharmadene can still control all this,” Harte said. Her voice had gone soft now, and very sure. “We will control it. First in our own house; then we broaden our goals to include political and financial leaders immediately after. We’re starting with our top ranks today. We’ll work our way down through the corporate structure and have everyone on board in the next few days.”
The man across the hall had finally stopped screaming, but he was weeping, a desolate and lonely sound. Irene Harte moved to shut off the intercom.
“I’m not dying in here,” Bryn said. Harte hesitated, smiled, and shook her head as she flipped the switch. Bryn hit the glass. “Hey! I’m not dying in here! I’m going to stop you!”
Harte turned to watch as the newly reborn vice president was led away, and another executive-level victim arrived to take his place.
For two days, the room across the hall saw a steady parade of people, and it was always the same—the indignation, the don’t you know who I am, the fear, the terror, the death, the scream. Bryn stopped watching. Stopped listening, except to note the scream and keep count of how many had been … processed. It went on twenty-four-seven, and after a while she fell asleep. It felt obscene to sleep while people were dying, but all the self-loathing in the world couldn’t keep her awake.