“Thanks.”
Fideli nodded to her, too. “Thanks, Pansy,” he said. “Nice working with you.”
“You too, Joe. It was good to get out and stretch my legs again.” Pansy hugged Bryn, and she hugged her back, surprised but pleased. “You, girl, you take care of yourself. I’ll see you in a week for your booster.”
“Promise?”
Pansy silently crossed her heart. “Get going. The moving vans will be here soon, and that makes him extra paranoid, even with all the background checks.”
“How the hell do you put up with it?” Joe asked, climbing into the van’s driver’s seat.
“I love him,” she said. “And he’s not just paranoid. People really are out to get him. And hey, seems like we’re all in that boat now, right?” She leaned in to put a kiss on Joe’s cheek. “You take care, sweetie. Call me anytime you need a partner in crime.”
Bryn buckled her seat belt and rolled down the window as they left the safety and shadows of the warehouse to let a fresh breeze blow through the van. The inside of the vehicle frankly reeked; the smell of her blood made her a little light-headed, or maybe that was the inhibitors taking hold. She was feeling herself again, finally; her leg’s ache had subsided, and when she ran her fingers over the back of it, she felt only a faint and fading scar.
“You can change clothes in the back,” Fideli said. “I’m not gonna peek.”
“You saw it all anyway.” She sighed. “It’ll be nice to not be dressed in paper.”
And it was, very nice, from the soft cotton underwear to the long-sleeved thermal tee and jeans. Pansy had included a pair of slip-on flats for shoes, which would have to do, for now. At least it wasn’t cold outside.
Bryn climbed over the seats and buckled herself back in place. “Where are we going?” she asked.
“Safe house up in the hills,” Fideli replied. “Strap in; we don’t need a ticket when the back of the van looks like a butcher shop died in it.”
“Is McCallister there …?”
“I don’t know where Pat is,” Fideli said. “When he’s ready to contact us, he knows my number. We’ve both got disposable burner phones. It’s the best we can do, for now.” He was quiet for a moment, watching traffic, watching the rearview mirror. Road noise hissed through the cabin. “You probably ought to know something.”
“What?”
“McCallister made me promise something. If I couldn’t get you out, or if … if you were too far gone, he made me promise to …”
“To end things for me,” Bryn said. “So I wouldn’t suffer.”
“Yeah. I thought you’d want to know that.” He pulled in a deep breath and let it out, slowly. “These are some fucked-up times if that’s romantic, Bryn.”
It made her smile, and it made her eyes well up at the same time. She turned her face away and let the wind whip against her cheeks to dry them as tears rolled down. “Thanks,” she said. “I did want to know that.”
He turned the radio on after that, and surprised her by singing along to it. He had a good voice, baritone, and did a mean version of Harry Nilsson’s song about the limes and coconuts. It almost felt … normal.
That was something Bryn realized she craved most. Normality. The feeling that her reality was still the same one that all these other people shared, the ones driving on the freeway next to them. They were headed to work or play or home or shopping. They had lives, goals, plans, challenges that didn’t include rotting away inside a dead shell of a body.
She envied them all, so strongly that it hurt. Somehow, without ever meaning to, she’d become an alien, stranded in a strange yet achingly familiar landscape.
“Bryn?”
“What?”
“Stop feeling sorry for yourself,” Joe said. “My family’s stuck somewhere halfway across the country, if not outside the country, and I don’t know when or if I’ll ever see them again. Deal with your shit and don’t wallow in it.”
“You—” She bit back her angry retort, and took a deep breath. “I am. I will. I just feel—”
“Yeah, I know,” he said, more gently. “Lost. There’s a lot of that going around.”
A phone was ringing somewhere, a harsh distant buzzing sound that brought Bryn up out of a restless light sleep in a strange bed. Her eyes snapped open, and for a moment she didn’t know where she was—a darkened room, with streetlights casting slanted shadows across the carpet through the blinds. The place smelled stale and unlived-in, and she finally remembered that she was in the safe house, a nondescript ranch house with a pathetic straggly lawn and secondhand furniture in the run-down rooms.
The phone was ringing down the hall, where Joe Fideli was sleeping. She heard him answer it, although she couldn’t hear what he was saying.
Exhaustion pinned her flat to the bed until she heard a light knock on her closed bedroom door, and she rolled out to swing it open.
“You’re dressed,” he said. He sounded surprised, although he was still in his clothes, too.
“Yeah, I figured we’d better be ready for anything.” That, and being dressed made her feel less vulnerable. She’d spent way too much time in that paper jumpsuit. “You got a call.”
“McCallister.” Fideli didn’t sound thrilled, and that made her muscles tense in anticipation of the bad news. “Listen, I think you’d better sit down, Bryn.”
That really didn’t sound good. She backed up without thinking about it, and eased down onto the bed. He stayed where he was, talking from the doorway. “He’s been tracking down your mysterious supplier, and he says he found him.”
“So … that’s good news, right?”
“Yeah, I guess so.”
“Who is it?”
“Some guy named Mercer. Jonathan Mercer. Sound familiar?”
It didn’t, but then it did. She remembered, far back at the beginning of this nightmare, that McCallister had mentioned the name Mercer…. “Mercer and Sams,” she said.
“They … created the drug. Right?”
“Sams offed himself after Pharmadene started the Returné trials; couldn’t take the guilt. Mercer’s been quietly working like a good beaver ever since, until about a week ago when he went on vacation.” That last was said with air quotes. “He dropped off of Pharmadene’s radar. Translation: he had a heads-up that the big conversion push was coming from Harte, and he didn’t want to end up strapped onto a table with a bag over his head. So he bailed, and they’ve been ripping up streets looking for him ever since. That’s stirred up a lot of information, including the fact that apparently Mercer had been quietly setting up his own production line for Returné.”
“He could ruin everything for them.”
“The only reason he hasn’t so far is that it’s in his interest to keep this thing a black-market enterprise. They need to shut him down hard and fast. Mercer’s a bigger threat to them than any of us are, but he’s also damn smart; we all checked him out and found nothing on him until he bolted.”
“Joe,” she said. Her fists clenched where they rested on her thighs. “Why am I sitting down? What are you not telling me?”
“Mercer wants to make a deal,” Joe said. “McCallister’s full resources and protection of his fledgling operation, in exchange for keeping you supplied with the drug.”
That wasn’t so bad. It was for McCallister, obviously, but … “What else?”
This time, Joe just gave up and said it. “He has leverage,” he said. “He has your sister Annie. She never made it to the airport when she left your apartment, and he says he’s going to kill her if we don’t take a meeting and make a deal. We’ve got just under two hours. He wants you there.”
Annie. Bryn sat frozen; she’d expected … Well, she didn’t know what she’d expected. She hadn’t thought they’d go after her family. She was used to thinking of her people as safely distant, away from all this … but Annalie had walked into the middle of it. Made herself a target.