Terminated (Revivalist 3)

She took a step back, and then hesitated. “No,” Bryn said, without taking her eyes from Thorpe’s. “No, I think there’s something I can do here that’s more useful. ”

“Die?”

“We both know it won’t kill me. ”

“How the hell do you know?”

“It’s worth the risk,” she said. “Just do it, Joe. ”

He cursed some, but then he hung up, and in the next ten seconds Lonnie was backing the truck up the road, over the curve of the hill. Putting solid earth between them and the explosion.

When Bryn couldn’t see it anymore, she tossed the phone on the other side of the road, into the ditch, and then nodded to Dr. Thorpe.

“Here goes nothing,” he said. “You know what I want you to do?”

“Yes,” she said. “Good luck, Calvin. ”

“My friends call me Cal,” he said. “See you. ”

Then he took a deep breath, reached out, and ripped the duct-taped item from the rough board of the billboard’s supporting column.

Bryn saw it in high-definition slow motion—him turning, tossing the silvery mass of tape toward her, her hand grabbing it from the air. She was already turning away from him by that time, with the grace and efficiency of a dancer, not a motion or muscle wasted, and then she was running, great long leaps powered by adrenaline and the extra boost of the nanites, and she made it almost halfway across the road before the wave of the blast hit her.

It picked her up in a shimmer of superheated air and threw her, ripped her, punched through her in a nail of white-hot shrapnel, and she rolled, shredded, into the ditch with just enough instinct left to clutch the duct-tape ball to the core of her body. She screwed her eyes shut against a flare of intense bright light.

The sound hit her a second later, rippling in a physical wave that shattered eardrums, and as the brutal glow still shimmered in the air, Bryn Davis’s shredded body died.

Her last thought was incoherent and strange.

I miss you.

She saw Patrick’s face, just a flash, and then it was all gone.

Again.

Chapter 7

Coming back wasn’t fun. Bryn hadn’t expected it to be; she’d gone into this on instinct, and instinct had a fatalistic sort of acceptance to the pain that she’d earned. At first, it was all instinct—whimpering, twitching, just an overwhelming sense of the world rushing over her, sweeping her back into a bloody swirl of agony and fury, and it took time for her conscious mind to fight its way to the front and be able to begin to analyze the inputs.

There were a lot. And they weren’t good news.

Sight came online before hearing. She knew they were speaking to her, but she couldn’t lip-read; it was simply too much effort. Instead, she watched Joe’s face for clues about how bad this was going to be.

He was pale, and his face was set into a hard mask. So, presumably not very good at all. Riley was on her other side. She became aware that her bones were resetting, slowly. Usually they snapped together like Legos, but this was more of a . . . bending, a slow knitting that felt torturously deliberate. Her lungs were full of blood that was being pushed up, out through her mouth. Muscles twitched and convulsed as they repaired themselves.

The nanites had a lot to do. But, incredibly, they were doing it. She’d given herself only about a twenty percent chance, tops, of surviving the blast, but damned if the little monsters weren’t pulling it off. She could almost like them, in that moment.

Almost.

She coughed out a massive amount of blood that left Riley and Joe exchanging horrified looks, but Riley toweled her face and hair clean. The water on her burning skin felt as good as paradise. Running a fever, she thought, and almost laughed, because a little cold was the least of her problems, wasn’t it? She coughed again, and this time managed to drag in some sweet, life-giving air.

Riley patted her shoulder in congratulations. When Bryn concentrated on the movement of her lips, she thought she was saying, Good, Bryn, just breathe. One thing was for sure: if Riley Block looked shaken, Bryn had truly been on the edge of permanent, gruesome death.

She wasn’t sure she ought to find it quite as oddly funny as she did, that deep concern on Riley’s face. But hysteria was probably about as good a way to deal with this horror as screaming, and a lot more fun. There’s that PTSD, she thought, and was instantly sobered up. Dying over and over was bound to have a cost—mental, if not physical. What had Patrick said about Jane? She hadn’t been the cruel bitch she was now, not at first. It took time.

It took agony, and the wearing away of sanity against the hard rocks of immortality.

Her eardrums healed, finally, and sound crashed in raw and hard, and she almost cried out just from the shock of it. Everything sounded wrong, and too loud, and vertigo hit her, hard, even though she was flat on her back on the ground. She gulped in tearful breaths, heard the uneven, too-fast beat of her heart, and felt the last important, load-bearing bones seal together. Just ribs and fingers and toes left now. They’d heal up in a bit.