Free Working Stiff by Rachel Caine

moves.
    Bryn folded her hands and tried to seem as inoffensive as possible. He’d already mentioned how young she looked; that was an asset in a situation like this. One she hated to use, but still, she wasn’t exactly awash in options here.
    Joe settled comfortably against the wall, still holding the gun steady on her. “Pat,” he said, “we’re good here.”
    It bothered her how careful they were, because even then, Patrick McCallister surveyed the whole room before entering. Like Fideli, she was sure he’d had some kind of military-style training. Mercenary, if not traditional. He was way too good at checking corners.
    He also secured the door, closing off her line of escape, before dragging over a chair and sitting down across from her. He did not, Bryn noted, block Fideli’s line of fire.
    Close up, without the adrenaline and fear to blur her focus, she was able to spot some interesting things about Mr. McCallister. First, the suit he was wearing wasn’t just any off-the-rack thing; it was tailored, and silk, and every bit as nice as what the late Mr. Lincoln Fairview had worn to work. McCallister looked tired, as if he’d missed a night’s sleep, but he was handsomer than she remembered. She’d missed how warm his dark eyes seemed, for one thing.
    “Miss Davis,” he said. “How do you feel?”
    “Not like I’m dead.”
    “You think I’m lying to you.”
    “Obviously. You have to be.”
    He shook his head slowly, and leaned back in the hard-backed aluminum chair. “Joe,” he said, “show her the video.”
    There was a flat-panel TV set flush into the wall, and well out of Bryn’s reach; Fideli pulled a remote control out of his pocket and punched some buttons. Cue music and intro titles, and a logo that resolved into the words
Pharmadene Pharmaceuticals
. It all looked very polished and corporate. High production values.
    But what followed was cold and clinical. There was a corpse lying on a morgue table, clearly and obviously dead; the skin was chilly blue, and still smoking a little from being removed from the refrigerator. The eyes were closed. It was a man, nothing special about him except that he was dead, probably from the two black-edged bullet holes in his chest.
    Enter a medical team, hooking him up to monitors that read exactly nothing. No heartbeat, no respiration, nothing.
    And then the injection.
    It took long minutes, but then Bryn saw a convulsive shudder rip through the body, saw the ice blue eyelids quiver, saw the mouth gape open, and heard …
    Heard the scream.
    She knew that scream. She’d felt it rip out of her own mouth, an uncontrollable torrent of sound and agony and horror and fear. It was the lost wail of a newborn, only in an adult’s voice.
    The corpse’s filmed eyes opened, blinked, and the film began to slowly fade. The skin slowly shifted colors from that unmistakable ashy tone to something less … dead.
    And the bullet holes began to knit closed—but not before bright red blood trickled out and began running down the heaving, breathing chest.
    The monitors kick-started into beeps. Heart rate. Oxygen saturation. Blood pressure.
    Life.
    He stopped screaming and looked at the doctors. His voice, when it came, sounded hoarse and dry. “Did it work?”
    Nobody answered him. They were all busily noting details, murmuring instructions, taking samples.
    It was like the living man, where the corpse had been, didn’t exist at all except as a clinical miracle.
    Bryn felt a horrible chill inside, but she put on a brave face. “Nice special effects. Really nice—”
    She would have gone on, but another video started, brutally fast.
    That was
her
. Ash gray, lying dead in a hospital bed. Her eyes were swollen and bloodshot and blank, pupils completely blown. She’d bitten her lip, and blood had dried on her face. Her head lolled limp on the pillow. They cut away her clothing, reducing her to just another shell, another dead thing, pitiful and cold and naked, and Bryn