Free Two Weeks' Notice by Rachel Caine

all the way up to the twentieth floor. She couldn’t help but imagine Lynnette taking this same journey, but going down, down into the basement levels where all the labs were.
    Down was where the white room was located, where (in the bad old days) Pharmadene had watched Returné victims decompose and recorded every single moment of it. Bryn was on those recordings. She hadn’t gotten far enough to be sluiced down the drains, but far enough that the memory made her shudder, no matter how much she blocked it out.
    Was Lynnette in the white room? Or would she choose some other way to go?
    The doors opened on more glass, more steel, and expensively abstract art. All the people sitting at desks looked busy and as glossy as the surroundings. Harris marched her directly down the hallway, past closed doors to one with yet another security scanner. Harris handled that on Bryn’s behalf. Beyond lay a sea of pale carpeting, more art, tamper-resistant windows, and a desk and some waiting areas.
    Ms. Harris shut the door behind her. Bryn walked across the rug to the man sitting behind the desk. She was trembling even more now. The last time she’d been in the executive offices of Pharmadene, she’d been meeting with a VP who’d been shooting for this very CEO position…and it hadn’t ended well for her. Bryn had spent the next few days locked in the white room, dying. As Lynnette might be now.
    Not something she could put out of her mind or convinceher body wouldn’t happen again. Something in her was shrieking in a raw, half-mad voice to get out of here .
    The assistant at the desk—younger than she would have expected—looked up from typing on his keyboard and checked her badge. “Ms. Davis,” he said. “Please take a seat. Mr. Zaragosa will be with you in a moment. Coffee?”
    Bryn had a sudden flashback to her own meeting with Carl this morning, the taste of coffee, the sound of Lynnette screaming, and said, tightly, “No, thank you.” She wasn’t eating or drinking anything in this place. Her palms were sweating. Holding a cup would only show off the unsteadiness of her hands, anyway, and she didn’t need the distraction.
    He nodded, picked up the phone, and spoke into it quietly. After he’d hung up, he went back to the keyboard, and the white noise of key clicks was a subdued, even soundtrack as Bryn sat down in one of the uncomfortable modern chairs. There was an old issue of the company newsletter on the table—three months old, probably the only one produced after the fall of the previous administration. Curiously, the magazine didn’t mention how most of the employees had been callously murdered and Revived by their bosses, but it did have perky “happyspeak” articles about how much the company cared. Corporate values. What a crock of shit.
    She was glad she hadn’t accepted anything to drink. Even with her stomach empty, the articles made her nauseated.
    The interior office door opened with a sudden rush of air, and Bryn forced herself to wait a beat, then replace the reading material neatly before she got to her feet to greet the oncoming chief executive officer of Pharmadene.
    “Raymond Zaragosa,” he said, extending his hand. Shetook it, feeling a little off-balance now, because he wasn’t what she’d expected. “Jeremy, hold my calls, would you? Ms. Davis, please come in. Thanks for making the trip. I’m sure this is the last place you’d like to be today, given the history.”
    He was on target, of course, but as she followed him into the inner sanctum, she found herself considering Zaragosa himself, not her potentially dire situation. He wasn’t corporate poster-boy material, for one thing: graying hair, yes, but not recently cut; his suit looked nice enough, but he hadn’t bothered with tailoring. Added to that, he had a stern, lived-in face with lots of character lines. No nonsense.
    “Have a seat,” he said. “Sorry about the modern-art furniture. I hate this stuff, but it comes