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Then he looked worried.

“Bryn, don’t!” he called. “What are you doing? Don’t!”

“I have to,” she said. “I’m sorry. I can’t explain right now, but please. Just let me go.”

She dropped down on the other side, into a four-foot ditch below the wall’s level, and then scrambled up and across the road. Not a lot out here in the country, but the road did have relatively brisk traffic with lots of long-haul trucks. Most truckers were wise enough not to stop for hitchhikers, but that wasn’t what she was looking for.

She started jogging along the gravel edge, picking up speed to a flat-out run—and then, as the front of an eighteen-wheeler passed her, she leaped sideways.

Her timing was
almost
perfect. She landed on the hydraulic connectors for the trailer behind the cab and immediately slipped off, having miscalculated her momentum—then caught herself just before she slid underneath the wheels.

Bryn scrambled to a balance point and braced her back against the cold corrugated metal of the trailer, then settled herself against the bumps. It wouldn’t be necessary to stay with the truck for long—in fact, it might be counterproductive, since Patrick would be dedicated in his search. She tried not to think about what might happen if her perch shook her loose—it probably wouldn’t kill her, but it’d be unpleasant for sure.

When the truck slowed down at a crossroads twenty minutes later, she jumped, landed and rolled into the low ditch next to the pavement, then stalked another truck and did the same jump-on maneuver. This one was easier, or she’d perfected the maneuver; either way, she settled in comfortably for a fifty-mile ride west. No particular destination in mind, because she had no idea what her plan was going to be, but putting space between herself and Patrick seemed like the only thing she could think about. She needed to know herself better before she took the risk of hurting him, or Annie, or any of the others.

But what about Riley? Isn’t she just as dangerous?
That worryingly practical part of her brain nudged at her, but the truth was, she didn’t think Riley was as much of a threat. For one thing, Riley seemed to thoroughly understand her new condition, and she’d learned how to manage it. She’d been dealing with it longer and had made some kind of mental accommodation.

But Bryn didn’t trust herself. Not yet.

Not when she was hungry.

She hopped off when the truck paused at a rest stop, one of the big complexes that catered to long-haulers; the luck of it was that it was like a shopping mall, full of clothes to replace the stained things she was wearing, and after she’d showered in the bathroom facilities and changed, she took the rest of her limited bankroll to the restaurant.

“What’s your biggest steak?” she asked the waitress—a faded American beauty rose with gray streaks in her blond hair and a friendly smile.

“Well, that’d be the Big Tex, seventy-two ounces, but it’s a stunt, honey; we serve it to those big-boy truckers and drunk frat boys, free if they finish it, which they hardly ever do. Otherwise, it’s a cool forty bucks. Most don’t even make it to the parking lot before they throw it all up. Maybe something like a porterhouse. How does that sound?”

“No,” Bryn said. “I’ll take the Big Tex. Rare as you can make it and not get closed down by the health department.”

The waitress waited for the punch line. When Bryn didn’t deliver one, she shook her head and wrote it down on her order pad. “Your ambulance ride, honey. Want any sides with it?”

“Just water,” Bryn said. She tried for a charming smile, but the waitress had probably seen it all, and tilted a skeptical eyebrow before heading for the kitchen window. She and the cook had a conversation, and a balding man in stained whites leaned out to give Bryn a look. He, too, shook his head, but in a couple of minutes she heard the steak sizzling, and the hunger she’d tried to leash began to snarl with real ferocity.

Bryn squeezed her eyes shut.
Just wait. Wait. It’s coming.

She didn’t know how long she sat there, struggling for control, but it snapped when a plate landed with a thump on the table in front of her—and there it was, seventy-two ounces of pure meat, drenched in watery blood. Just cooked enough to be legal, as she’d ordered. The waitress put down a glass of ice water and stepped back. “Okay, now, when you start feeling full, you just tell me and—”

Bryn didn’t even use the knife and fork.

She grabbed the steak off the plate and held it in both hands, and bit into it. The waitress made a startled sound and took a bigger step back, but that hardly registered at all, because Bryn gnawed at the beef, tore at it, chewed and swallowed without even registering the taste except as blood and salt and flesh, and she didn’t pause until she’d teethed the last threads of gristle from the bone. Then she broke the bone open with her hands and sucked out the marrow.

Something in her brain registered then—that refueling had been accomplished—and she dropped the fragments to the plate, sat back, wiped her mouth and chin with the napkin, and drank the entire glass of water in one long, convulsive gulp.

The silence got to her in the next few seconds, and she looked up to see the waitress standing ten feet away, back pressed to a wall, mouth open. The cook was leaning out the window with an identically shocked expression. Other diners were completely still, and every set of eyes in the place was fixed on Bryn.

One kid had his cell phone out and was recording. He stopped, put it down, and slow-clapped. “That was
awesome
.”

“I—” Bryn swallowed, tried again. “I really love a good steak.”

Someone laughed. But not the cook, and not the waitress. They’d seen a steady parade of tough guys in here trying to eat this steak, and Bryn imagined that most of them had left half on the plate.

And nobody had ever swallowed it in five minutes flat, ripping into it like a wild dog.

Bryn threw a generous tip on the table, and got out fast. She stopped again in the restroom to clean herself up. In the harsh lights, she looked—surprisingly fine. She wiped off the remaining grease and splatters of juice, but she felt good. Better than good. She felt . . .
great
.

I can do this, she told her reflection. A steak a day. Or any kind of meat, as long as it isn’t . . . alive. It’s strange, but I can do it. There’s a way to deal with this. I don’t have to be a monster.

But she couldn’t shake the expression she’d seen on the waitress, either. Her definition of
in control
might be someone else’s of
insane
. Either way, it was going to be hard to masquerade in normal life now, when hunger drove her to these kinds of extremes. And how often would it do that? How much would she have to eat? She’d have to ask some hard questions of Riley to find out, but she suspected that the amount of fuel she took on would have quite a lot to do with how much effort she put out.

And considering they were right now on the unprepared, unarmed side of a war . . . effort would probably be considerable.

You can’t run away from it, Bryn. This is what you are. Deal with it, because it isn’t going away.

She went to the pay phones outside in the hallway—ancient things, but still working, thankfully—and phoned back to the motel. She asked for the room where they’d been staying, and was put through, and there was only half a ring before the call connected and Riley Block said, “What the hell do you think you’re doing, Bryn?”

“You knew it’d be me.”

“Of course I knew—I’m not an idiot. Where are you?”

“At a truck stop off Route 70,” Bryn said. “I ate an entire seventy-two ounce steak in five minutes. I think I set the new record.”

Riley was quiet for a moment. “Are you sure that was smart?”

“Almost certainly wasn’t. But I couldn’t—I wasn’t sure I could control it, Riley. Around Patrick. Around Joe. And I can’t stand that. I needed to eat, and waiting around for a trail bar and OJ wasn’t going to cut it. You understand.”

“You think it’s safer out there? You’re going to attract attention ordering those kinds of meals; you know that.”

“I know,” Bryn said. “But I had to have a little bit of time to myself. Just to test myself. To know—know if I can really control myself.”

“I can see that. But you can’t be out there on your own; you’re going to get hurt.”

“I know,” she said. “That’s why I’m calling.”

“We’re ready to leave here now,” Riley said. “We’ll pick you up. Stay in plain sight in the restaurant, and we’ll find you. Have some pie. Live a little. It’s not like you have to worry about your weight. No matter what you eat, it’ll burn right off.”

“Bright side to everything, then.”

“Damn right,” Riley said, and hung up.

Bryn went back to the restaurant, took her seat again, and ordered a piece of apple pie à la mode. Because Riley was right about the calories, this time her body was perfectly capable of enjoying the taste of a good pie. And it was good. Extraordinary. Or maybe that was just all her newly upgraded senses coming online.

She was tempted to order a second piece, but saw a large black van pulling into the parking lot. It flashed its lights twice, and she started to get out of her booth.

The waitress blocked her path. She was flanked by a tall, skinny man in a flannel shirt and jeans with a camera. “Just a sec, hon. We need to get your picture for the wall. This is Matt. He’s the manager here.”

Bryn was able to get her hand up just in time to block the flash, and shoved forward, knocking the waitress and the manager—who was still angling for a shot—out of her path as she headed for the door. “Wait!” the manager yelled. “It’s part of the deal. We have to get a picture of anybody who eats the steak. Wait—”

She didn’t. She was out the front doors, across the parking lot, and moving without pause into the black van, whose sliding door had opened for her. Bryn slammed it shut and said, “Drive,” and Joe Fideli, behind the wheel, put the van in gear and accelerated smoothly away onto the access road.

There was a moment of silence, and Bryn looked around. Everyone—absolutely everyone, even Joe, in the rearview mirror—was studying her.

“Enjoy your meal?” Manny asked.

Riley was watching her, too, and after a bare second, she gave an almost imperceptible nod.

Bryn sighed. “I have to tell you something. You’re not going to like it.”

She was certainly right about that last part.

•   •   •

Bryn chose her words carefully, because she knew what she said next would change everything, forever. And she also knew that Riley was using her as a stalking horse . . . and that whatever she said about her own condition, she couldn’t implicate Riley.

Not yet.

“You know that the version of Returné I originally was given needed daily shots,” she began. “Manny improved the formula and edited out some of the programming to get past the less fun aspects, like being a slave operated by remote control. But the best he could do was extend the amount of time needed between shots.”

Manny said, “You say that like someone else has done better.”

“They have,” she said. “Back there at Pharmadene. But it’s a little bit more complicated. You know they were engineering the drug originally for the military, and the military had a problem with the shot-a-day barrier, which—along with the chancy conversion rate—was why they canceled their support. What we didn’t know was that the project was still under way by a rogue department working for outside contractors, and that was what I stumbled into at that nursing home . . . a farm for advanced nanites, incubated in the unconscious bodies of people who didn’t have anyone to look out for them.” She still had hideous flashbacks of that place—of the quiet horrors that went on there.

“We know all that,” Manny said. “What does this have to do with you running out for a fucking steak dinner?”

Riley turned her head toward Bryn, very slightly, but didn’t make eye contact. Didn’t give any kind of a signal.

“When Annie and I went to Pharmadene for safety, we found out they’d made headway on the military priorities,” Bryn said. “We found out  . . . the hard way. I’m infected with the upgrades now. I don’t need shots anymore. What I do need—desperately—is high protein meals. So you can’t just stash me in a motel with a granola bar from now on. Sorry, but it’s a . . . medical condition.”

There was a frozen, electric moment of silence.

“Upgrades,” Manny finally repeated. “That’s why you survived that fight at Pharmadene. But what do you mean, you don’t need shots?”

She took a deep breath, and took the plunge. “They’re self-replicating, the upgraded nanites. When they mature, they’ll reproduce, and that colony will need to migrate to a new host.”

Silence again, heavy this time, and finally, Pansy Taylor was the one who spoke up. “Okay, if nobody else wants to, I’ll say it. What you mean is that you’re infected, and you’re going to be infectious. And when you say you need protein, you mean you need meat.”

“Jesus Christ,” Joe Fideli said. He sounded grim, and he looked it, too. “Fucking eggheads. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency engineered the same tech into their robot battle dog. Official press release says that it could power itself from available proteins, but nobody who looked it over was fooled. It eats corpses. Or, theoretically, live prey, if it can bring it down.
That’s
what you’re afraid of. You’re craving meat, because that’s how the nanites are powered. You’re afraid you’re going to . . . what, eat us?”

“I—” She couldn’t lie. “Yes. Maybe. I don’t know. But I needed food, and I couldn’t take the risk of staying with you. Manny, the incubation period is thirty days, so I think I’ve got until then to figure out how to stop this thing. I don’t want to spread it. I promise—I don’t. But I’m going to need your help.”

“Yeah,” he said, “you damn sure do.”

And he drew his gun and shot her in the head.

Bryn saw the flash, but she never heard the sound; it was far too late.

The world blacked out.

When it came back, it did so in a thick, red rush of pain—a cascading signal that swept through her brain and out through every part of her body. The machine, coming back online, and bringing with it twists of agony that curled through her like whip-cracks.