Chrysalis

58

Purchase knelt over the porcelain bowl again, feeling another dry heave coming on. He’d long since brought up everything in his stomach, but the heaves seemed disinclined to stop — he’d kept on flushing, and retching, and flushing again. Ten minutes had passed, and here he was, still kneeling on the tiled floor, one hand on the toilet seat and the other around the tank, hugging it as tightly as a child would a teddy bear.

They’d told him to calm down and stop shouting. They’d said this was no time for hysterics. Peyton and that frosty one, Dafna, hadn’t even wanted to let him out of the lab. But when they’d seen the greenish pallor rise in his face, they’d moved aside instead of getting doused in puke. The rear hallways of Omega R&D had been mercifully empty, and he’d just managed to make it into a men’s room stall before the geyser came.

Calm down. Stop shouting. Easy for them to say. It wasn’t their brainchild that had been weaponized. Implant research was his baby. It was his life. And he’d helped shepherd it from the crude offerings of other medical design companies to what it was today, without taking the easy route of other firms he could name, who relied on the 510(k) pathway or pre-market approval of “predicate devices” to avoid clinical trials. He’d insisted on the most stringent tests, made sure BioCertain’s offerings passed the strictest clearances: his own. And with only one aim: to improve lives, to save lives. But thanks to cruel fate, those same implants were being used to kill.

All this time — as his own investigations had revealed more and more, as the ramifications of what the others told him sunk in — he’d been able to compartmentalize the possibility that his devices would kill people today. But his Sentinel didn’t compartmentalize. It had merely signaled, with an unusual alert tone, twice — then gone on to provide him with details. A man, seventy-three, whose heart stopped following sudden, unexpected diabetic ketoacidosis. A woman on their newest beta-blocker, who’d abruptly gone into V-tach and then just as abruptly to sudden cardiac arrest.

They wouldn’t — shouldn’t — have died so quickly. The man exhibited the first symptoms at four minutes past noon; the woman, at 12:07. They were both dead by ten minutes past.

Now he pushed himself up to a kneeling position, supported by his legs instead of the porcelain. Wrigley had been hit hard, too — he’d seen it in his face. But VR had only been the red herring. He, Francis Purchase, was in charge of the devices ultimately responsible. It meant his career, of course, but that was nothing compared to…

His Sentinel sounded again: that same unusual tone. Christ, not a third one already —

It was at that moment he felt a gloved hand curl around his mouth, and cold sharp steel press against his neck. “Dr. Purchase,” came a muffled voice.

It was a statement, not a question.

“No yelling,” the voice continued. “Just bring me up to speed — as fast as possible.”

The voice had an accent Purchase couldn’t place. As the pressure on his lips eased slightly, he struggled to process what was happening. “Up to speed,” he repeated.

Suddenly, the man — it was obviously a man — shoved a device into Purchase’s field of view. It was a security-issue Chrysalis transponder, with half a dozen signals locked in on its screen. “Mossby. Peyton. Logan. They’re nearby. What are they doing? Tell me, now, and maybe I’ll let you live.”

Purchase felt himself drifting into shock. Was he perhaps going mad? It didn’t matter. His professional life was over — which meant he had nothing to live for.

A fierce pain lanced into his neck. It dug deep, scraping one of the cervical vertebrae — or at least, that’s how it felt. The blade retreated; the pain remained. Purchase felt blood begin to run down to his shoulder, then his chest, in a thin, warm stream.

Fear brought him back to the present moment.

“The one thing you don’t have is time,” the voice said. “Give me the objective, layout, complement — you have five seconds to start talking.”

Purchase, now focused on the pain in his neck, parsed the military terminology. “You’ll let me live?”

“I said I may let you live. But if you don’t tell me everything, immediately, I’ll hose this stall with your blood.”

For a moment, Purchase’s jaw worked silently. Then — feeling the pressure of the blade on his throat again — he managed to find his voice.