Sizzle and Burn

stillness. He’d been on the night shift on this ward ever since she arrived a few days before. She had never slept this soundly before.
    An uneasy sensation drifted through him. She was on a suicide watch but he’d worked there long enough to know that when patients were determined to take their own lives, they usually succeeded.
    He entered the code that unlocked the door, moved inside the small space and went toward the bed.
    “Miss Plumer? Are you awake?” He reached down to shake her shoulder.
    By the time he realized that the shape on the bed had been created by pillows and folded blankets, it was too late.
    He heard the faint slide of a slippered foot on the tile floor behind him. The next instant pain exploded in his head.
    The world went dark.

    She had chosen one of the smaller orderlies but his clothes were still much too big on her. The shirt reeked of masculine sweat and cigarette smoke. But she had learned the night routine well. All she had to do was cross the hall to the stairwell without being seen. If she made it that far, she stood an excellent chance of getting out of the building. With a little luck, no one would miss the orderly for a while.
    She made it down the stairs to the employees’ locker room, found the orderly’s locker and removed a cap and a jacket. She shoved her hair under the cap and turned up the collar of the jacket.
    A small hypnotic suggestion removed any doubts the guard at the employees’ entrance had concerning the identity of the departing staff member.
    A few minutes later, she was in the orderly’s battered compact, driving away from the hospital. She would have to ditch the car and get another one before dawn, she decided.
    She drove hard and fast, putting as much distance between herself and the hospital as possible. And while she drove she made her plans.
    For all intents and purposes, the organization considered her as good as dead. That situation would change, however, as soon as someone found the unconscious orderly.
    The Inner Circle would order an immediate search when word got out that she had escaped. The cops and J&J would also look for her. Niki Plumer would have to disappear in a very convincing manner, at least until she could demonstrate to the Inner Circle that John Stilwell Nash was a traitor to the organization.
    When she proved that she was the only one who had recognized how truly dangerous Nash was, the director would thank her. And then he would give her Nash’s position in the organization. From there it was only a few short steps to the Inner Circle and, ultimately, the director’s chair.
    They would wonder why she had survived being deprived of the formula, of course. Perhaps she would let them think she had some natural immunity to the side effects. Or maybe she would pretend that Nash never gave her the real drug because he feared she would become more powerful than him. Yes, that would work nicely, she thought. Nash gave her a fake version of the drug. Perfect. Another nail in his coffin.
    The Inner Circle believed that she was a mid-range strategy talent who had been bumped up to a level nine by the drug. The truth was, she was a natural level-nine parahypnotist who had only pretended to be a mid-range strategist. With her abilities, it had been easy enough to swap out the little vials when she was given the first three injections of the formula, the ones designed to get her hooked. Later, when she was on her own, she had simply dumped her regular supply down the nearest drain.
    She had sensed from the outset that if the organization was handing out a para-enhancement drug freely to its operatives, there had to be a serious downside. The Inner Circle would want to make sure it had a way to control the dangerously powerful talents it created.
    She had been right.
    She wanted to use the drug as badly as any of the others but she wasn’t going to take it until she knew for certain that it was safe or that there was an antidote. She had seen for herself what the stuff was doing to John Stilwell Nash.
    They said that family feuds were the nastiest quarrels. She didn’t doubt that for a moment. It would be interesting to see the expression on Nash’s face when he discovered that he wasn’t the only modern-day result of John Stilwell’s very personal reproductive experiments back in the late 1800s.
    It wasn’t the strong who survived, she thought. It was the very, very smart.

    Fallon Jones read the news when it came across his