“How does the damage to her epidermis look?” she asked.
“Well, at first glance, it looks dreadful,” said one of the doctors. “But we’re not seeing much actual damage. We have reports, though, stating that it was excruciatingly painful.”
“For humans, anyway,” muttered one of the doctors under his breath. Odette was not supposed to have heard him, but she did, and she shot him a look. He flushed and turned his attention back to Clements’s feet.
“Move,” said Odette to the nearest doctor, and he shuffled aside. She knelt down close to the Pawn’s exposed thigh and took a deep breath. Her eyes refocused, zooming in, so she felt as though she were shrinking and falling into Clements’s skin. The mottled red surface filled her vision.
“It’s red, but I don’t see any blistering or actual burns,” she said. “The pores are undamaged, and there’s no sign of cellular breakdown.”
“Thoughts?” said a doctor meekly.
“It may have seeped through the skin to affect the tissue beneath. Do you have a scalpel?” The doctors and the people with guns exchanged glances and then shrugs. “I’m going to be operating on her eyes in a second; do you expect me to do it with evocative descriptions or with actual tools?” A scalpel was produced, and she ignored the fact that the three soldiers all tightened their grips on their weapons. “I’m just going to make a small incision to check for subcutaneous damage. I’ll sew it up later. You won’t even know it was there.”
Odette made a tiny curving cut and lifted up the flap of skin. She adjusted her gaze and examined the epidermis and the dermis. To the aghast disapproval of the assorted medical practitioners, who were all watching her as surreptitiously as they could, she pulled down her mask and sniffed the wound. Then, before anyone could stop her, she touched the cut with her glove and then licked her finger.
“What the bloody hell is wrong with you?” bellowed the attending physician, grabbing her shoulder and pulling her back violently. The three soldiers all brought their guns up to point at her. The other doctors stampeded to the far end of the room and huddled there together like frightened caribou in surgical gowns.
“Relax,” said Odette witheringly. “I’m not your creepy but hot Bishop.”
“Are you insane?”
“I’m checking her blood for any poisons or compounds,” said Odette coolly.
“Oh. And?”
“And I think she’ll be fine—at least, her skin will. It’s already improving. As far as I can tell, it’s a customized enzyme that acts as a nontoxic, noncaustic trigger of nociception. I can’t identify all the elements, but there are chords of sulfur and Murdock’s extract overlying a base note of liquefied kanten along with a distillation from the glands of the Nycticebus coucang.”
“I beg your pardon?”
“The slow loris.”
“What does all that mean?” asked the doctor.
“That stuff hurts like a bitch, especially your eyes, and it looks like it’s causing damage, but it doesn’t actually do anything in the long run. Temporary, if extremely painful, blindness.”
“You got all that from tasting her blood?” said the doctor skeptically.
“Absolutely,” said Odette. “Here, do you want to see if you can taste something different?” She proffered her finger, and the doctor recoiled.
“I’ll, um, I’ll take your word for it.”
One of the advantages of working with the Checquy is that they’re quite willing to believe the impossible, mused Odette. Of course it was impossible. She’d tasted something in Clements’s blood, but she wouldn’t have been able to break it down like that. The truth was, she knew the material because she’d had a hand in concocting it. It was a Grafter weapon that she and Pim had worked on as junior assistants, and she recognized it instantly. Although it’s interesting that it didn’t have an effect on me, she thought. They must have tailored it that way.
“We’ll need a more detailed analysis, of course, but I think the effects will fade away within a week without any residual harm,” she said.
“Oh, that is good news,” said the doctor in a peculiar tone.
“You don’t sound like you think it’s good news,” remarked Odette as she quickly stitched up the wound.
“No, we do. But will the eyes recover as well?” asked another doctor.
“That I don’t know,” said Odette dubiously. Exposure to the original formula had been like getting hit in the face with a Siamese cat covered in vinegar—painful, disorienting, and bewildering, but not permanently damaging. However, she recalled some of the people she’d seen in the street. There had been at least one man who had tears of blood pouring out of his eyes. That might have been an allergic reaction. Or the Antagonists might really have tampered with that stuff. “What’s the situation with Pawn Clements’s eyes?”
“I think you’d better take a look,” said the doctor near the Pawn’s head. Judging from his voice, he was at least forty years older than her, but he spoke in a tone of respect and awe. “I don’t know about the skin, but this doesn’t look to me like it’s improving at all.”
Odette made her way to Clements’s head. It did not escape her notice that one of the gun-toting guards had followed her around the room and taken up a position behind her. Just concentrate on the task at hand, not on the fact that they will likely shoot you if you fuck up. She gazed down at the aforementioned task at hand, who was still anesthetized but whose eyelids were held wide open with retractors. This gave Felicity a staring, incredulous look, the same staring, incredulous look, Odette suspected, that she would have worn if she were awake and knew that Odette was going to operate on her. With the swelling around her eyes held back by tape, the Pawn had the air of a startled shar-pei.
The Pawn’s eyes were red and weeping, but, even more alarming, they were streaked with tiny threads of a dark purple, almost black material. It was not like anything Odette had ever seen before. What the hell have they done with the formula? she thought. I didn’t detect any radical changes in it, apart from the fact that they made it smell like soup. Then she noticed a fine dappling of the same color across the Pawn’s brow. She leaned forward and smelled the skin around Clements’s face.
“It’s a different product,” she said. “She’s had something else sprayed in her eyes.”
“Are you going to lick her again?” asked a doctor hesitantly.
“I think best not,” said Odette as she zoomed back in on the eyes.
“Should we take a swab to see what it is?”
“How long would it take to analyze it?” she asked.
“The problem is that we don’t really have labs here,” said the doctor. “The Annexe is pretty much just offices and an armory. We’d have to get the sample somewhere else and then back again.”
“We don’t have time for that,” said Odette. “I don’t know if you noticed, but those stains are spreading.”
“What?”
“They’re growing. Just as I’ve watched, they’ve expanded by a couple of microns. We need to go in, now.”
There was something almost holy about cutting open an eye. The elegance of the form, the sheer impossibility of its structure. You couldn’t help but feel reverence for the liquid beauty of an eye. It was one of the reasons Odette had chosen to specialize in ocular architecture.
She’d rejected the tools they’d offered her. They’d been very good-quality implements, but none had possessed the qualities she required. Instead, to the continued horror of the doctors, she’d hiked up her surgical gown and slid her hand down inside the waistband of her scrubs, to her right leg. A seam opened in her skin, internal muscles rippled, and two scalpels were eased out into her hand. Grown from her own bone, with unorthodox lines to their blades, they were practically unbreakable and beautifully, organically sharp.
“Are those sterile?” asked someone.
“Yes,” said Odette. “There are glands that secrete cleansing agents into the pouch.” She put the blades down on a ste
rile field near the instrument tray and held up her hands so an OR tech could remove her no-longer-sterile gloves and put new ones on her. “Now, I know you’re all judging me and, um, possibly getting ready to shoot me in the head, but I need you to be quiet while I do this.” And she sliced into Felicity’s right eye. The scalpel cut easily through the tough coating of the sclera. Long moments passed as she gently twisted the cut open and used the nonbladed end of one of her scalpels to probe inside with minuscule, delicate movements. She paused and drew her gaze in tighter and tighter until the nerves in her head began to burn. The doctors and the guards maintained a petrified silence, barely breathing. Then:
“Oh, Jezus mina!” At her shocked exclamation, the doctors all jumped, and she heard the guard behind her shift into a shooting position, but she reserved all her horror for what she saw inside Clements’s eye. It was bad. Very bad.
“It’s some sort of organic agent,” said Odette. “An edited cancer or maybe a coral. It’s bled through the sclera and is growing in the vitreous humor. It’s adhered itself to the inner surface of the eye and the hyaloid canal and is increasing exponentially. It’s eating her eyes.”
Judging by its current size and rate of spread, only a minuscule amount of that stuff had made its way to Felicity’s eyes, but it was expanding swiftly. The growths were comparatively small now, but to Odette’s heightened vision, they looked vast and frightening—great jagged tendrils that branched out and grew thicker. If it continued unchecked, not only would Clements be rendered permanently blind within the hour, but it was possible that it would continue into her brain and kill her.
“Can you excise it?”
Odette paused. Maybe it was the presence of the armed guards or the unspoken threat Rook Thomas had made, but she sensed that telling the truth would not be good for her.
“What are the odds of you retrieving my tools from my hotel within twenty minutes?” she asked finally.
“That’s impossible, I’m afraid.”
“I suspected as much,” she said. “Okay, what pharmaceuticals do you have available here?” A flunky was dispatched and returned with a tablet computer featuring the Annexe’s catalog. Odette scanned it grimly. It was respectable enough for a little clinic, but for her purposes, it would be like working with leeches and a sharp rock.
Okay, think. Are there any compounds here that might buy you some time? Nothing. I have nothing. I can’t analyze it, I don’t have the tools to cut it out without mutilating her eyes. I have all this knowledge locked up inside me, and I can’t do anything with it. They’re going to kill me and they might kill Alessio and there’s going to be a war and I can’t do anything to stop it. I’m useless!
I’m . . .
I’m . . .
“I have an idea,” she said. “We’re going to need all the antirejection drugs you can get. And I’m going to need a hypodermic needle and . . .” She trailed off, aghast at her own plans. This could either fix everything or make everything much worse.
“Miss Leliefeld?”
She sighed.
“I need you to bring me a mirror.”
Are you sure you don’t want me to do this?” asked the doctor in the tone of a man who fervently hoped she didn’t want him to do this.
“No, it’s fine,” said Odette. “I can do it.” And I wouldn’t trust you anyway.
“Would you like one of us to hold the mirror, at least?”
“No, I can lock the muscles in that arm so it’ll be steady.” She held the mirror up in front of her face and looked herself in the eye. Are you ready? It would have been nice if she’d felt a core certainty, a glow of faith in herself, but there was nothing except the churning doubt and fear. I’m never going to be ready, so I might as well start now.
She brought the hypodermic up and pressed the needle into her own left eye.
She’d dulled the sensation in that portion of her face and shut down the eye so there was no pain, but the pressure was nauseating. She watched as the needle slid into the white of her eye while around her the assembled doctors gave a little sigh. The guards even seemed to have forgotten about their guns. Then she slid her thumb into the ring on the end of the plunger and began to draw it out, slowly sucking up a portion of her vitreous humor.
Not too much, not too little, she thought as, bit by bit, she drew out the clear gel that filled her eyeball. She was almost hypnotized by her own movement. Despite her best efforts, a dull ache started to thrum inside her skull.
A little more, she told herself. As much as you can stand. A bit of pain now might make all the difference later.
Finally, Odette eased the needle out of her eye. She looked at the hypodermic critically. It seemed such a tiny amount. But it will have to do. It was seething, she knew, with Broederschap materials. High-tech bacteria. Specially designed cells. Her own exquisitely edited DNA. For its weight, and the knowledge it represented, that gel was worth billions of dollars. She held out the mirror, and a doctor took it reverently. Then she turned to Clements. She inserted the needle into one of the openings she’d made in the Pawn’s right eye and injected a little of the liquid. She’d drawn from only one of her eyes because she needed the other one to finish the procedure. With the amount of vitreous humor she’d taken from her left eye, its vision would be warped and flawed until she could replace it. If I get the chance.
The material washed into Felicity’s eye and merged immediately. For all its value, Odette’s vitreous humor looked exactly like anyone else’s. She’d tried to inject it near a smear of the growth, and now she waited anxiously. Please, please, let it do something. She knew the potency of her own body. Her eyes could eliminate cataracts and glaucoma in seconds and scour away parasites in minutes. But this stuff coating the inside of Pawn Clements’s eye was a weapon, created to destroy. All Odette could do was hope.
Long minutes dragged by and there was no sign of change. She’d put exactly half of the extracted material into the right eye. Should I put the rest in? If the full amount in one eye has an effect, then one of the doctors can remove more from my other eye, she thought. Hell, they can put me under and drain it all. Depending on how it all turns out, someone can always build me new eyes.
And then she noticed that the spread of the growth had slowed. She counted fifteen of her heartbeats and confirmed that it had stopped completely. Then the tips of the tendrils began to turn white and dissolve. It worked!
“It worked!” she shrieked, and the entire room burst into applause. She quickly injected the rest of the material into the left eye.
It wasn’t over. Repair work would need to be done, and Clements would have to be put on a rigorous regimen of antirejection drugs until the Broederschap materials had broken down within her body. But Odette had arrested and possibly reversed the weapon’s progress. Thank God, she thought as she accepted tentative handshakes.
I wonder how Clements is going to take this.
40
Felicity awoke, but she could not open her eyes. There was a soft pressure on them that held them closed. She lifted her hands carefully and felt pads covering her eyelids, held down with tape. Okay, be calm. She was afraid to send her Sight down through the bandages, terrified of what she might find.
There was a noise off to the side, and Felicity tensed and her Sight pulsed out. She was lying on a couch, in an office. A desk squatted off to her left, bookcases against two of the walls. There was a chair near the door, and seated in the chair was—she switched her focus to the immediate past—Odette Leliefeld. The Grafter girl was curled up, hugging her knees. A pad and bandage covered her right eye, but apart from that, she appeared to be fine.
“Where are we?” asked Felicity.
“The Annexe. The office of the head of the Southeast Asia section. It appears this was the closest place with an unoccupied couch.”
“What about my—” Felicity broke off, frightened to ask in case she got an answer.
“Your eyes are going to be fine,” said Leliefeld’s v
oice carefully. “The swelling is already going down.”
Felicity frowned, or she would have if the swelling of her face hadn’t prevented it. In the course of her career, she’d suffered the occasional injury and seen teammates get hurt. As a result, she’d spent a fair amount of time around doctors, and she knew that they never, ever cut to the chase.
“What aren’t you telling me?”
“In addition to the fog, you were exposed to another weapon,” began Leliefeld.
“Yeah, he spat on me.” There was a startled silence. “And?”
“They asked me to operate,” said the voice. Slowly, reluctantly, Leliefeld described what she had found and then, even more slowly and reluctantly, described what she had done to fix the problem.
“You put your Grafter slime inside me!” Felicity felt outrage and nausea. The injection she’d received from the graaf had been bad enough, but it had been sufficiently clinical that she could convince herself it was medicine or an inoculation. But Leliefeld had taken a part of her own body and transplanted—no, grafted!—it into Felicity’s eyes. It was disgusting. It was monstrous. Vague memories about the eyes being the windows to the soul floated in her mind. What does this mean? Will I see things the same way? Can she see through my eyes now? Will it affect my powers?
“It’s technology,” said Leliefeld in an unreasonably reasonable tone. “It’s natural.”
“Natural!”
“If you gave me thirteen months and a lot of slides, I could explain it to you,” said Leliefeld. “There is a scientific basis for it. Can you say as much for your powers?”
“I was born with this power!”
“Without Broederschap technology, you would be blind. Blind and maybe even dead.”
“I would have been blind because of Broederschap technology!” Clements barked back. “Your cousin spat that shit in my eyes. It’s all the same.”
“You don’t believe that, Felicity. Not anymore. And I don’t think you ever really did. After all, you’re a Pawn of the Checquy. A tool. You know as well as I do that the line between you and the monsters you fight is very thin. It’s the same for me.” Her words hung in the air between them. “Anyway, the swelling is going down, and the redness of your skin is fading.”