Stiletto (37 page)

“And what was it?” Odette prompted gently.

“I saw fronds at first, moving about in the water. Red and gold and mahogany and ebony. Little bunches. And then I peered more closely, and I saw that it was hair. The trailing hair of tiny, naked children flying in the water.” Odette felt a shiver go down the back of her neck.

“It never crossed my mind that they were fake,” said Dr. Fielding. “They were too perfect. Undeniably real. Tiny, perfect babies that looked at me and smiled and swirled through their own hair. They were boys and girls, and then they were gone, out of the jar, swum away to somewhere else. Inexplicable.” She shook her head.

“They asked me again what I thought, and I replied that I didn’t know anything at all. From that moment, the Checquy had me, and I never looked back.”

“So it’s worth it?” asked Odette.

“Oh, absolutely. Of course, there are downsides as well. It can be so dangerous, you know. Horrendously dangerous. You get promoted in this job as much because someone has been killed as because of your talent. But the real downside, at least for an academic like me, is that you can’t publish. And you lie to those around you. My family doesn’t know what I do; they think I work for a corporation. Of course, I’ve done more, seen more than they could dream of, but they don’t know that.” She shrugged. “Anyway, let’s get a wriggle on here.” She led Odette to the base of the scaffolding, and they started climbing the steep switchbacking stairs.

Close up, the beast seemed somehow less authentic. Odette’s mind kept telling her that something that large could not possibly be real. Behind the sheen of polyurethane, its hide looked rubbery. Then, as they neared the top, Odette realized there was a massive gouge in the body. It carved open the back, and she could see the meat, honeycombed with bubbles like a fleshy sponge. There did not appear to be much blood.
Perhaps it all drained out,
she thought.

“Do we know what happened to it?”

“As best we can tell, it got in the way of a cargo ship, which, as you can see, tore the hell out of it,” said Dr. Fielding. “And I suppose it wasn’t happy about it, because it attacked and sank the ship before bleeding to death. Later I’ll show you its mouth. The teeth are huge, serrated, and made out of some calcium compound that doesn’t even chip when it’s cutting through iron.”

“What have you established so far about the creature?” asked Odette.

“Well, we’ve found that it’s made of flesh and bone.” She paused and looked at Odette. “I know that sounds sarcastic, but it’s actually a hugely important insight. Another interesting feature is multiple eyes all over the front of its head and several more scattered along the length of its body. Very peculiar, but the preliminary tests have revealed no unusual properties.”

“No unusual properties?” repeated Odette incredulously as she looked up at the wall of skin.

“Well, no radiation or internal toxicity,” amended the doctor. “Temperature, gravity, light levels, and the rate of time passing all remain normal in its vicinity. None of the attending personnel have reported any medical problems or abrupt shifts in their height, weight, or sexual orientation.”

“I see. Can you identify genus? Or even family?”

“We’ve found that it’s tricky trying to taxonomize these sorts of things,” said Dr. Fielding. “In the course of my years with the Checquy, we’ve added two biological kingdoms and identified several thousand new phyla.”

“I see,” said Odette, somewhat taken aback. “May I ask, Dr. Fielding, why does this fall within the jurisdiction of the Checquy?” She paused, trying to find the right words. “I mean, for all you know, this is a perfectly natural creature that has simply never been seen before.”

“It’s possible,” conceded the doctor. “Although the fact that it’s unlike anything ever seen, or even reported, makes us a little suspicious. The fact that it attacked a ship gives us grounds for labeling it malign, which is one of the things that brings it under the Checquy’s authority. But if suddenly a whole bunch of them turn up around the world, we’ll reclassify it.” They reached the top of the scaffolding and walked across the broad platform. In the middle, just above the curve of the creature’s back, several people were putting on oxygen tanks.

“What are they doing?” asked Odette.

“Ah,” said Dr. Fielding. “This is rather exciting. One of the interesting features of the subject is a line of blowholes along its back. They’re very big.”

“Oh?”

“Big enough for a person to climb into,” said the doctor.

Odette looked at her in awe and delight. “No!” she exclaimed.

“Yes.”

“Oh, you
have
to let me go in!”

*

I really hope that Leliefeld manages not to get herself into any messy situations while I’m doing this,
thought Felicity.
If something happens to her while I’ve got my brain stuck in a dead animal, I am going to get in so much trouble with Rook Thomas.

Pawn Roff, Dr. Fielding’s aide, was leading Felicity across the vast hangar to the front of the beast. She could just make out a low platform with a plastic pavilion on top.

“Pawn Clements, we’ve reviewed your file,” said Pawn Roff. “And I applied the risk-analysis template for your powers.” Felicity nodded. The Checquy had suffered a few disastrous incidents in which the vulnerable or vacant bodies of Pawns whose minds had temporarily left their bodies were taken over by supernatural squatters. As a precaution, an office in the Checquy had worked up a schema for the employment of abilities like hers. It described what precautions ought to be taken before someone turned his or her Sight on anything. The risk assessment wasn’t always carried out — it depended on how pressing the issue was — but Pawn Roff seemed to be one of those people who liked to have every box ticked.

“What’s the evaluation?” she asked.

“I’m afraid the fact that you’ll be examining a dead supernatural creature of demonstrated malignancy makes it an automatic category C,” said Roff apologetically. Felicity shrugged. Category C meant that she would be supervised by a doctor, a lawyer, and a guard, each of them armed with a handgun and a machete. Once the observation was over, she’d have to submit to weekly medical, toxicological, psychological, and religious examinations for a month. It was inconvenient, but she’d been through worse.

Category E would have meant she’d need to receive a series of nuclear-style decontamination scrubbings after the operation, while category F added mandatory exorcism rituals for all known religions and two weeks of an all-liquid diet. Category G required that all the aforementioned precautions take place on an isolated oil-rig facility in the North Sea with twelve marksmen pointing guns at her from a hundred meters away.

At the level of category S, she would be automatically executed, her remains incinerated, and arrangements made for them to be removed from the planet. And there were nine higher levels of precautions beyond that, moving into the Greek alphabet.

They came to the platform with its little tent. It looked very small and vulnerable with the great corpse of the creature rearing up behind it like an Eiger made of old fish. In a tiny antechamber, they were provided fresh coveralls that were not made of thick rubber but rather a cotton so sheer and breathable that Felicity’s scarlet knickers and bra could be seen through it.

This is what comes of thinking you won’t be deployed in combat today,
she thought dismally. Normally she wore quite plain underwear, since there was always the possibility of being sent into a combat scenario. However, waking up in the glamorous surroundings of the hotel, and somewhat intimidated by Leliefeld’s luggage and wardrobe, she’d elected to wear her very best clothing, including her undergarments. Of course, Leliefeld was wearing a suit that looked like it cost three times as much, which had somewhat spoiled Felicity’s mood.

Felicity and her guide proceeded into the main area of the tent, where several people, also dressed in cotton coveralls, were waiting. She noted that none of
them
were wearing exuberantly colored underwear.

“These are your witnesses for today, Pawn Clements. Allow me to introduce Dr. Quis, Ms. Brünnhilde Trant-Erskine-Brown, QC, and Sergeant Patrick Liar.”

“Sergeant
Liar?
” repeated Felicity faintly. Sergeant Liar was a gigantic man and, unnervingly, was already holding both his service pistol and his service machete in his hands, as if ready to execute her at any moment.

“
Lyrer,
with a
Y-R-E-R
,” he said. He spoke with a gorgeous Irish accent. “Like someone who plays the lyre.”

“Well, that’s a lyrist, but it’s still nice to meet you,” said Felicity. “All of you.” She shook hands with the other two but not the sergeant, who was unwilling to relinquish his grip on his weapons and who didn’t seem delighted to have been corrected about his own name.

There was a groaning sound underneath them, and they all swayed a little as the hydraulics of the platform began lifting them. The plastic roof of the pavilion squashed down a little as it came in contact with the corpse.

Set up in the center of the platform was Felicity’s equipment, arranged in her preferred layout: a table with some paper, pens, pencils, crayons, charcoal, and a voice recorder so that she could record her impressions as soon as she emerged from her trance. A thermos of chilled cranberry juice stood by, moisture beading on its sides.

The most important item was a piece of intricate and expensive furniture that looked like a dentist’s chair, or would have if Ferrari had been in the habit of making dentist’s chairs. It had been specially commissioned by the Checquy for those Pawns whose abilities required them to lie still for a long time. There were IV drips hanging on a rack and discreet little tanks underneath should a catheter (or worse) prove necessary. Heart, brain, lung, and gallbladder monitors were attached at the back, with the leads all coiled up.

Felicity eased herself into the chair, and Pawn Roff set about fastening restraints around her ankles, knees, waist, and neck. They were uncomfortable, but even more disconcerting was the knowledge that the chair could be electrified if two of the three witnesses judged it necessary. It also contained a series of small explosive charges that would, if detonated, do an astounding amount of harm to the chair’s occupant while leaving any bystanders with no greater problem than sourcing an effective dry cleaner.

Dr. Quis, a white man of indeterminate age, facial features, and hair color, applied monitoring leads to her stomach, chest, neck, forehead, and the balls of her feet and then connected them to the machines. The sound of regular beeping filled the little pavilion.

“Is there anything else you need, Pawn Clements?” asked Pawn Roff.

“No, thank you,” said Felicity. She set the chair’s massaging rollers to “light pummel” and activated the machinery that reclined the seat and brought it up to the depression in the pavilion’s ceiling. The armrests lifted up until her bare hands came into contact with the plastic roof.

And here we go.

Felicity closed her eyes and opened her mind. Smell and sound were sucked away, and touch shouldered into the forefront. Her powers were all about physical connections, texture, substance. The light scratchiness of her suit, the liquid crawl of the perspiration on her back. She gathered herself together and pushed forward, out of her body, passing like light through the ceiling. There was a frisson as she moved through the shellac on the creature’s hide, and then she was inside.

Odette Leliefeld may think she knows anatomy,
thought Felicity,
but she’s never had
this
perspective.

Much to her regret, this wasn’t the first corpse she’d surveyed. When she had begun doing it, at the Estate, it hadn’t been easy. She’d felt as if she were drowning in dead flesh. The weight of a body and the flashes of its history that leaked into her psyche had actually prompted her to become a vegetarian. The Checquy, upon learning her reasons for becoming a vegetarian, had firmly told her that she couldn’t allow her work to affect her that way; it suggested an appalling lack of self-discipline. They had insisted she keep eating meat.

It still wasn’t particularly easy, but she’d reached the point where she could delve around in a murdered corpse for an hour and then go have a hamburger without feeling any guilt or nausea. The key, as when one interacted with kindergartners, was not to acknowledge the immeasurable horror of what you were dealing with.

Now, as she hovered inside the meat of the creature’s chin, Felicity took a moment to orient herself.
First step, locate the main organs. You’re in the head, so check the brain.
Navigating one’s way through a corpse was, usually, just a matter of following some universal signposts.
I just hope this thing has a spine.
She sent her mind coursing up a jawbone as thick as a pine tree and then traced her way along the outside skin to the nearest eye.

Okay, and now I just follow the optic nerve to the brain
. Mentally humming the theme from
Mission: Impossible,
she spiraled along the fleshy cable.
It’s really not a good sign that I’m enjoying this more than the prospect of going back to a five-star hotel at the end of the day,
she mused.
Rook Thomas never actually said how long I would have to hang out with that Eurotrash Grafter and her creepy little brother. I wonder if — this doesn’t feel right,
she realized.
Where’s the fucking brain?

Felicity estimated that she’d traveled about a third of the length of the creature, and not only had she not found a brain, but none of the other optic nerves had converged with hers.
I know I’m in a possibly unique, probably supernatural creature, but this really doesn’t make much sense. Why would the brain be so far away from the eyes?
What kind of creature keeps its brain in its arse? Apart from Pawn Bannister,
she amended. If she’d had access to her arms, she’d have folded them in vexation. She settled for thinking vexed thoughts and pressed on farther into the corpse.