Stiletto (65 page)

“Right,” said the trooper. He sounded a little taken aback. “Brilliant, we’re on it.” He spoke into his radio, issued instructions. “So, which eye is he missing?”

“This one,” she said, holding up her hand.

A lessio looked up as Odette came into the room, and immediately jumped to his feet.

“You’re here! It’s been
crazy,
’Dette! They’d taken us up the Shard to see the city, and there was this green cloud growing across the river, and I realized that it was right where our hotel is. And then the teacher got a call, and we all went down, and there were two men in the lobby who said I had to come with them and they drove me here and put me in this room and told me to stay here and no one’s told me anything and it’s been
hours!
”

Odette blinked. Her normally calm brother was evidently completely freaked-out. She hugged him tight and looked around the room critically. They’d been delivered to the Annexe, the Checquy’s headquarters for international operations. It was a somewhat squat, unassuming building in the southernmost part of London. It stood only a few meters from a decidedly unsquat, extremely assuming office building that contained some impressive and flashy businesses, including a television production company, a modeling agency, and the editorial offices of a notorious magazine that featured lithe young women wearing mainly hats and gloves, so the Annexe was often overlooked entirely by passersby — which was, of course, the point.

Alessio had been deposited in a sort of break room where Checquy office workers could hold little meetings or presentations. He’d been supplied with a microwaved pizza, a few bottles of water, a battered edition of
Tom Brown’s Schooldays,
and some old copies of the
Beano Annual.
An armed guard outside the door had escorted him to the lavatory twice.

“So what’s going on?” he demanded.

“I can’t tell you right now,” she said and looked up at the ceiling meaningfully. His eyes grew wide.

“Are they — are they going to kill us?” he asked weakly.

“I don’t know,” said Odette. She took his hand in hers and reflected on the past hour.

She’d woken up in the back of a wide ambulance strapped to a stretcher. On the other side was Pawn Clements, looking absolutely dreadful. Her face was swollen from the fog, and there were bruises on her cheeks. A mask covered her nose and mouth, and her skin was mottled red. Two medical personnel, a man and a woman, were leaning over her doing medical things.

“Oh no,” said Odette, and they looked at her with distaste burning through their gas masks.

“It’s all right for some,” said the woman. The fact that Odette had emerged from the fog with absolutely no marks on her — even the cut from Simon’s spur had closed up tracelessly — apparently did not sit well with the woman.

“How is she?” asked Odette.

“Not well,” said the man. “She’s been knocked about, her skin looks like it’s been chemically burned, but it’s her eyes that are —”

“Don’t talk to her,” interrupted the woman. “Do your job. And you,” she said, turning to Odette, “how do you feel?”

“All right, I think,” said Odette.

“Then keep quiet.”

What do they know?
she thought.
What happened? Where did Simon go? Do they have him? What is going on?
But they weren’t questions she could ask. All she could do was watch as they worked on Clements.

They’d driven to the Annexe, which was apparently the only Checquy office in London that the fog hadn’t reached. Both the Rookery and the Apex had been sealed off to prevent fog from getting in, but there was no way that the ambulance could have made it there through the crowds and the carnage.

So instead, they’d maneuvered through the panicked traffic, mounting the curb at several points, and eventually got to the Annexe garage. From there, a team of concerned-looking nurses had whisked Clements away in one direction and three extremely large women had whisked Odette away in another. They’d ordered her to strip for decontamination, and she’d experienced the most intense shower of her life, with seven nozzles jetting carbonated water at her from multiple angles. Afterward, she felt as if she’d gone down two dress sizes. They’d provided her with virulent-yellow scrubs and bed socks in place of shoes and then led her through dingy, linoleum-floored corridors and put her in with Alessio.

The two of them sat silently and held hands.

If they come in and try to hurt my brother or take him away, I will kill them,
decided Odette. It was not immediately clear what would happen after she did that — she really couldn’t picture any further into the future — but it was a decision that she felt she could stand by.

The door opened, and an Indian man in a suit entered and closed the door behind him. He wore no expression and Odette tensed. Alessio looked at her in alarm as her hand tightened around his. Under the table, a spur slid out of her other wrist.

“I’m Pawn Malhotra. Miss Leliefeld, I’ll need you to come with me. Mr. Leliefeld will remain here.”

“No,” said Odette.

“I beg your pardon?”

“I’m not leaving my brother. Not without some sort of explanation.” He opened his mouth. “One that I can trust.” He closed his mouth, pursed his lips, and reached into his coat. Odette braced herself, but he produced a mobile phone. He turned away and spoke into it before holding it out to her. She wavered for a moment but then retracted her spur and held out her hand.

“Hello?”

“Odette, this is Myfanwy Thomas.”

“What is going on?”

“What’s going on? The worst attack on the United Kingdom since the Blitz is what’s going on,” said the Rook. “Clouds of that stuff erupted in London, Edinburgh, Cardiff, Belfast, Manchester.” Odette closed her eyes.

“Jesus.”

“Quite. The press are calling it the Blinding. The good news is that it’s dissipating. And, for the most part, it’s been nonfatal. We’ve had astoundingly few reports of deaths, and those have been due to car accidents and some heart attacks and falls. It was your friends, though, wasn’t it?”

“Yes,” whispered Odette.

“They’re spiteful little shits, you know. Thousands of innocent people have been affected, and a few appear to have had an especially bad reaction to the stuff. There’s panic — the stock market had an epileptic fit before trading was suspended, the roads are jammed, and we’re only just getting major rescue teams in. The whole world is looking at us on their television screens and demanding an explanation. Every army on earth is braced to defend against a similar attack. If we get through the next twenty-four hours without war breaking out, I will be astounded.”

“I — I don’t know what to say.”

“I don’t need you to say anything, Odette,” said the Rook. “I don’t know if I can trust you. Last I heard, your cousin was coming to take you away with him.”

“He was forcing me!”

“You say. I have no proof of that,” said Thomas. “The only witness is currently unconscious in the medical facility of the Annexe. But here’s the thing. They tell me that Pawn Clements’s eyes have been damaged, very badly. And I understand that you’re quite good with eyes.”

“I — yes, they’re my focus,” said Odette, and winced. “They’re my specialty, I mean. But Marcel is far more experienced.”

“Marcel is here at the Apex,” said Thomas. “We can’t leave right now, not easily. And he’s actually working on someone else, some civilian child. So I want you to fix her eyes.”

“What if I can’t?” said Odette.

“Try. Try as hard as you possibly can.” And the call ended. Odette looked up at Pawn Malhotra.

“All right,” she said finally. “Let’s hurry.”

The Annexe had a little medical clinic, an emergency facility, Malhotra told her as they walked, nowhere near as well equipped as the rooms she’d visited in the Rookery and Apex House. It now formed the core of a hastily established field hospital. Benches lined the corridors leading to the clinic, and members of the Checquy who had been caught in the fog lay on them, unconscious. It was crowded and crude, but it was apparently all that was available. All the public hospitals, it seemed, were crammed full with members of the public. Odette felt a shameful wash of relief that the people she passed were all unconscious. She could imagine the hateful looks she would have gotten.
Has word gotten out that the fog didn’t affect me?
she wondered.
Do they know it was unleashed by Grafters?

Finally, they arrived at the actual clinic. She hurriedly scrubbed her hands and arms and was ritually swathed in a surgical gown by nervous swathers. Her hair was rolled up on her head, and the cap and gloves were put on her.

Clements had been laid out on an operating table with sterile sheets draped over her in strategic locations. She was unconscious and, for the first time that Odette could ever recall, looked vulnerable. In some places, the sheets had been folded back, and Checquy people were applying products to her red skin. The workers were all gowned and scrubbed and looked like fairly standard-issue medical staff. There were three figures, however, who did not look at all standard-issue. Clad in surgical gowns, masks, and caps, they stood against the wall, each of them holding a large gun wrapped in a sterile plastic bag. They all evoked the adjective
hulking,
and it was clear that they had not taken any oaths to do no harm. Odette glanced at them, swallowed, and took refuge in the familiar problem of surgery.

“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?”