Stiletto (83 page)

“Whatever,” said Gestalt. “They had to put a different face on the other body, the male I used at Hill Hall. It was too recognizably a Gestalt’s. And in this one they jacked up my reflexes a bit. So I could take out that Pawn in the lift and spray you two down.”

“I suppose those implants don’t seem like the best idea now,” remarked Odette.

“Oh, it’s just a body,” said Gestalt.

“And you’ve got your new ones, your free bodies, don’t you?” Gestalt didn’t say anything, but she looked pleased. “And you think that you can trust my friends? How can you be sure that those zygotes haven’t been tampered with?”

“They’re clean.” Gestalt coughed. “I’ve had enough bodies now to know the difference.”

“So what, then?” said Odette. “Your bodies will grow up and meet and have more Gestalt babies?”

Gestalt managed a sort of shrug. “Something like that.”

“You realize that all your new bodies are the result of incest?” said Odette.

“Of course I do,” said Gestalt. “I
did
have sex with myself.” Odette winced. She couldn’t help but be disgusted by the idea.

“It’s not the religious taboos I’m thinking of,” said Odette. “It’s a small gene pool you’re drawing from, and it will be getting smaller all the time.”

“I’ll be very organized about it,” said Gestalt. “But I’m not relying on immortality. Every new baby is another generation I’ll get to live. And who knows what clever science the world will come up with in the next couple of lifetimes?”

Oh yeah,
thought Odette weakly.
Clever science is terrific. Look where it got me.

“Maybe I’ll study it myself,” Gestalt mused. “One of my bodies could do a degree. I’ll have a lot of time since I’ll have no Checquy to worry about. Now, if you’ll excuse me,” said the rotting woman, “they’re serving spaghetti Bolognese at the Gallows Keep prison tonight, and it’s my favorite.” Her eyes glazed as the mind of Gestalt withdrew from the Sophie-body.

And then Odette was alone. She imagined a blond man with Sophie’s eyes coming awake in a small locked room somewhere in Scotland.

I’m going to die here,
she thought.
I’m dying alone with the corpses of my best friends.
She closed her eyes.

And then she remembered Alessio and the attack that was to be made.

There’s nothing I can do,
she thought weakly.
I can’t stand up; I don’t think I can even scream for help.
She wished suddenly that Gestalt hadn’t left.
I could have tried to persuade her to alert the authorities. Her imprisoned bodies could have told the guards. Word might have gotten through. Gestalt might have bought herself a few privileges in prison — something to make the time pass faster until the new bodies were ready.

But there was no guarantee that Gestalt would have agreed to any such thing. They would probably want as little attention paid to their doings with the Antagonists as possible.

They’re going to win,
she thought.
The Antagonists’ attack on those children is going to smash the negotiations. There will be no chance of peace — they were right about that. And Pim and Saskia and Claudia and Simon would have considered dying to be a small price to pay. Look at everything they were willing to do. Claudia, plugged into the wall. Saskia letting her friend use her eyes. Simon working away in those suites, turning innocent people into weapons. Simon walking over the bodies in the fog to retrieve me. Felicity told me how jauntily he’d moved, taking out his mobile phone and calling the others to let them know their beloved friend was being brought back to them.

Calling them on the phone.

Simon has a phone.

In front of her, Simon’s body was withered and black. His surgical skin had proven to be especially vulnerable to that horrible scream. Brown liquid had soaked through his suit and spread out in a puddle around him. Odette tried to move her arm, and ribbons of fire shot across her shoulders.
This is what rotting muscle feels like,
she thought.
It feels like shit.

All her Grafter muscles were dead, but she knew that there were still thin cores of her own, natural muscle buried underneath.
So, it really will be all me.
She strained, and her arm moved a little. Just a little.
Progress,
she thought.
Now, a little more.
Every few minutes, she managed to jerk her arm a little closer to the edge of Simon’s coat. Sweat soaked her clothes. She was horribly aware that time was passing, that at any moment, Mariette might begin unleashing something horrible on a group of schoolchildren in a museum.

Finally her fingers closed on the cloth and she managed to walk them up his coat, scrabbling against the wet material and then pulling it open. Then, in a moment of divine mercy, his phone slid out of his inside pocket. It took as much concentration as performing microsurgery on an infant’s eye, but Odette found a way to bat the phone toward her until it was lying by her face.

I did it!

Now, what’s the damn number?
It was growing hard to think, but she managed, with all the strength of her will, to recall her brother’s phone number and dial. It rang and rang again.
If it just goes to voice mail,
thought Odette,
then I am going to... to... well, I’ll probably just die here in a puddle of slime, knowing that it’s all over.

“Hello?”

He’s alive!
“’Lethio,” she said, her tongue thick in her mouth.

“Odette? You sound terrible,” he said cheerfully. “Whose phone are you using?”

“Where are you?” she said, gasping. “Are you okay?”

“What’s wrong?” he asked.

“Are you okay?”
she said. She would have screamed it if she could.

“I’m fine,” he said defensively. “I’m with the school group, we’re at the Victoria and Albert Museum.”

“Gimme teacher right now. Now.” He must have detected her urgency, because after a few scuffling sounds and some distant conversations, the phone was passed over.

“This is Cathy Tipper” came a voice. It was a very gentle voice.

“
Pawn
Tipper?” Odette asked intently. She wanted to make sure that she was talking to someone who had actual powers to protect her brother.

“Yes,” said the teacher.

“Pawn, ’m Odette, ’Lethio’s sister. I’m with the delegation.” She paused for breath. “There will be an attack on you, in the art museum. Any moment. Unnerstand?”

“Understood,” said the teacher.

“P’tect ’em. Get ’em out.”

“Yes,” said the teacher. She snapped out orders in a drill sergeant’s tone, something about formation and securing vulnerables. Odette had the impression that the orders were being given, not to any other teachers or accompanying guards, but to the students. “They’ll be safe,” the teacher said, coming back on the line. “Now, where are you? Hello?”

Odette could hear the voice faintly, but she couldn’t answer. The phone lay by her face, but all she could do was draw long, slow breaths. Eventually, the voice on the phone stopped. Odette missed it a little.
It was nice to have some company.
She felt the sunshine move onto her face, and she closed her eyes. The warmth poured onto her eyelids and took the chill off the sweat and the slime. She felt as if she were floating in the light.

I wonder why I’m dying so much more slowly than the others did,
she thought absently. She had no idea how long she’d been lying there, drifting in and out of consciousness. She remembered a period when her legs had twitched violently and woken her up, but that had stopped after a while.
Good-bye, spine
. She barely realized it when she wet herself.

Maybe she slept. She had visions. They might have been dreams, or perhaps they were memories fluttering up as her brain began to shut down. But they were all good images, of simple things. A pond, a vase, a dress, a kiss.

She was awake but lost in a reverie, so she didn’t hear the door open or the faltering steps that came across the carpet. As if from very, very far away, she heard Felicity’s voice saying her name, and, somehow, though she could not move, she smiled.

Felicity lay on that table for hours, they later told Odette. She’d lain there long enough for the paralytic chemicals Pim had injected into her to wear off. Long enough for Felicity to roll herself off the table in the suite and put on a shirt.

The skin room she’d been in was not looking healthy. Whatever poisonous smoke had come out of her veins had left the place looking decidedly seedy, but the sphincters that held the door shut remained firmly clenched. Felicity tried cutting her way out with a bone scalpel, and then with a bone knife. Finally she picked up an alarming-looking surgical saw and hacked her way out into a very corporate hallway.

Exhausted, clutching the walls, she sent her Sight gliding through the offices. She saw the corpses lying about and Odette sprawled on the floor, just barely alive. She hobbled through the hallways as quickly as she could and made it to the conference room. The smell was horrific, all the corpses slumped in pools of fluid. And there was her friend, lying very still.

“Odette, are you all right? What happened to you?”

“Flssss,” Odette bubbled.

“Good to see you too, babe,” said Felicity, coming closer. “Although you look really bad.” She sat down beside the Grafter and gingerly took her friend’s sticky hand. Then she picked up the phone that was lying by Odette’s face. It was odd-looking — much chunkier than most phones today. Then she saw that there was still a call in progress, and the counter on the bottom of the screen showed it had been going on for a few hours. She tentatively put it up to her face.

“Hello?”

“Hello? Who is this?” said a startled man’s voice on the other end.

“Who is
this?
” she asked.

“I’m Constable Alan Summerhill,” said the voice. “I’m with the police. We believe that a crime has taken place, and we are trying to track the location of your phone. May I have your name and location please?”

“I’m Felicity Clements,” she said. “I don’t know the location; I was abducted.” She bit her lip, wondering what to say. If the police came, the carnage around her would inevitably result in the Checquy appearing eventually, but they might not be able to contain this situation. She looked down at what remained of Odette.
Fuck it, she needs help now.
“I’ll look around for something that might show where I am.”

“Ah, are you Felicity
Jane
Clements?” said Constable Summerhill.

“Yes...”

“Pawn Clements, I’m Pawn Summerhill,” he said. “Rookery Communications section. Wasn’t sure whether you were a civilian.”

“I quite understand,” said Felicity.

“What’s your situation?” asked Summerhill. “Are you in immediate danger?”

“No,” said Felicity, looking around the room. Everyone else, including Pawn Jelfs, was most definitely dead. “But I have Odette Leliefeld from the Grafter delegation here, and she’s in critical condition.” She looked down at Odette. “
Extremely
critical condition.”

“You were taken by the group responsible for the Blinding?”

“Yes,” said Felicity, “but they’re all dead here. Five of them. Advise Rook Thomas immediately. It looks like — I don’t know — some sort of toxin attacked them? Or maybe it was a suicide-pact thing.”
Odette, did you agree to kill yourself with these manky terrorists?

“Understood. Now, the phone you’re using is preventing us from tracking your location.”

“It’s big and chunky,” she said.

“Probably some paranoid hacker product,” he said. “They run the call through all sorts of clever connections on the Internet. I expect that any other phones you might find there would be similarly tedious, so we’re going old-school. Are there windows? Can you see anything that will give you a clue about your location?”

“Yes, we’re in an office building, a few stories up. I think we’re in the City.”

“Okay,” said Pawn Alan. “Do you see any familiar buildings?”

“No, not really,” said Felicity helplessly. “I can see across the street, and it’s just some other office building.”

“That’s okay. Can you get out of the office?”

“I don’t know,” said Felicity. “And I don’t want to leave my friend here. She’s in very bad shape.”

“Okay,” said Alan. “Is there any furniture?” In the background, Felicity could hear people giving orders about prepping medical care.

“Yes, there are some chairs and laptops and things.”

“Excellent; we have a procedure that we’ve found works very well in this situation. It will help us identify your location quickly, but I need you to do exactly as I say.”

“Okay,” said Felicity seriously.

*

The pedestrians walking on Barrington Road looked up in surprise as an office chair burst out of a fourth-story window. The chair spiraled down crazily as a woman put her head out through the hole.

“Falling glass! Everyone look out!” she screamed. The people below scattered out of the way as the shards rained down. Then they looked up indignantly. “Please, call the police!” she shouted frantically. “There’s a man in here with a gun, and he’s insane! Help us!” Then she vanished back into the building.

Approximately twenty-two calls were immediately made to the local police, who had been alerted, through various back channels, that a call of that sort was expected and that some extremely important people wanted the address as soon as possible. The civic-minded members of the public were assured that help was on the way. Most of the civic-minded members of the public hung around warily to see what happened. A few of them shared their story on the Internet.

Interest flared, especially when several police vehicles arrived, lights flashing. Large men with large guns emerged, to the gratification of the waiting citizenry, and rushed inside. By the time the press arrived, three ambulances were in place and some victims had been removed, two of them covered with sheets. The ambulances screamed away, to which hospital, no one seemed to know.