Stiletto (84 page)

*

“This is hardly subtle,” remarked Felicity as the ambulance sped through the streets. The medic who was taking her pulse smiled a little.

“A madman with a gun is a handy story,” he said. “It allows for all sorts of things. Armed officers running around. Sites sealed off. Ambulances. Of course, the media will go absolutely insane, and the government will have to answer some awkward questions, but when we’re in a hurry, that’s a price worth paying.”

“Odette — the girl in the other ambulance — do you know how she’s doing?”

“She didn’t look good, but we have someone very talented with her. Now, lie back and take some deep breaths.”

*

The world swam before Odette’s eyes, but she was alive. Alive, and feeling slightly more so than before. Patches of gentle warmth touched her cheeks, her body just below her breasts, her hips. The sensation soaked through her, and she felt stronger, and very safe. Her eyes focused a little, and she was looking up at a plump older man with gray hair.

“You... you have twelve arms,” she said blearily. “And two heads.”

“No, you’re just seeing double,” the medic assured her.

“Am I going to die?”

“No,” he said cheerfully.

“I know medicine,” she said. “I should be dying.”

“I cheat a bit,” he confessed. “You’re not going to die from these injuries. As long as I’ve got you,” he said. “And I’ll stay with you until we’ve got you stabilized. I gather there are quite a few Belgians clamoring for you to be delivered back safely to the Apex so they can take care of you.”

“Is it safe for me to sleep?”

“Absolutely.”

So she did.

Time passed. Odette found herself back in the medical wing of Apex House, only this time she was a patient. The medic from the ambulance, Pawn Eustace Brigalow, stayed with her, keeping her alive. She was placed in a private room that immediately became much less private as surgical-masked Grafters swarmed in, partially to say hello and congratulate her but mainly to examine her body. Scans were taken, samples were drawn, and Pawn Motha was brought in to look at her and report what he saw. Odette found it difficult to care.

One afternoon Marcel came to her and described the repairs that would be undertaken on her body. There seemed to be rather a lot. Many of her organs would need to be replaced, and her skin and bones had suffered significant damage.
I wonder if there will be any of the original me left
.

“Marcel,” she said. “What happened to them — to me? What was that?”

“We’ll talk about it later,” he assured her. “There will be lots of time to talk.”

Alessio was not permitted to visit her. It was judged that since he had been spending so much time amongst the pupils of the Estate, he was likely to bring an infection in with him. Odette and her brother spoke on the telephone but kept the conversations light. He was having a decent time and would be going up to the Estate for a visit. He assured her that he was okay and that all the other students from the field trip were fine, but he would give her no more details. Odette suspected that he had been ordered not to tell her anything too upsetting.

Grootvader Ernst came twice, but the visits were cold and awkward. Odette had no doubt that whatever had been done to her, whatever had been put into her, had been at his command.

One frequent visitor was Felicity. They didn’t talk about the abduction or the events in the conference room, only about very frivolous things. Felicity had moved back into her flat with her dog and was coping very badly with the lack of room service. The housemate who had been in hibernation had woken up. The negotiations were going well. On a different note, Felicity had gone out for dinner with a Pawn from her old combat team, but Trevor Cawthorne, the sniper from Scotland, had given her a call to tell her he’d be down in London in a few weeks and asked if perhaps they could get together for a drink. Felicity wasn’t entirely certain how she felt about these developments.

The surgeries began. Most of the time, it was Marcel repairing her body. Crates and canisters had been shipped in from the Grafter houses around Europe. Equipment and materials. Every morning, Odette was wheeled to the OR and lifted onto the table. Marcel would open her up and begin the day’s work. Occasionally, he would be assisted by a member of the delegation; a few times, a specialist was brought in from Europe to advise on a particular component. The Checquy attendants were aghast at the amount of work that had to be done on her, but to Odette, it seemed almost comforting. For her, a surgical table was a familiar place to be.

Once, she’d woken up to find that a dozen members of the Checquy medical staff were looking on in fascination as Marcel explained what he was doing in her chest cavity. She recognized a couple of them from when she’d tried to assist in that one Pawn’s emergency surgery. She looked around, rolled her eyes, and went back to sleep.

Most of the time, though, she was awake while her great-uncle did his work inside her, and it was just the two of them present. A mirror was set up so that she could observe. He would demonstrate techniques on her internal organs and test her on what she’d learned. He also told her about his life and his experiences in World War II. Then, one day, he described the woman in Paris whose screams had killed her grandfather Siegbert.

“It was from her that I took the components that were put into you, Odette.” During that long, torturous journey from Paris to Belgium, while his brother and his wife lay in a cart and watched themselves rot, he had kept the woman’s head and neck in a sealed jar, preserved in alcohol. “Such a weapon was too valuable not to keep.” In the years since, he had tested the components secretly, wondering if the effects could be duplicated. “In the end, those nodes in the woman’s throat proved to be unique,” he said regretfully. “I do not know why they did what they did. They were a mystery, just like the Checquy. And I put them into you.”

“You put Gruwel parts inside me,” she said tightly. It was lucky that she was lying on a surgical table with everything below the neck paralyzed or she would have attacked him. “You made me a monster and a murderer. You made me kill them! You made me kill the people I loved best! How could you? How
could
you?”

“Ernst and I decided that we had to take every possible chance to remove the Antagonists,” said Marcel. “We have seen hatred like theirs before, an unwillingness to move on, to forgive. It is poisonous. And so I grafted the nodes from the woman’s throat inside you. I installed a supplemental brain and plumbed it into your eyes and gave it override control over your limbs so that when you saw Pim and Saskia in the same place, you would kill them.”

“Pim and Saskia?”

“They were the leaders,” he said. “I know them, Odette. They were my students, my relations. All of the Antagonists were talented, but Pim and Saskia were the sine qua non of the conspiracy.”

“And why didn’t I die?” she asked dully. “All my friends died, so why didn’t I?”

“They had far more implants than you,” said Marcel. “They made themselves into monsters for hatred of the Checquy. Simon and Claudia were the most obvious, but all of them seethed with weapons and tools under their skin. They must have begun as soon as they pillaged the Paris house, operating on each other. They took themselves too far from what they had been. It made them vulnerable. Plus” — and here he paused for a moment — “I made some modifications to your system, as much as I could, to shield you.”

“Oh,” said Odette in a small voice.

“I could not do much. The weapon affects Broederschap materials, the substances that allow our craft to function. And I am a Grafter, I have to use the tools I know. If I had removed all the Broederschap organs, you would have noticed. But I replaced some of your augmented organs with standard human ones.” They were both quiet for a while, and then he set about putting in her new heart.

*

Finally, her body was repaired. Better than it had ever been. Odette looked at herself in the mirror and saw exactly the same person. On the inside, she knew, she was stronger, faster, with greater control. Her spurs were tucked away inside her arms, but they were new. Her old ones, the ones Pim had sculpted for her, had shattered inside her during the scream. The new ones had been made by a distant relative who lived in Bratislava. Everything about her was bespoke, specially made. Her whole body was couture.

Inside her mind, though, she felt broken. She had enough control of herself to ensure that she didn’t dream, but she was still haunted by memories of what had happened.

And then she was summoned to meet with Rook Thomas and Grootvader Ernst to make her report.

Odette went to the Rookery and was led up to Rook Thomas’s office. Ernst embraced her, holding her tight, but she was stiff in his arms. She could not forget that it had been he who had given the order to make her into a weapon.

She told them everything. They sat silently, and Rook Thomas took some notes, but they did not ask any questions. Odette suspected that they knew it all anyway. When she was finished, Rook Thomas told her what had happened when Mariette attacked the school group at the V and A Museum.

As a result of Odette’s phone call to Alessio, the class had broken down into small groups, with various combat- and defense-powered students assigned to protect those who were more vulnerable. The students had then begun to make their way through the building to a multitude of exits, planning to regroup at a prearranged location. Alessio’s group had been accompanied by the teacher, who was especially eager to ensure the safety of her politically significant charge. As they moved through the fashion gallery, Alessio had recognized Mariette. She was wearing a different face, but she had on an armor-coat that was identical to the one Odette had worn. He very quietly pointed her out to his teacher.

So I suppose it was a good thing, in the end, that I explained everything to him,
Odette thought.

The students in his group formed a protective ring around Alessio, and Pawn Tipper had engaged her discreet but devastating abilities. The public had been none the wiser, simply seeing the girl in the suit fall victim to a heart attack. None of them imagined that she had been struck down by a silent word from the teacher’s lips. Investigation of her corpse had revealed smoke grenades filled with an intricate and deadly toxin.

Odette bowed her head and accepted the fact that it was over. The Antagonists were done. Ernst and Rook Thomas remained respectfully silent while Odette absorbed this idea. Then she looked up.

“Is that all?” Odette asked. “Do you need me for anything else?”

“Not today,” said Ernst. “You may go.”

*

“How could they do it?” Odette asked suddenly, and Felicity looked up from her unenthusiastic contemplation of her bowl of muesli. They were having breakfast in the hotel restaurant. Felicity was no longer Odette’s minder — Odette didn’t seem to have a minder anymore.
Apparently, if you murder your friends and relations for the sake of national security, the government will finally trust you.
But Felicity and she still spent a good deal of time together. The things they’d been through set them both apart from their respective organizations. So they shopped, and walked, and talked. Odette had explained everything to Felicity, how she’d been used. The Pawn hadn’t said anything, for which Odette was profoundly grateful. But now, this morning, Odette needed answers. “How could they do that to me?”

“You’re a Pawn,” said Felicity. “A Pawn of the Checquy. You might not have taken the oath yet, but that’s what you are. You’re a tool, to be used and directed for the good of the people. Sometimes you’ll be a scalpel, cutting out disease. Sometimes you’ll be a sword, and you’ll take on threats with all the strength you can muster. And sometimes, Odette, you’ll be a stiletto, a hidden weapon that slides quietly into the heart.”

“I’m honored,” said Odette. She stared down at her food. “I just can’t stop thinking about it, Felicity. All I can see is them dying. I’ll be walking or taking a bath or watching television, and I’ll remember Saskia getting poisoned by her own body. Or Claudia’s brain shutting down. Or Simon’s skin putrefying. It’s been weeks now, and it doesn’t stop. I want it to go away!”

“It won’t ever go away entirely,” said Felicity. “I wish it did. But with things like this, with wounds on the inside, sometimes it’s just a case of getting through the day. Or the hour. Or the minute. Sometimes the hard times come every other minute, and they’ll keep slapping you so that you can’t ever relax. And sometimes you’ll go for weeks and maybe even months before it gets you, right when you least expect it. But it never goes away entirely.” Odette sighed. “Although it does get easier, Odette. And it’s easier when you have comrades.”

Later that day, Odette went for a walk in Kensington Gardens. The weather was getting colder, and the sky was gray. She looked in the Serpentine Galleries, which Saskia had mentioned visiting, and then stood in the wind and looked at the water.
It gets easier,
she told herself.

She sat down on a bench.
It gets easier.
And then she found that, despite herself, she was weeping, and she couldn’t stop. She sat, crying, while people hurried by, averting their gaze out of embarrassment, or courtesy, or distaste. She wept because of the sorrow and the guilt of watching her dearest of friends die, watching her beautiful boy die, and knowing that it was because of her, that she was the vessel of their destruction. She wept because of their rage and their fanaticism and because, in her heart of hearts, she knew that their deaths had been for the best.

A little old lady came walking by with two Scottie dogs in little tartan coats. She sat down on the bench by Odette and silently took her hand. Nothing was said between them, but they held hands until Odette ran out of tears. The lady gave her a clean handkerchief, and Odette mumbled something thankful.

Then she went back to the hotel and hugged a startled Grootvader Ernst for real.

*

Lionel John Dover stood on the footpath under the dim light of a lamppost and looked up at the house.
Maybe this is it,
he thought. It was different from the two places he’d visited before. Those had been little town houses, new and sterile. This was an old house in an expensive neighborhood. The trees along both sides of the street were huge, and they reached across to each other to make a tunnel of leaves. Beyond a low stone wall and a garden, the house stood large and beautiful. If he squinted, he could just make out the number 1841 carved in stone above the door. Light glowed behind the curtains on the ground floor.