They vanished into the rectangle of morning sunlight.
If he was mad enough to think the beasts harmless, he was mad enough to take Montgomery outside and shoot him. I twisted my wrist. Clawed at the manacle. It didn’t give. I studied the manacle and found a small black opening on the side for a key.
I might be able to pick the lock. If I just had … yes, the surgical tools. I fell to the floor and reached as far as my shackled wrist would let me. Scalpels, forceps, needles—they littered the floor out of reach. I slid out my toe as far as I could, but I was still inches away.
“Blast!” I yelled. I jerked on the manacle. The chain clattered—the sound of my imprisonment.
I crawled to the desk. My fingertips just grazed the brass drawer handle. I cursed and tugged on the chain. It was twisted. I scrambled to my feet and spun around, twisting the chain the other direction. A straightened chain might give me only an extra half an inch, but that was all I needed.
I reached again for the drawer, and my middle finger barely wrapped around the handle. I pulled it open, hoping for a letter opener or a pen. My stomach sank. Files—dozens of them, meticulously labeled, packed tightly. The laboratory was filled with countless sharp objects, but all I could reach was a cabinet filled with useless paper.
I slammed my fist on the files. Montgomery might already have a bullet in his skull. Maybe Father would kill me, too. Then again, maybe not. There were worse things on the island than dying.
The sweat on my hand smeared the ink on one of the files. I wiped my hand on my skirt and looked at the word.
Balthazar.
I slid out the file. Inside were pages of notes in tight, controlled handwriting. Sketches. Medical diagrams. Notes on behavior, appetite, origin of the bear and dog he’d been made from. Careful recordings of the exact procedure Father had done five years ago.
I read it quickly. Five-fingered, it said. Passable appearance. Still unable to replicate Ajax’s procedure. Suitable for household service.
I threw the file on the floor and dug through the rest.
Cymbeline.
Othello.
Iago.
Ophelia.
All names from Shakespeare’s plays, I realized. That’s how he’d named his creations. There must have been a hundred files, each with careful notes and measurements, as though the islanders were only experiments on paper and not breathing, thinking, killing creatures.
My finger paused on a familiar name.
Juliet.
For a moment time slipped away into some dark void. My lips formed that one word, my name—Juliet, Juliet, Juliet—over and over, repeating until it all made sense. But it never did. How could it? My hand pulled out the file, but it was like someone else’s hand laying the file on the cold ground, opening it, rifling through the few meager pages annotated with my father’s distinctive handwriting.
And then time seemed to fracture again and I was back in my own body, all too aware of how my sweaty fingertips caught on the paper, the grit on the ground digging into my legs, as my eyes focused and refocused on the handwriting.
The pages had a date—July 1879, one month after I was born. The notes were briefer and more disjointed than Balthazar’s and the others’. The paper wasn’t even the same—these pages looked ripped from an old journal. They must have come from a time before Father had developed a system for cataloging his creations. There were only a few scribbled lines describing the surgery he’d performed when I was an infant. The file told me painfully little, didn’t prove anything—until I reached a handful of words in Latin I didn’t recognize. Except for one.
Cervidae.
Deer.
That was all I needed to see. Feeling melted out of my fingers and I let the pages flutter to the ground. I touched my face, my hair, but sensation was gone—it was like touching flesh that wasn’t mine. And maybe it wasn’t. Maybe it belonged to some animal, a deer. This body—my eyelashes, my toes, the curve of my waist—was a lie. Such a convincing lie that I’d even fooled myself.
I slumped against the operating table, eyes closed, hugging my arms in tight. Trying to see within me, to feel if it was true. At some point the lantern must have gone out, because when I opened my eyes, I was alone in darkness. Hours or minutes might have passed—it didn’t matter.
The laboratory’s metal door creaked open, and I shielded my eyes from the bright sunlight. The pages of my file lay scattered at my feet. My eyes adjusted slowly to the light. Father came in, his arms folded behind his back like a gentleman. His face was as calm as the afternoon sea. Feeling flooded back into my numb body. My fists balled, slowly. Anger bubbled in my blood, almost giving me the strength to rip the manacle from the table.
“Where is he?” I asked.
“Montgomery should never have been a concern of yours. His kind are beneath you. His mother was a whore whom Evelyn let scour our pots in her Christian charity.”