“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?”
“I think you’d better take a look,” said the doctor near the Pawn’s head. Judging from his voice, he was at least forty years older than her, but he spoke in a tone of respect and awe. “I don’t know about the skin, but this doesn’t look to me like it’s improving at all.”
Odette made her way to Clements’s head. It did not escape her notice that one of the gun-toting guards had followed her around the room and taken up a position behind her. Just concentrate on the task at hand, not on the fact that they will likely shoot you if you fuck up. She gazed down at the aforementioned task at hand, who was still anesthetized but whose eyelids were held wide open with retractors. This gave Felicity a staring, incredulous look, the same staring, incredulous look, Odette suspected, that she would have worn if she were awake and knew that Odette was going to operate on her. With the swelling around her eyes held back by tape, the Pawn had the air of a startled shar-pei.
The Pawn’s eyes were red and weeping, but, even more alarming, they were streaked with tiny threads of a dark purple, almost black material. It was not like anything Odette had ever seen before. What the hell have they done with the formula? she thought. I didn’t detect any radical changes in it, apart from the fact that they made it smell like soup. Then she noticed a fine dappling of the same color across the Pawn’s brow. She leaned forward and smelled the skin around Clements’s face.
“It’s a different product,” she said. “She’s had something else sprayed in her eyes.”
“Are you going to lick her again?” asked a doctor hesitantly.
“I think best not,” said Odette as she zoomed back in on the eyes.
“Should we take a swab to see what it is?”
“How long would it take to analyze it?” she asked.
“The problem is that we don’t really have labs here,” said the doctor. “The Annexe is pretty much just offices and an armory. We’d have to get the sample somewhere else and then back again.”
“We don’t have time for that,” said Odette. “I don’t know if you noticed, but those stains are spreading.”
“What?”
“They’re growing. Just as I’ve watched, they’ve expanded by a couple of microns. We need to go in, now.”
*
There was something almost holy about cutting open an eye. The elegance of the form, the sheer impossibility of its structure. You couldn’t help but feel reverence for the liquid beauty of an eye. It was one of the reasons Odette had chosen to specialize in ocular architecture.
She’d rejected the tools they’d offered her. They’d been very good-quality implements, but none had possessed the qualities she required. Instead, to the continued horror of the doctors, she’d hiked up her surgical gown and slid her hand down inside the waistband of her scrubs, to her right leg. A seam opened in her skin, internal muscles rippled, and two scalpels were eased out into her hand. Grown from her own bone, with unorthodox lines to their blades, they were practically unbreakable and beautifully, organically sharp.