“It was in our briefing notes,” said the one on the right. “Because of your throat surgery.”
“I don’t care. You are here to... I’m not actually sure what your real purpose is, and I don’t really want to know, but I’m one hundred percent certain that it is not to protect me from the dangerous effects of alcohol. I am going down to the bar on the ground floor, and I am going to order one single drink, and you can come and watch me drink it. And then I will return to this room. I promise.” The two guards exchanged glances, and she could almost hear the grinding of their mental cogs.
“Yeah, okay,” said the one on the right finally.
The Checquy guard posted in the lift looked surprised when they got in but said nothing. They alighted in the lobby and proceeded to the hotel’s ground-floor bar, where a few patrons were sitting about. Most were members of the public, but Odette recognized a few Checquy operatives, who were obviously praying that she would not come over and sit with them. Instead, she sat at the bar, the guards hovering obtrusively nearby. She ordered a stinger and took a substantial swallow when it arrived. The alcohol did burn uncomfortably in her throat, but it was completely worth it.
“Pawn Fletcher, Pawn Macdonald, you can go sit over there,” said a voice behind her. “You look like you’re here to abduct the poor girl.” Odette looked around and saw Pawn Sophie Jelfs. The Pawns looked uncertain, but Jelfs spoke with the kind of authority that brooked no resistance. “Odette, you look completely knackered.”
“I don’t know what that means,” said Odette, “but I am willing to bet it is accurate.”
“Mind if I sit here?”
“Please.” The Pawn sat down next to her and ordered a gin martini. “I see you made it through the Blinding unscathed,” said Odette. “I’m glad.”
“As luck would have it, it happened on my day off,” said Sophie. “I was at home, doing some gardening. So what have you been doing these past few days to exhaust you so?”
“Performing various surgeries at gunpoint and sleeping in a warehouse in an inflatable kiddie pool of slime.”
“That would... probably do it,” said Jelfs. Odette smiled wryly. “You were in the middle of the fog, right? That’s what I heard. It must have been terrifying.”
“It was scary,” said Odette, “although I got knocked out for most of it. You know what the worst part was, though? The part I’m having nightmares about? It’s something that didn’t even happen.”
“What?” asked Sophie, looking confused. “What do you mean?”
“When it was happening, all I could think of was my little brother. I kept worrying whether the fog had hit him. He doesn’t have any implants, you know. No protections. He’s just a kid. I looked around and saw all those people lying in the streets in agony, and the thought of it happening to him just, it just —” She broke off and wiped her eyes with a napkin, then took a drink. “He’s innocent in all this. When I woke up, it was the first thing I thought of. And I keep playing it over in my mind. It’s the worst thing that could happen.”
“It didn’t happen, though.”
“I know,” said Odette. “I tell myself that. He was fine. But it’s still the thing that makes me sick to my stomach.”
*
In a darkened room, a doctor removed the coverings from Felicity’s closed eyes and gently washed her eyelids clean before letting her open them. A faint light glimmered in her gaze, and she could make out the doctor in front of her, so she knew she could see, but still her fingers were tight on the arms of her chair. As he peered into her pupils and photographed her retinas, she was secretly braced for the doctor’s scream of horror that it had all gone wrong, that she would go blind, that she must be put down. But instead he sighed with pleasure.
“Everything looks fine.”
“Really?”
“Perfect,” he said reassuringly. “No sign of any injuries or abnormalities at all.” He showed her the pictures, which were of no help except to establish that the inside of her eye looked like a huge orange globe, and then gave her a mirror. As far as she could tell, her eyes looked as they always had — no shift in color, no odd pulsating vessels, no impression of bulging or being about to burst.
Then she peered closely at the rest of herself and admitted that she’d come through it fairly well. The redness of her skin had faded completely, and far more quickly than the radio address had promised. Of course, not everyone has access to a Grafter-sent gift basket of bath salts.
The next morning, a car came and drove her back to the hotel. As it took her through the city, Felicity looked out with wary interest. The last time she had seen these streets, they’d been ghostly and silent, with people moaning or lying still on the ground and the fog swirling about. Now, London had returned to normal. The crowds were bustling, and if there was wariness in the air, at least people weren’t hiding in their homes.
The hotel had recovered its haughtiness and was open for business despite being practically ground zero for the outbreak of the fog. The doormen even stood a little more stiffly at attention, as if to say that an inexplicable, possibly terrorism-based disaster was absolutely no reason to let standards slip. One of the lifts had apparently been commandeered for the exclusive use of the Checquy, because as soon she entered the lobby, she saw the guard standing by the doors politely but firmly direct an elderly couple to a different lift. He might be dressed in knickerbockers and a witty allusion to a newsboy’s cap, but he’d been in her class at the Estate and could grow razor-sharp tusks from the sides of his jaw and unbreakable horns from his forehead in moments. She’d once caught him cheating off her math test.
“Kevin!” she exclaimed.
“Fliss!” he exclaimed back, then he put on a sober, serious face and spoke in the respectful tones suited to a man disguised in the distinguished but ridiculous uniform of a hotel employee. “How you doing? I heard you got caught in the manifestation.”
“Right. Is that all you heard, Kev?” she asked as the lift rose.
“I heard you kicked the shit out of some muppet who managed to get away.”
“Anything else?”
“I heard you got the very best treatment in the whole wide world,” he said meaningfully. His eyes flicked upward for a moment.
“And is that a problem?” she asked levelly.
“Not for me,” he said.
“For anyone else?” she asked. He shrugged. “Yeah, I know how it is.”
“They’ll get over it. Just don’t get involved with anything weird,” he advised.
“Course, ’cause nothing weird is likely to happen. My life’s just full of unweirdness at the moment. In fact, it’s full of unweirdness generally.” The lift doors slid open.
“Hey, at least you’ll have fun at the party tonight,” he said encouragingly.
Oh, right, thought Felicity. The reception. Shit.
41
A note on the table led Felicity to the fridge, where there actually was a little parfait waiting for her.
Well, that’s cute, she thought. Admittedly, it contained kiwifruit, which she loathed, but she appreciated the sentiment enough to choke it down. She settled herself on the couch with the parfait and brooded about the prospect of the reception. In the whirl of everything, she had clean forgotten about it.
It’s probably ridiculous that I would prefer to fight that bastard in the fog again than go to this bloody function. But it was the truth. Felicity did not enjoy fancy dos. The evening with the Court at Hill Hall had been the second-worst event of her life, surpassed only by the death of her teammates, but still worse than the time she’d had two teeth backhanded out of her head by an elderly woman in a poke bonnet, or the time she was stung into unconsciousness by an ambulatory fern, or even the time she almost had her head pulled off by an insane straw golem that had been wandering around Hampshire pulling people’s heads off.