Odette couldn’t even shake her head, but she found that she could speak, sort of. Her voice was raspy.
“I don’t even know what it was,” she said. “I — I think my great-uncle put something into me. A weapon.” She was thinking of the surgery that she had gotten at the last minute before coming to England and that, in her na?veté, she had been so thrilled to receive. They trusted me, she thought. But trusted me to do what?
Gestalt opened her mouth to say something, and clear liquid ran out of her throat and over her lips. She spat. “Please excuse that,” she said. “I was going to say, congratulations, you’re a soldier. A Pawn. They use you. It’s how it works. You wouldn’t believe the number of people I sent off to their deaths.”
“Did they know you were sending them off to die?” asked Odette bitterly.
“Not always. But whatever your family put in you, it certainly did a number on Grafter organs. My spine is killing me.”
“They put implants in you?” asked Odette. “In that body?” Her gaze flickered up and down Sophie.
“Oh, yes,” said Gestalt. “Quite a few. Of course, in all the bodies, there was always that phone thing so the one girl could look out through my eyes.”
“Claudia,” she said weakly. Claudia, who was sitting dead in her chair, still plugged into the wall.
“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.”