*
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.
51
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.
*