Odette Louise Charlotte Henriette Clémentine Leliefeld, born on the first of September twenty-three years ago in Ghent to the hoogleraren Drs. William and Ludmilla Leliefeld.*1 There were copies of the parents’ résumés, which Felicity flicked through, noting that they were both paleontologists with a few books under their belts.
There was an extensive family tree. Odette’s mother’s side went back only four generations, but the lineage on her father’s side more than made up for it. It extended back to the court of Charlemagne and showed connections to the noble families of France, Spain, the Netherlands, and Bohemia, as well as to the seven noble houses of Brussels. Felicity noted that Leliefeld was the direct descendant of Ernst van Suchtlen, leader of the Wetenschappelijk Broederschap van Natuurkundigen.
Great, so she’s like the princess of the Grafters.
There was a list of vaccinations for the infant Leliefeld. Felicity knew most of them — diphtheria, tetanus, polio, and so forth — but some were unfamiliar. Apparently, they had been unfamiliar to someone else too, because they were highlighted and had question marks scribbled next to them.
Leliefeld had attended ordinary, which was to say non-Grafter, preschool and primary schools, with all their attendant bits of paper. There was a finger painting of a happy smiling girl under a happy smiling sun. A school photo of a little Leliefeld, missing her two front teeth. A soccer team with Leliefeld sitting in the middle, holding the ball. Thank God they included her spelling tests, Felicity thought drily.
And then suddenly there were no more records from schools but rather reports from private tutors and long handwritten essays on anatomy. Sketches she’d done of bones and musculature. More inoculations. Surgeries — there were x-rays of her hands, photographs of the insides of her eyes, before-and-after MRIs of her brain. Felicity squinted at the brain pictures, unable to identify the significance of the changes.
Photocopies of every page of every passport Leliefeld had ever had were included, each page certified by a justice of the peace as being a true duplicate of the original. Felicity saw her age from infant to child to gangly adolescent to the woman she was today. The passport pages told a story too. Leliefeld had traveled quite a bit, but only in Europe. It looked as if she had asked for stamps even though, as an EU resident, she hadn’t needed them.
She had studied, under assumed names, in non-Grafter institutions. Six months at the Karolinska Institutet in Sweden. A course at the Paracelsus Medizinische Privatuniversit?t of Salzburg. Art classes at the Accademia di Belle Arti di Firenze.
Apparently, the trips hadn’t all been for academic purposes. Leliefeld, along with some other Grafter students, had been rebuked by the Broederschap security office for getting arrested in Stuttgart. Drinks in a nightclub had segued into a fight with locals (which ended when two of the locals mysteriously went into anaphylactic shock from a previously undiagnosed allergy to their own leather jackets), and the local constabulary had stepped in. Nothing serious, but evidently the Grafters saw any official attention as a dangerous failure to remain covert. There were also holiday trips to Venice, Barcelona, Grindelwald, Marseille.
So, something of a party girl, Felicity mused.
She found some photos of a teenage Leliefeld wearing just a pair of shorts, her hands demurely covering her breasts. There were livid red scars running down her chest and spiraling around her arms and legs. One curved out of her hairline, down her jaw, and back up the other side. In another picture there was a long row of sutures running up her spine and disappearing into her hair, with other lines jutting off across her back like tributaries. Most jarring, however, was the proud smile on the girl’s face in all the pictures.
There were DVDs with ominous labels, surgeries that Leliefeld had performed.
O. Leliefeld — Appendectomy on subject B7245
O. Leliefeld — Mini–asymmetric radial keratotomy on subject UT633
O. Leliefeld — Gastroduodenostomy on subject RR274
O. Leliefeld — Femoral-head ostectomy on subject RP898
O. Leliefeld — Salpingo-oophorectomy on subject LK N555555
O. Leliefeld — Caesarean section on subject 187, subject 187(a), subject 187(b), and subject 187(c)
O. Leliefeld — Harada-Ito procedure on subject 07224
I don’t think I need to watch these, Felicity thought queasily. Then she noticed that Leliefeld had performed these surgeries while she was still a teenager.
She turned to a different section of the file. Leliefeld had a younger brother: Alessio Léopold Albert Pépin Leliefeld. Felicity skimmed his records and saw the same sort of history, but ten years behind. A standard childhood except for some nonstandard inoculations, and then an abrupt transfer to a life of private tutors. No surgeries, Felicity noted. Yet.
Then she came to the part that was of greatest interest to a member of the Checquy: what Odette Leliefeld was capable of, the enhancements that set her apart from regular people. To begin with, her eyes had been almost completely rebuilt; additional lenses had been inserted and the rods and cones “accelerated” by means of some long process explained in Dutch. There was a note about the inclusion of a negative lens, which apparently gave her eagle-like vision when she wanted it.
Changes had also been made to the musculature running from Leliefeld’s shoulders down to her hands. These changes did not, to Felicity’s surprise, appear to give her any superhuman strength. Rather, the alterations granted her unparalleled fineness of touch and control. That control, combined with her outstanding vision, enabled her to perform microsurgery with her bare eyes and hands. She could conduct operations on living tissue that were well beyond the capabilities of the most advanced (non-Grafter) hospitals in the world.
A sealed pouch in her left thigh held two surgical scalpels that had been grown from her own bone. The description noted that her body sterilized the scalpels, thanks to Leliefeld’s highly modified body chemistry and bespoke gut flora, which not only rendered her impervious to most toxins but also gave her a ridiculously healthy immune system and scented her perspiration with jasmine.
They don’t say what her poop smells like, thought Felicity sourly.
And that was pretty much it. Pretty much.
Despite herself, Felicity felt a bit of pity for the Grafter girl. Really, it was almost as if Leliefeld had been designed for a specific purpose. They had taken a little girl and decided that she would be a surgeon.
Say what you like about the Checquy, but at least you get to pick what kind of job you do. Her own abilities were not particularly combat-relevant, but she had known she wanted to be a soldier, and her teachers and the organization had supported her. Of course, she still got pulled in to provide insight on crime scenes and artifacts, but they’d never said, “You will do the job your abilities are ideally suited for, and only that job.” As far as she could tell, the Grafters had told Odette Leliefeld, “You will do this job, and we will ensure that your abilities are ideally suited for it.”
Leliefeld seemed to possess only two augmentations that were not directly linked to performing surgery. The first was the modifications to her facial musculature and skin, which apparently conferred some cosmetic advantages. The file was quite adamant that the changes did not allow Leliefeld to alter her appearance so much that she would be unrecognizable, which left Felicity quite certain that they did allow that very thing.
The other modification was the two retractable spurs sheathed tidily away in her forearms, one spur in each. They were connected to little reservoirs of chemicals tucked up near her elbows. According to the notes, each spur could deliver one dose of octopus venom and one dose of platypus venom before they had to be refilled with hypodermic needles.