Thus, at the age of four months, Felicity Jane Clements was brought to Kirrin Island, enrolled in the Estate, and, incidentally, was legally made a Taurus instead of an Aries. She was installed in the nursery and given various treatments that an Irish peasant woman had come up with several hundred years earlier for her child’s psychometry. Primary among these ministrations was the regular application of an ointment made out of moss and yogurt (the original recipe called for fermented goat’s milk, but yogurt worked just as well). It smelled terrible but did have the effect of numbing Felicity’s powers somewhat and letting her function. It also left her skin looking terrific.
One of the unexpected problems was that, unlike the Checquy’s previous psychometric operatives’ powers, Felicity’s abilities were not limited to her mouth and the skin of her hands. In fact, they were activated through all of her skin, which meant that she spent the first few years of her life almost completely covered in a thick, green, constantly cracking coating of crud. She also subsisted on raw vegetables that were specially cultivated on the island by one person, in order for them to have as little history as possible.
There was, of course, tremendous incentive for Felicity to gain complete control of her abilities as swiftly as possible. Quite aside from the potential benefits to the nation and the distressing odor of the ointment, there were dangers associated with psychometry. The records of the Checquy told of two operatives and three infants who had fallen into deep comas from which they could not be awakened. Popular theory held that they had gotten tangled up in the histories of some object they had touched and could not find their way out again. They had been discreetly put down, rather than being allowed to linger and rot. The Checquy did not want to lose Felicity.
Fortunately, like all Checquy operatives, her predecessors had left behind copious notes about their powers. These journals were stored in high-security vaults and archives around the British Isles. Researchers immediately began trawling through the documents to sift out useful tips and techniques. As soon as she was able to understand words, Felicity was rigorously taught the mental exercises that would allow her to turn off her powers at will. Some were physical routines akin to yoga, but most involved strict mental discipline, constantly keeping her powers in check and shutting herself off from the world.
The Estate, which took a dim view of its students relying on crutches of any sort, weaned Felicity off her lactose/lichen lotion as quickly as possible. The process was exhausting, especially since she had to maintain her barriers even while she slept lest she lose herself in dreams filled with the past experiences of a bed frame or a set of sheets. But her powers did not penetrate water, and every Sunday she was permitted to sleep in an isolation tank. Drifting gently, she was, for once, at rest, her mind unclenched, untroubled by her dreams or those of the furniture.
The scientists and philosophers at the Estate were fascinated by Clements’s abilities and urged her to explore the boundaries of her Sight. They discovered that it was not limited to the past and that she could use it to augment her perception of the present. Her Sight could spread out to give her a perfect awareness of everything approximately three meters from her skin. In that area, with her eyes closed, she could describe the nature and position of items placed around her. More, she could see through them, whether metal, stone, or plastic. If they placed a gun at her feet, she could read its every component, every bullet.
Under the enthusiastic prodding of her instructors, Clements discovered that she could push her Sight out even farther. Her consciousness would leave her body as an invisible probe that she sent out of herself, taking up about the same amount of space as a basketball. Kneeling blindfolded in a room, she could send it down through her bare hands, across the floors, up the walls, and along every object in the place.
There were blind spots, however. Certain materials were impenetrable to her Sight and key among them was anything that was alive. There was something about living things that caused her powers to slide off them. They were invisible in the present, and she could see their echoes in the past only through the history of nonliving things. She could shake a person’s hand and get nothing at all (unless the cuff of his coat brushed her hand). But give her a corpse and she could read its past from the moment she had zipped open the body bag, through the person’s murder, and back into his life. (The Checquy hadn’t killed someone so she could try this, the file noted, they’d just happened to have a corpse handy.) Decant some blood out of a healthy boy, give the cells a few minutes to die, and she could draw you a picture of the donor.
There were other limitations as well. Her powers would skip automatically over anything that had occurred in the forty-eight hours surrounding a solstice, and there had been a couple of shells and a fork that, for some unknown reason, she couldn’t read at all.
Fascinated, Odette read a transcript from an interview with a nine-year-old Clements as she’d tried to explain her Sight to a group of eminent scholars, including a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, an Oxford don specializing in the philosophy of consciousness, three mathematicians, and the bishop of Bath and Wells, all of whom had been sworn to secrecy under the Official and Unofficial Secrets Act.
It’s sort of like swimming. Everything is an ocean. When you’re exploring the present, you’re swimming along the top of the water, getting farther and farther away from your body. And then, when you want to go into history, you dive down.
The scholars went away and wrote lots of academic papers about physics, space, and the memory of reality that no one outside the Checquy would ever see. Meanwhile, Felicity got used to being pulled out of class to read the history of the occasional murder weapon or blood-drenched obsidian altar stone lifted from the inner sanctum of a dark temple in downtown Plymouth.
She’d done well enough at school, her grades not outstanding, but respectable. Her hobbies included tae kwon do, cross-country running, and a couple of failed attempts at bulimia. The file contained some records from Felicity’s counseling sessions, and Odette hesitated guiltily before opening them. They were unremarkable, which was simultaneously disappointing and reassuring. Rather than stemming from any form of demonic possession or psychic backwash from her abilities, the bulimia had been an attempt to assert some control over her own life. The counselor judged that it was due to Felicity’s being obliged to maintain a constant rigid hold on her abilities combined with normal teenage angst and the fact that she would never be permitted to leave the Checquy. She’d grown out of the second problem and come to terms with the first and the third through some traditional talk therapy.
Early on in Felicity’s schooling, the Estate had noted her fascination with stories of warriors and soldiers. She displayed a marked aptitude for martial arts and strategy. Her sessions with the Checquy career counselor had established that she was very interested in joining the Barghests. And so, after graduating from the Estate, Clements underwent intensive training in armed and unarmed combat, and then moved into active service with an urban assault team based in London. She had nine confirmed kills of people and two confirmed kills of creatures who, although they wore trousers, were not counted as people by the Checquy.
And this violence-obsessed killer is the woman responsible for my well-being, thought Odette weakly.
*
“So do you have a cure for cancer, then?”
Startled, Odette looked up from the file to see a tall man looming over her. She hadn’t heard him enter the conference room, but the door was closed behind him. She tried to pull her thoughts together and out of the files.
“I’m sorry, what?” said Odette.
“Your lot are supposed to be masters of biological science, right?” said the man, a Checquy employee who looked to be in his forties. He was wearing a gray suit and carrying a leather briefcase, which he put down so that he could cross his arms.
“Well, I’m still learning,” said Odette. “But we don’t generally get cancer unless someone makes a mistake. My name’s Odette, by the way.” She thought about offering her hand to shake, but he was standing very close to her.
“You can alter people’s bodies?” he asked, ignoring her attempt to be polite.
“Um, yes.”