Holding both guns, Marcel checked each room. Outside, the growing storm battered against the windows. All through the house, there were signs that preparations had been made. The storage bins and cold containers of his parents’ laboratories did not contain samples, constructs, or strange animals. Their tools had been carefully sterilized. Many documents and books were missing, and, given the copious amount of ash and fragments in the fireplaces, they would never be found. Of his parents’ portfolios and journals, there was no trace. The house had been methodically stripped of any Broederschap materials. Oddly, much artwork was missing from the walls, and quite a few pieces of the more valuable furniture had gone. Marcel hoped this did not mean that the authorities had taken his parents and their work.
But surely the Nazis would have emptied the house completely, he thought. And there would be soldiers or officials billeted here. He looked through the bedrooms and saw that all the beds had been stripped. He paused in his old room and retrieved a few mementos of his childhood. There was no sign, however, of his parents.
He finally found them in the rooftop greenhouse, sitting together on a bench, surrounded by flowers that had clustered around them. Except for their white skin, they could have been asleep. Corruption did not touch them. Possibly it was a quirk of their genetics, but he suspected that his mother had arranged it that way. She would never have wanted to rot, and his father would have indulged her fancy. The air was lightly touched with the perfume of dried flowers, and when Marcel trailed his hands along the blossoms, they crumbled away, as if they had been dead and preserved for years.
Marcel walked toward his parents, his eyes wet. He pressed his arm to his face, blotting away the tears, and then drank in the portrait of them both. When he reached out to touch his father’s shoulder, both Arjan and Hendrika fell away to powder, as if they were themselves dried flowers.
He sat for a while and remembered his life in that place. Then he got up and opened the doors at either end of the greenhouse. The wind swept through. It picked up the dust and the flakes of all the plants and whipped them away, up into the skies of Paris.
Good-bye.
As he left the house, he noticed a troop of soldiers down the street. They were going from door to door and did not seem overly concerned with courtesy. He sighed and turned his back on them.
*
Getting away from Paris proved even more difficult than getting there. Whereas before they had been three warriors well equipped for combat and stealth, they were now a party consisting of one warrior who had an unorthodox gun, three alchemists whose implants tended toward the scholarly, and four horribly crippled invalids. In addition, they were transporting various documents, equipment, and samples that could not be easily replaced or safely destroyed. Vans, trucks, and automobiles were still in short supply, and they again ended up in a wagon (this one stolen) pulled by a horse (this one legally purchased). Now they were moving against the flow of refugees, which made them stick out even more. As a result, they were obliged to travel on meandering back lanes and often went across the countryside — a strategy that kept them out of sight of soldiers but slowed them considerably.
Partway through the journey, they discovered that the damage that the screaming woman’s voice had done to Henk’s, Hans’s, Siegbert’s, and Claudette’s insides had been far greater than anyone had realized. If Richard and the other two Grafters had not been with them to administer first aid, it was highly doubtful that any of them would have survived the first two days of the journey. The woman’s cry had attacked their Broederschap implants like a virus, shredding the patterns within, leaving them in a state of ongoing liquefaction.
To Marcel’s despair, Siegbert was in especially bad shape. The double exposure to the woman’s scream had increased the effect, and Marcel could actually see his brother wasting away in front of him. Every hour melted flesh off his bones. His breath rasped painfully in his lungs and throat.
“He’s dying,” Marcel said to his wife.
“I’m afraid he’s not the only one, beertje,” she said, and she patted him weakly on the cheek. “Unless we do something, the four of us won’t make it to the border. But he won’t survive another twelve hours without help.”
And so that night, in a field near Amiens, the hale Grafters were driven to crack open their comrades’ bodies and set about some frantic jury-rigging. They dealt with the comparatively easy ones first. Henk and Hans submitted to their operations with stoic silence. Claudette provided testy instructions even as they opened up her chest. All three of them seemed a trifle better after their procedures, although none of them could yet sit up.
Then Siegbert was laid down on a bed of dingy straw. Richard confided to Marcel that his twin was too weak to receive any form of painkillers, but it hardly mattered. Siegbert had passed into a delirium and had no idea where he was. His fingers trembled, and his breath was shallow, but other than that, he lay still.
“I don’t know what I can do for him,” Richard confessed.
“Just try,” said Marcel. “Please.”
Several desperate hours ensued. They were hardly the best conditions in which to undertake emergency surgery. The cows whose field the Grafters were occupying had moved off to a distant corner, but a fox watched the operation from the hedge. Marcel held his twin’s hand and prayed that the animal hadn’t been drawn by the smell of carrion. Rain fell, trickling into the incision in the patient’s belly. Pauline, the apprentice, hurried to the containers they had brought with them and fetched new organs that dripped with preservatives and oils. Clipped instructions passed back and forth between the two master Grafters, and their hands and tools moved frantically.
Finally, despite their best efforts, Siegbert’s hand went limp in Marcel’s and a last, labored breath eased from his mouth. They were all silent, and Richard drew his hands out of the abdomen.
“We can’t leave his body here,” said Richard finally.
“I know,” said Marcel softly as he closed his twin’s eyes and then closed his own.
*
“I’m sorry,” said Felicity, and Marcel opened his eyes.
“Thank you,” he said. “It was very difficult at the time.”
“What did you do after that?” she asked.
*
Siegbert’s body was wrapped in a coat and placed in the wagon along with the three surviving invalids and the thermos containing his son. The rest of the journey was punctuated by more abrupt surgeries as the patients variously went into seizures or cardiac arrest. In addition, the party were continually obliged to evade troops, refugees, and the inhabitants of the countryside they were traveling through. Along the roads there were smoldering vacant villages, and violence was always imminent. To cross the border meant going miles across rough country and through forests to avoid sentries.
By the time they made it back to Belgium, Henk, Hans, and Claudette were all three hanging on the edge of death, as the implants in their brains and spines had broken down completely into a foul-smelling syrup. Upon arrival at a Broederschap chapter house in the city of Roeselare, they were immediately taken into surgery and then spent several months in therapeutic comas as their bodies were carefully repaired by some of the Grafters’ most capable fleshwrights.
*
I would have liked to go into a therapeutic coma myself,” said Marcel, “or at least take a nap, but there were important things happening.”
“What things?” asked Felicity.
“The Second World War. The brotherhood sent me on various missions. There were family members scattered around Europe, many of whom needed help escaping the violence. There was much running around. A great deal of derring-do. Nazis were fought and dissolved.” He shrugged. “It was an exciting time.”