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It was familiar, and Susannah instantly knew why. She'd seen a sign similar to this during her one brief visit to Fedic. Fedic, where the real Mia - the being who had assumed mortality in what might be history's worst bargain - was imprisoned.
When they reached it, Sayre pushed past her on Hawkman's side. He leaned toward the door and spoke something guttural deep in his throat, some alien word Susannah never could have pronounced herself.It doesn't matter, Mia whispered.I can say it, and if I need to, I can teach you another that you can say. But now...Susannah, I'm sorry for everything. Fare you well.
The door to the Arc 16 Experimental Station in Fedic came open. Susannah could hear a ragged humming sound and could smell ozone. No magic powered this door between the worlds; this was the work of the old people, and failing. Those who'd made it had lost their faith in magic, had given up their belief in the Tower. In the place of magic was this buzzing, dying thing. This stupid mortal thing. And beyond it she saw a great room filled with beds. Hundreds of them.
It's where they operate on the children. Where they take from them whatever it is the Breakers need.
Now only one of the beds was occupied. Standing at its foot was a woman with one of those terrible rat's heads. A nurse, perhaps. Beside her was a human - Susannah didn't think he was a vampire but couldn't be sure, as the view through the door was as wavery as the air over an incinerator. He looked up and saw them.
"Hurry!" he shouted. "Move your freight! We have to connect them and finish it, or she'll die! They both will!" The doctor - surely no one but a doctor could have mustered such ill-tempered arrogance in the presence of Richard P. Sayre - made impatient beckoning gestures. "Get her in here! You're late, goddam you!"
Sayre pushed her rudely through the door. She heard a humming deep in her head, and a brief jangle of todash chimes: She looked down but was too late; Mia's borrowed legs were already gone and she went sprawling to the floor before Hawkman and Bulldog could come through behind her and catch her.
She braced on her elbows and looked up, aware that, for the first time in God knew how long - probably since she'd been raped in the circle of stones - she belonged only to herself. Mia was gone.
Then, as if to prove this wasn't so, Susannah's troublesome and newly departed guest let out a scream. Susannah added her own cry - the pain was now too huge for silence - and for a moment their voices sang of the baby's imminence in perfect harmony.
"Christ," said one of Susannah's guards - whether vampire or low man she didn't know. "Are my ears bleeding? Theyfeel like they must be - "
"Pick her up, Haber!" Sayre snarled. "Jey! Grab hold! Get her off the floor, for your fathers' sakes!"
Bulldog and Hawkman - or Haber and Jey, if you liked that better - grabbed her beneath the arms and quickly carried her down the aisle of the ward that way, past the rows of empty beds.
Mia turned toward Susannah and managed a weak, exhausted smile. Her face was wet with sweat and her hair was plastered to her flushed skin.
"Well-met...and ill," she managed.
"Push the next bed over!" the doctor shouted. "Hurry up, gods damn you! Why are you so Christingslow? "
Two of the low men who'd accompanied Susannah from the Dixie Pig bent over the nearest empty bed and shoved it next to Mia's while Haber and Jey continued to hold her up between them. There was something on the bed that looked like a cross between a hair-dryer and the sort of space helmet you saw in the oldFlash Gordon serials. Susannah didn't much care for the look of it. It had a brain-sucking look.
The rathead nurse, meanwhile, was bending between her patient's splayed legs and peering under the hiked-up hospital gown Mia now wore. She patted Mia's right knee with a plump hand and made a mewling sound. It was almost surely meant to comfort, but Susannah shuddered.
"Don't just stand there with your thumbs up your butts, you idiots!" the doctor cried. He was a stoutish man with brown eyes, flushed cheeks, and black hair swept back against his skull, where each track of the comb seemed as wide as a gutter. He wore a lab-coat of white nylon over a tweed suit. His scarlet cravat had an eye figured into it. This sigul did not surprise Susannah in the slightest.
"We wait your word," said Jey, the Hawkman. He spoke in a queer, inhuman monotone, as unpleasant as the rathead nurse's mewl but perfectly understandable.
"You shouldn'tneed my word!" the doctor snapped. He flapped his hands in a Gallic gesture of disgust. "Didn't your mothers have any children that lived?"
"I - " Haber began, but the doc went right over him. He was on a roll.