“Whose bed is that?”
“Oh,” Somerset said quietly, shaking her head. “That’s Pawn Verrall’s bunk.”
“What happened to Pawn Verrall?” Felicity asked warily.
“Her Labrador started whelping, so she got the night off.”
“Ah,” said Felicity. “Okay.”
“We still have a full complement of troops,” the attendant assured her. “There’s always an understudy on call.” She supplied Felicity with official Barghest pajamas (navy blue, with no emblems whatsoever) and an official Barghest toothbrush (in no way distinguishable from a normal toothbrush). “Would you like a hot-water bottle?” she asked.
“Thank you,” said Felicity gratefully. By the time she fell into bed, the chill had been taken off the sheets, and she nestled down comfortably. As she drifted off, her mind was filled with delight that she was so close to her heroes, mingled with sorrow that her team could not share her excitement.
Thirty minutes later, she was jolted out of her sleep by a torrent of noise. It sounded like someone was cramming a metric ton of live weasels into a phone box, and it was coming from a spot only a few centimeters from her face. With no time for thought, she launched herself out of bed before she was even properly awake, flailing away at whatever was attacking her. The sound seemed to be coming from everywhere, and shapes were moving about in the dim light. Then the sound cut out, and the lights in the room flared into brilliance, blinding her. She stumbled back with her hands pressed against her eyes and bounced off a Barghest of indeterminate gender who was lacing up its boots.
“Watch out!” said the Barghest. All around them, people were rushing about madly. Bewildered, Felicity fell back on her bed and watched as all of the soldiers ran out of the room. The lights assumed a more normal intensity, and Major Somerset came in, accompanied by two men who began making the beds.
“Oh, darling, I’m very sorry about that,” said the attendant. “They got the call, you see. Had to bolt off to Neath. Something about a computer that’s eating the Internet. Good riddance, I say—it’s all smut and people whining. But we can’t choose our assignments, I suppose.”
“But what in God’s name was that noise?” said Felicity weakly.
“The Rookery has been experimenting with different sounds to rouse the troops,” said Somerset. “I believe that one is a recording of baboons fighting over a Mars bar.” She gestured toward Felicity’s bed. “See the speakers in the headboard? Gets them awake immediately.”
I’ll say, thought Felicity.
“Course, it’s a problem for some,” mused the attendant. “Pawn Sutton keeps punching them out on instinct. She’s gone through four headboards so far. But it wakes her up sharpish. Anyway, you get yourself back into bed,” she said. “You won’t get woken up again until it’s time to wake up.”
Four and a half hours later the Barghests charged back into the barracks, loudly singing some sort of victory song in Latin. Apparently, the computer had been successfully killed or turned off or negotiated with. Felicity buried her head under her pillow.
15
A chauffeur-driven car, clean and discreet, ferried Felicity through the London traffic to her home. She was dressed in the suit that had been retrieved from her locker and had a stack of files on her lap. Grenadier, her Pomeranian, was seated next to her, gnawing contentedly on a new toy. He was black, with the wide-eyed stare of a lemur or a celebrity caught wearing old holey sweatpants by the paparazzi. She’d had to swing by the home of a Checquy operative to retrieve him.
As soon as Felicity was declared dead, a representative of the Checquy had gone by her town house. He had emptied the fridge of all dairy products, picked up her dog, and re-housed him with a loving family that had happy, laughing children. Said children had been in tears at the loss of their new pet. Grenadier, however, had trotted away from them without a backward glance.
The driver turned the car into Felicity’s lane, a few streets away from Kensington Gardens. It was paved in bricks and, a hundred or more years ago, had been the back alley that served the carriage houses of the big expensive terraced houses on either side. Now all the carriage houses had been converted into little town houses that cost the earth. The driver held her files and stood on Grenadier’s leash as Felicity fumbled with her keys. She thanked him, and then she and her dog went inside.
The floor of the onetime carriage house had been dug out so that the living room sat half a story below street level, and the kitchen a story below that. A tight spiral staircase led up to a landing and a bedroom with no windows. Because it was the largest bedroom and had its own bathroom, it generally went to whichever of the three housemates currently had a boyfriend. At the moment, it was Felicity’s, not because she had a boyfriend (she didn’t), but because she was the only one in a position to use it. From the landing, more stairs led up to two tiny bedrooms and the world’s smallest bathroom.
Grenadier trotted across the living room and vaulted onto the couch. He nestled himself into his accustomed corner and closed his eyes. Felicity placed her files on the coffee table and went downstairs to make herself a cup of milkless tea.
The house was quiet. One of her housemates, Priscilla, was out of the country, posted to Okinawa, where she was meeting with one of the four other supernatural organizations the Checquy had diplomatic ties with. Kasturi, the second housemate, was hibernating on a plinth in her bedroom. I must remember to go in and dust her, Felicity told herself. Then, with her cup of tea, she settled herself on the couch and closed her eyes for a moment.
It had been a busy morning. Early, well before the sun came up, she’d been woken by the attendant with a summons to Rook Thomas’s office. All the Barghests were still asleep, and Felicity had tiptoed out reverently. Her suit had been waiting for her, and she’d dressed quickly before scurrying up to the executive floor. Mrs. Woodhouse had waved her in, and Felicity had found the Rook wearing pajamas and a dressing gown and participating in a conference call about snipers. It was evident that she had been roused from her private apartment upstairs to talk with some far-flung outpost of the Checquy. Thomas had excused herself from the call, muted the phone, and handed her the Odette Leliefeld files.
“Where did we get all this material?” Felicity asked.
“Most of it was supplied to us by the Grafters themselves,” said Rook Thomas. “They sent us an insane amount of information. We can’t decide if it’s a strategic attempt to bury us in paperwork or if they’re just really, really anal.”
Flipping quickly through the files, Felicity was inclined to believe the second option.
The Rook told Felicity that she was to report to her division head, attend a therapy session, and then go home and prep for her placement with the Grafter girl. She gave Felicity the direct number for her mobile phone, wished her luck, and was back on the conference call before Felicity had gotten a chance to sit down.
The head of her division was waiting for her when she arrived. Her special placement on the orders of the Rook had raised a couple of eyebrows, but it had a certain logic to it, and because it was an order from Rook Thomas, it was accepted. Felicity did as Rook Thomas had ordered and recounted every detail of the events in the row house without mentioning any speculation about the Grafters. The division head had nodded thoughtfully and was sad at the loss of his people, but there was no indication that he linked the events to anything more significant. As far as he was concerned, it was just another inexplicable supernatural atrocity that had flared in the heart of the city. Tragic, but unremarkable.
Then came the session with the therapist. Felicity had been braced for a horrible surge of emotions, but in fact the time had passed quite quickly and easily. It was partly because she had vented so much grief during the car ride to the Rookery, and partly because she was now focused on her new mission. There was still sorrow in her heart, of course, but there was so much to do and think about and plan for that she could not spare the time to be traumatized.
; It happened, she thought. It all happened, and now this is happening. She sat quietly for a moment, then took a sip of tea and opened the first file.
A picture of the Leliefeld girl stared back at her. It was not the typical ghastly ID photo, nor a surveillance photo with a fuzzy image of the subject as she walked down the street. Rather, it featured Leliefeld groomed and polished and smiling right into the camera. It was the sort of photograph that you would send to your grandmother or feature on a Christmas card.
And then there were pages and pages and pages.
Everything had been meticulously folioed and indexed. It’s as if they included every piece of paper they could find. Photocopies of driver’s licenses and student-ID cards. A birth certificate. Math tests. Felicity winced at notes from surgeries—some that Leliefeld had performed and some that she’d undergone. Much of it was in Dutch, a little was in French, and what English there was had been written in the laboriously stilted language of someone not completely fluent. There was a list of the medications Leliefeld was taking now and lists of the medications she’d taken at other times in her life. Diets she’d been put on. Fingerprints, toeprints, tongueprint, x-rays, and an image with streaky lines that Felicity vaguely recognized as a DNA report.
She skimmed over a checklist of all the samples the Grafters had submitted to the Checquy. Samples of Leliefeld’s blood, saliva, bile, urine, tears, mucus, stool, skin, venoms, hair (scalp, underarm, forearm, nostril, leg, pubic), toenail clippings, fingernail clippings, breath, flatus, vitreous humor, bone marrow. I’m glad Rook Thomas didn’t give me the reports of those as well, she thought.
Still, despite the chaos of the documents, Felicity found that she was building up a mental profile of the subject.
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.* 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 Privatuniversität 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 Graf
ter 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.
To Felicity, who hadn’t even realized that platypuses had venom, it sounded like the most ridiculous defense mechanism ever. She knew that the Grafters were capable of constructing utterly lethal weapons and had been doing so for centuries. But this woman had restricted herself to the equivalent of a pair of dueling pistols or a stiletto dagger.
The spurs were lovely, though. There were photographs of them, and sketches that looked like the work of Leonardo da Vinci. They were elegant little things, almost art deco in their design. If they weren’t tucked away in someone’s forearms, you’d want to have them on your desk as the world’s most exquisite letter openers.
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