She stood carefully, uncertain of her balance until she confirmed her relatively minimal state of disorientation. She tiptoed across the room to the door, testing the handle gently, and found it locked. She looked out the window and discovered she was on the fourth floor of a rather generic modern building, with a view of dusty hills and scattered clusters of scrub brush and coastal sage. The sky was endlessly grey, which told her nothing more than she was still somewhere in Central – if her kidnappers were to be believed, most likely at the Far Shores. The window was simply a pane of tinted safety glass in a metal frame set in the wall, with no mechanism or latch, clearly designed to remain closed. Eerie tapped it with painted blue fingernails thoughtfully, then put her ear to the glass and listened.
She heard the door unlock and turned to face whatever came with an impassive expression, her hands balled into fists at her sides.
Dr. Graaf let himself in with a smile, wearing a white lab coat, flanked by a middle-aged Asian man with a receding hairline and a comb-over, dressed in the same way, who locked the door behind them. They both held clipboards, and their coat pockets were stocked with a liberal supply of pens. Dr. Graaf’s black shoes were polished to the point that Eerie caught a brief reflection of her own face in them as he walked across the room to one of the chairs, indicating with a gesture for her to sit on the examination table. Seeing no other option, Eerie hesitantly complied, resting on the edge of the crinkling, paper-covered mattress, her hands balled between her legs.
“Good afternoon, Eerie. I, as you might remember, am Dr. Graaf, and this is my associate, Dr. Tsu. I offer my sincere regrets for the circumstances of your arrival,” Dr. Graaf said cheerily, as if he were apologizing for a bumpy bus ride. He paged through the paperwork attached to his clipboard, nodding to himself as he read. “We took the opportunity to make a brief examination while you were indisposed. You will doubtless be glad to hear that you appear to be in excellent health.”
Eerie recoiled at the statement.
“What did you do?”
Dr. Graaf looked hurt at the implication of impropriety.
“Nothing invasive, I assure you,” he said, his tone wounded. “A routine check of temperature, blood pressure, and weight. We drew two blood samples to conduct a few standard tests, and gave you a supplementary injection for safety reasons. Additionally, we conducted a series of X-rays and took a few MRI images. The results, I must say, were fascinating...”
“You did not have my consent,” Eerie stated flatly. “That is wrong.”
Dr. Graaf appeared genuinely flustered, while Dr. Tsu looked at him in obvious confusion.
“Again, I offer my apologies,” Dr. Graaf said earnestly, setting his clipboard aside on the counter. “I did not intend to offend your sensibilities. I merely seek the advancement of science, and you, my dear girl, offer a wealth of knowledge otherwise unobtainable. Sometimes social niceties must be set aside in the name of the greater good. I am certain that you understand.”
“Understanding is not important,” Eerie said, with a slight shake of her head. “Consent is.”
“Dr. Graaf, perhaps another injection?” Dr. Tsu produced a wan smile as he made the suggestion, his voice soft and in keeping with his delicate features. “The patient appears perturbed...”
“Not ‘the patient.’ My name is Eerie, and I am a person. Not an object to be studied.”
Dr. Tsu looked at her with evident puzzlement.
“You are entirely wrong, child,” Dr. Graaf countered gently. “Your status as a person is very much in question, at least from a strictly human perspective. And we are all objects for study, regardless of any other factor. Because of your unusual parentage, however, you are a particularly fascinating object of study – your unique biological and genetic makeup could well provide insights that might otherwise never be gained. You should take pride in that, I think.”
Eerie said nothing, regarding them with her dilated eyes and expressionless face.
“For example,” Dr. Graaf continued enthusiastically, “are you aware that there are at least three previously undiscovered cellular bodies in your blood? Our microbiologists assure us that they have never seen anything of the sort before. One in particular is intriguingly similar to other terrestrial microbes, quite possibly a separate living being in its own right, perhaps existing in conjunction with your own system in a symbiotic relationship. Assuming that this is an independent creature that inhabits your bloodstream, and that it provides some form of health benefit or biological function, imagine the implications for medical science! Perhaps it could be transplanted or grown in cultures and injected...”
“I would like to go home,” Eerie stated. “Can I have a phone, please? I want to call Rebecca Levy.”
Both doctors blanched at the name, exchanging a look whose significance was lost on the Changeling.
“I’m afraid that is impossible, at this particular moment.” Dr. Graaf nodded to Dr. Tsu, who left the room quietly. “Are you familiar with the Far Shores, Eerie? The work that we do here?”
“I want to go home,” Eerie repeated. “Now.”
“As I mentioned, at the present, that is impossible. Clearly, however, I have erred in my approach and presentation of your crucial importance to the work that we are doing, here at the Far Shores. Allow me to rectify that.” Dr. Graaf stood and gestured for Eerie to accompany him. “Perhaps a tour of our facilities, of the many fascinating and positive developments that are happening on our campus, will help set your mind at ease as to our intentions. There are so many amazing things that I wish to share with you! If you will come with me...”
“No.” Eerie folded her arms. “I want to call Rebecca.”
“That isn’t going to happen.” Dr. Graaf smile never wavered. “Come along, please.”
“I don’t want a tour. I want to go home.”
“Eerie, I insist.” Dr. Graaf again beckoned for her. “Let’s not make this more unpleasant than it needs to be, shall we?”
***
Alex was lying on the sidewalk, staring at the back of Katya’s legs. The pain in his head had diminished to nothing worse than a typical headache, and the nosebleed had stopped, though when he wiped his hand across his face, his nose and lips were caked with partially dried blood. His vision slowly cleared, and the sounds around him gradually clarified from undifferentiated rushing into two identifiable voices.
He turned his head, too weak to stand, and realized that Katya was standing between him and the Witch, one hand filled with needles, the other holding a grenade, her thumb encircled by the pin.
“You take another step, and I’m going to perforate your brain,” Katya warned. “If that doesn’t kill you, I’ll pull the pin on this. It’s high explosive layered with anti-personnel shrapnel. One way or another, you will die.”
“You are within the blast radius, Auditor.” The Witch’s voice was warm and resonant, her tone full of good humor. “As is the boy you are protecting. You would both die in the explosion. Are you even sure that it would harm me?”
“Try me,” Katya suggested, “and we’ll both find out.”
The Witch threw her head back and laughed.
“Fortunately, such an extreme response is not necessary. I intend no harm to you, or to your amnesiac friend. I am here to offer the Auditors assistance, and I come bearing gifts.”
“Funny,” Katya growled, “you don’t look like Santa Claus.”
“You are a witty one, girl,” the Witch said. “Commendable. Now, if you would, please call the one of your number named Mitsuru. My name is Yaga, and she can vouch for my intentions. I will also need to speak to Alice Gallow.”
There was a confusing jumble of movement, as a black-haired woman stepped out of the Witch’s shadow and snaked her arm around the Witch’s neck, drawing it tight in a vicious choke hold.
“That’s original. No one ever wants to talk to me. I usually have to make them talk.” Alice tugged the hold tighter while simultaneously lifting the
Witch off of her feet, causing her to gag and kick futilely against Miss Gallow’s armored shins. “Hey, Mitzi. This the Witch you talked to?”
Alex glanced behind him, and Miss Aoki – actually, it was Mitsuru now, he reminded himself – was extending a hand, Chike watching with concern in the background. She glanced at Miss Gallow and nodded, then carefully helped Alex back up. Katya replaced the cap on the grenade with a sigh of relief. Michael must have apported in with Chike and Mitsuru, because he hurried to Katya’s side.
“Are you good, Katya?”
“Fine, fine,” Katya said, waving his attentions away. “Worry about Alex.”
“I’m okay,” Alex said, taking a damp cloth that Mitsuru proffered and using it to clean the blood from his face. “All clear.”
“Okay,” Miss Gallow said, lowering the Witch down to the ground, and relaxing the hold slightly, so the Witch could take several shuddering breaths. “It’s not my usual policy to suffer a Witch to live, but I guess this time I might make an exception, assuming you have a real good reason for being here.”
Miss Gallow released the Witch, who went tumbling to her knees, her face gradually returning to its normal shade while she coughed and clutched her neck. Before she could stand or speak, Miss Gallow rested the muzzle of her shotgun against the nape of the Witch’s neck.
“I’m gonna warn you, though – I’m feeling jumpy and impulsive today. You do anything that makes me even slightly nervous, and this is gonna be a very short conversation. Understood?”
The Witch nodded, still attempting to regain her wind.
Alex finished cleaning his face, and tossed the bloody rag aside. Michael approached him, looking concerned.
“Are you alright, son? What happened?”
“I’m fine,” Alex snapped, not sure why he felt annoyed and embarrassed at the attention. “It’s a long story, but it doesn’t have anything to do with that Witch, or the mission. We’ll talk about it later, okay? Right, Katya?”
Katya glanced over at him from where she stood, watching the Witch, still holding her handful of sewing needles.
“Yeah,” she agreed reluctantly, averting her eyes. “Sure.”
Michael looked from one of them to the other, bewildered.
“Spill it,” Miss Gallow said, nudging the Witch with her gun barrel. “What brings you to Kiev on this lovely, sunny day?”
“The same thing as you,” the Witch responded, one hand covering her bruised throat. “The Anathema. I am pleased that you heeded my advice, despite your lack of gratitude, and your brutish behavior.”
“Be careful,” Miss Gallow said, prodding her with the gun. “You don’t wanna hurt my feelings.”
“I doubt you would be so quick to kill me.” The Witch smiled at Miss Gallow. “After all, without my help, your operation will fail, and all of you will die.”
“That sounds a little bit too much like a threat.”
“It isn’t a threat.” The Witch rose slowly and gracefully, seemingly unconcerned with the gun touching her neck. “It’s an act of charity.”
“Okay, we are already following up on your last gift,” Alice snarled. “Why are you so urgently generous?”
“Because they have rooted a sapling of Yggdrasil, the World Tree,” Yaga explained calmly. “And if you do not act to stop them before it is aligned, then you will not be able to stop them at all. You people!” Yaga exclaimed. “Don’t you know anything about Norse mythology?”
***
Dr. Graaf couldn’t judge the impression he was making on the Changeling. He had steeled himself against the temptation to confuse her with a human being, to project the morals and rationales of humanity onto a canvas apart from those concerns, but that particular conundrum never presented itself. Instead, he found himself wondering how she had lived so long in human society – to the extent of making friends and having romantic relationships, if reports were to be believed – when she did such a poor job of imitating humanity. The injection had not yet taken effect, if he was any judge of such things, though he could not be sure – it was untested, to say the least.
He would have understood fear. He had arranged for the girl to be kidnapped, after all, and force had been involved. He had separated her from everything she knew, and he had not been shy about his intent to use her to further his own studies. She had been subjected to a medical examination while she was unconscious, and had been refused the opportunity to contact those who she purportedly cared about. Yet the Changeling evidenced not even trepidation, even when she toured the biological laboratories, with their caged experimental animals and necessarily cruel practices and instrumentation. Dr. Graaf had concealed this place even from the students amongst the Audits program, for fear of the reaction it would provoke, but the Changeling offered no comment on observing a ward full of monkeys dying of venereal disease or an experiment designed to study the breakdown of society in a colony of starving rats.
Curiosity, too, he would have understood. Dr. Graaf believed deeply in the basic human fascination with the unknown, and science was the primary tool by which the unknown could be observed, measured, and eventually understood. In the same way that some of the patients in the initial trials of nanite implantation that he had conducted with Gaul and Vladimir years before had been excited, in some inspiring and perverse way, to be the subjects of a study that could lead to the advancement of knowledge or death – the two not being mutually exclusive. He would have empathized, had the Changeling realized the potential of her current situation and succumbed to the allure, the tremendous potential inherent in her being. No such reaction was evident, however, when he showed her the wonders of the physics and chemistry departments – the new fabric they had developed that was a liquid until it encountered body heat, at which point it baked itself into a flexible and comfortable solid form; the metals that had attributes ranging from superconductivity to near impenetrability; the laboratory that held a reactor at its core that simulated the fusion process that occurred in the hearts of stars; the sapling World Tree, sequestered in its armored chamber, invasive branches working their way into everywhere. None of these marvels moved her.
Instead, she went were she was told to go, watched without comment what she was told to observe, and neither asked questions nor praised or questioned that which he showed her. The work of the Far Shores was designed to excite, to explore the furthest reaches of what science was capable of, and it had never previously failed to earn a reaction of some kind, be it the wonder that kept his staff working through their long hours and isolation, or the fear and revulsion that had exiled Dr. Graaf and his work to the lonely fringe in the first place.
The Changeling’s reaction puzzled him at the same time it reinforced his intentions. Dr. Graaf was willing to sacrifice his own humanity for the sake of knowledge, which he avidly believed to be the noblest of virtues. But that particular sacrifice would clearly not be required of him in this case – because the “girl” was anything but. She was female, as a physical examination had confirmed, and her genetics were similar to that of a human, as initial testing indicated, but concepts like “young,” “innocent,” and “tragic” could not be applied to her. The things his staff had discovered with a handful of cell and blood samples, a small selection of MRI images, and a cursory exam were astonishing – they would be years in analyzing and digesting what had been found, and years more in synthesizing and applying it. If Dr. Graaf had his way, he would have given her over to Dr. Tsu and his biological labs for years, given him time to grapple with the code of her DNA and the fabric of her nervous system, allowed opportunity to explore and sample her every depth and recess. Even now, he was tempted to make just a minor allowance, for the sake of what they could have done with the time.
Sadly, he could not risk even such a small dalliance, regardless of the potential reward. Though the abduction had been successful, the discovery of the Changeling’s disappearance was inevitable, as was the retribution that would follow, assuming he did not p
repare adequately. While the Far Shores campus was fortified and defensible, he knew that such practicalities would mean nothing to the Changeling’s self-appointed guardians – Rebecca Levy would brush them aside if she were roused, and the Director was even more fearsome. What Dr. Graaf needed, he knew, was a discovery of such indisputable and irreplaceable value as to place him, and the Far Shores, beyond the possibility of any consequence. Despite their emotional attachment to the Changeling, the administrators of Central were concerned with the community’s survival above all things. If he had something critical to Central’s continued existence, they would be forced to allow him to continue unmolested, regardless of how deeply they might despise him for it. A finding that would force them to leave the Changeling in his care, assuming she was not destroyed in the process of the experiment.
This was why he had taken the Changeling to the power plant to end her tour, to the core of the facility where the strange alloy recovered from the oldest ruins in Central was purified and then put into direct contact with the Ether. Because of what he had seen during her previous visit to the Far Shores, on the beach, when the Changeling had walked on top of the Ether like the fairytales of Jesus of Nazareth that he had been taught as a child.
“It is magnificent, is it not?” Dr. Graaf asked, vainly attempting to provoke a reaction. He pointed to the enormous articulated mechanical housing that lowered the rods into the Ether. “The entire facility is built suspended over the sea of Ether. The rods housed inside are made of a material outside of the periodic table, of unknown and radical properties that we are only beginning to understand. Among those properties, the foremost is the ability to survive direct contact with the Ether. As I am certain you learned at the Academy, any material making physical contact with the Ether is immediately destroyed. Even the nanites, and the Operators who are infused with them, can only come into contact with the radiated Etheric energy, rather than the substance itself.”
The Far Shores (The Central Series) Page 47