by P. R. Adams
That was the answer. All I had to do was acknowledge it, and the pain would end.
I looked up into the nurse’s cruel eyes, saw the puma robot, then darkness.
The Sparrow sped down the expressway, and the robot hit us again. Morena’s blood splashed across my face. Clemens’s brains were on my tongue, in the back of my throat.
The puma’s head came closer, jaws wide, ready to crush my skull as it had Clemens’s.
“Who do you work for?”
Steel gums slid over my bloody face, and the pressure began. Crushing. A roaring like the ocean in my head. Drowning on fluids bursting into my sinus cavity, tasting my own brains.
I screamed.
Darkness.
They shifted tactics again and again but eventually grew tired of me. I wondered if I might have cracked without realizing it. Something they had gave them access to my mind, maybe getting them beyond the Agency’s conditioning, as well as my own refusal to surrender. Memories were theirs to draw upon, to manipulate and make real. They could simulate vision for me, produce a world where I was still whole.
I had no reality.
Until I woke to drowning.
At first I thought it was just another dream or memory manipulation, maybe even a torture session. Water splashed around me, foul with sewage. I had never been in a benjo ditch. It wasn’t memory.
I gagged. I twisted, raised my head up to what had to be the sky. Drops splashed on my face. Rain. Current pulled me. Foul water caught in my throat.
I was drowning.
I kicked with legs that had never been properly set. The pain nearly broke me again. One of my feet caught on something sharp—plastic or metal. I pushed off, felt the edge gash into my flesh, but my back went up against something smooth and hard. Rock. I pushed again, harder, and my head cleared the water the rest of the way. Drops splashed against me. More rain.
I heard the voice, distant, distorted, almost indecipherable. But it was English. American English. “There!”
Splashing, cursing. More than one person coming closer as I gulped at the air.
A different voice, equally American. “Shit! What’d they do to him? He’s a fucking wreck. Put a bullet in him, do him a favor.”
“Uh, you want me to work for you? It takes this guy right here. Or I walk.”
“Danny.” My voice was a broken croaking sound. But it was Danny, I was sure of it. I tried again. “Danny!”
Hands grabbed at me and hauled me out of the water. Something went around my waist then my thighs—a rope. I was hauled up, and I heard the rotors of a helicopter approaching. It was overhead, lifting me. The rope burned against my ruined legs, and I nearly passed out. After an eternity, I was dragged aboard, and I heard concerned voices. A female voice started talking to me, asking me what I was feeling, what they had done to me, what I remembered.
Panic hit me like a jab to the gut.
A new tactic. A new way to get me to crack.
“Shit, what’s wrong?” Danny’s voice again.
A strong hand gripped my shoulder.
“I-I think he’s crying,” the woman said.
“Stefan? Stefan? You hear me?” Danny leaned in close. “We’re taking you home. Got a job for you. You’re going home.”
I reached for Danny’s hand, then remembered that I didn’t have any hands of my own. Phantom pains. Tortured nerves. Maybe even a broken mind. Maybe. “Is he alive?” I asked.
“Stovall? Yeah. Last I heard.” His voice was close, whispering. “I left him for you.”
Laughter. Ragged, terrible to hear. My voice.
It was reality. If I’d given up Stovall’s name, I would already be dead.
I was going home. I was going to live. And someone was going to pay.
Chapter 3
They put me up in a hospital, this time a real one. The blankets scratched against my skin, the sheets crisp but soft. Sunlight was a warm patch on my chest changing throughout the day. Machinery hissed and beeped, and people shuffled in and out of my room, sometimes murmuring, sometimes silent. Mostly, it was nurses. On occasion, I could detect perfume or cologne. I assumed those were the newer ones. The others smelled like fatigue and surrender, broken and going through the motions. When they touched me, it was rough and uncaring. Too much death had sapped away their empathy.
By the time the first doctor visited, the sun had left me but it felt warmer. She had a different way about her—harder soles to her shoes, a more energetic step, a more antiseptic smell.
“Mr. Mendoza. I’m Dr. Jernigan.” She sounded young, energetic, under fifty, for sure, maybe with a drawl, with a somewhat deep voice. “How’re you doing?”
“I’ll leave that to a professional to determine.” I think I smiled, but who knew how I looked. For the first time, I really heard myself without teeth and hated it.
“You’ll survive, but you may wish you hadn’t.” Tapping sounds then—fingers on a computing device. “You have a cybernetic device behind your ear. Useless now, but we can replace it.”
“It used to be a simple radio receiver and speaker. I don’t know what they did to it.”
“They?”
“The people who did this to me.”
“It looks like they may have been using it to…” A sniffling sound. Disapproving.
“They were in my head.”
“Hmm. They’ve destroyed your legs. Multiple fractures in both femurs, none set properly. Your hip bone has suffered extensive atrophy. Many of your bones are going to be a problem. You’re not responding well to most of the antibiotics we’ve tried.” Sighing replaced the confident voice. “Honestly, you being alive makes very little sense.”
No snappy comeback came to me, and I was missing the parts essential to crossing my arms and glaring. “That’s it? That’s your bedside manner? No hope?”
“Of course we have hope. We—” More tapping. “It’s going to be very hard on you, Mr. Mendoza, that’s all. In your weakened state, I have concerns about your ability to withstand the rigors of what’s ahead.”
She had no way of knowing what I’d been through. “What do you have in mind?”
“Cybernetic replacements for your limbs—that’s not my decision, it’s what was paid for. It’s not just the money, though. You understand, I’m sure. Same with your eyes. Facial reconstruction. We’ve been provided excellent imagery to work from, and in some places we’ll go with bone replacement. Teeth implants. The ears we can regrow. All of it could be regrown, actually, if someone were willing to pay.” She paused again, but I didn’t hear tapping this time. “Were you consulted about these decisions?”
“I’m sort of in debt to the people who saved my life, so I can’t second guess them. Where are we, by the way?”
“The Guillaume Clinic. You familiar with Rockville, Maryland? About ten minutes west of there. We handle severe trauma cases. Experimental spinal surgery. Cybernetic implants.”
Exclusive clientele. “You ever handle anything as severe as my case?”
“No.”
Like that. Honest, up front.
It sounded like she started to say something but settled on a small throat clearing. “The complication you bring is that you’ve been through sustained trauma. You have drugs in your system we’re unfamiliar with. You have infections. And the timeline for your surgeries and rehabilitation is beyond aggressive.”
Of course. The mission Danny had mentioned. “Will the quality of my life improve?”
She paused again, then tapped her device. “If you live.”
I didn’t feel like reminding her that she’d said I would live. The heat on my skin was strange, not just the small patch caused by the sunlight. It was like a smoldering fire. “The sun went down?”
“It’s late afternoon. This time of year, it’s starting to get dark earlier.”
Autumn. “It feels hot in here.”
“The drugs are working clear of your system. And there’s the infections. You’ll experience pain before w
e can safely switch you to our own medications. I wish it were something we could avoid. I’ll check back tomorrow.”
Her gait was different as she exited, and I wondered if she was distracted by lying to me or by what was ahead for me.
I didn’t have to wait long to find out.
Sometime after slurping up dinner, I woke screaming. I was strapped down, and my awareness of my surroundings was compromised.
People came in and out, cold cloths and ice packs were placed all over my body, but no one did a goddamn thing to stop the pain.
I was in the Sparrow again.
I was in the torture dungeon.
The Korean nurse who’d seduced me was straddling me, driving her thumbs into my eye sockets and laughing like a devil. But she was different now, curvier, with lighter hair and emerald eyes.
It cycled like that.
I fouled myself and someone cleaned me.
I ran the fields of our farm back in Idaho, gold in the summer sun.
I watched from the cargo bay of a helicopter as smoke curled up from the ruins of Jerusalem.
I dove through the midnight sky toward a firelit drop point in Syria.
And always the refined voice would ask me, “Who do you work for?”
More and more, I felt certain I knew the answer. And so did he.
Then I remembered what Stovall had done to me and my team, and I whispered the real answer: I worked for no one.
When the worst of it passed, I woke to the smell of my own sweat. What remained of me trembled. Someone was there, assuring me everything was going to be fine. I couldn’t imagine how. It felt like waking in the torture dungeon all over again. They drew blood and cleaned me up, then left me.
Days dragged by in a feverish, pain-filled haze until Dr. Jernigan finally returned.
“You’ve surprised a few people, Mr. Mendoza.” There was almost a hint of humor to her voice. “The infections seem to be responding to our medications, and the painkillers have begun to clear your system. We’ve started you on something that should help, but you still have quite an ordeal ahead of you. Are you ready for this?”
I focused on the memory of Stovall’s face when he’d pitched the Korea mission to me—that condescending, lying face that could only belong to one of the untouchables.
“I want to get better,” I said. It came out shaky.
“Of course. We’ll start tomorrow. We’ll be taking your legs. You understand?” There was a catch in her voice.
“Yeah.” They’d been taken from me by my torturers anyway.
“You’ve shown amazing resilience. I believe in you.” She touched my chest with a warm, strong hand that lingered, then was gone.
I should have had weeks to fight through the withdrawals and infections. Time to recover from the amputations before the cybernetic grafting. Months of rehab. The schedule didn’t allow for it.
Just as Dr. Jernigan had said, it began with the legs. The surgery was the next morning, before the sun had warmed me. I woke to all sensation below my waist being gone, but that was quickly replaced by a sense of dead weight. My arms and eyes were next, followed by my teeth. The drugs did a reasonable job, but the experience was like walking into an ice cream shop run by the most wicked of sadists: Every imaginable flavor of pain was there. Move incorrectly, and fire shot up your spine. Sneeze or breathe too deep, and the phantom pains left you imagining you were twitching. You couldn’t go wrong combining flavors—all the pain was exquisite. Assuming you liked pain, that is.
Then came the morning where the gauze came off my eyes, and I realized I hadn’t been feeling phantom pains. The world was a strange palette of reds and grays. No real colors, just shades. Sunlight was a glare beyond a window framed by melting ice.
My limbs had been replaced. I couldn’t control them, but I could see them—arms that could have been mine, mounds that hinted at normal legs beneath the blankets.
The door to my room opened, and a woman carrying a computing device entered, dressed in a pale hospital uniform and lab coat. I could only make out that she was tall, dark-haired, and probably in her late thirties, perhaps even her forties. With no way to know her skin color, I could only rely on her squarish face and angular nose. I guessed at a north European heritage. The familiar gait and hard soles gave her away.
“Dr. Jernigan?” I asked.
Her head tilted slightly and she smiled. “The eyes are working. Good.”
“Everything’s shades of red, sort of. Reddish gray.”
She came closer and set her computing device down on a chair next to my bed. I had a better sense of how large she was—maybe a bodybuilder. Her hands settled on my thighs, but I couldn’t feel the touch. “We’ll adjust the eyes. It takes some getting used to. They’re capable of extremely sharp sight within normal human range, as well as ultraviolet and infrared up into thermographic range. I’m assuming you know what to expect?”
“Yeah. I’ve worked with full-spectrum infrared, if that’s what you mean.”
“Good.” She pinched my thighs. “Now how about these?”
“Should I feel that?”
“Not yet. If you’re not in pain, then we’re doing very well.”
There was no longer any normal pain scale for comparison. “I don’t think I am.”
“That will change, unfortunately.” She fetched the device back up from the chair and seemed primed to go—uncomfortable, probably. “The worst of it is yet to come, but my work is almost done. We have some more bone reinforcement to do yet.”
“Reinforcement? For the atrophied bones you mentioned?”
“Your entire body, really. A good deal of that is handled through injections, but it takes time. Initially, we focused on the bones that are critical to supporting the stress your cybernetic limbs will generate. It does no good to have a leg that can kick a door in if the pelvis it rotates against is as flimsy as tissue paper or the spine can’t support the torque without snapping. Would you like to see some images of that sort of injury?”
I winced. “No, thanks. Along with the cybernetic limbs, what’s the reinforcement going to do to my weight?”
“Not much. The cybernetics use lightweight plastic for bone and structural integrity. It’s about twice the strength of a healthy femur and less than twice the weight. The muscle fibers and other components are actually lighter than their organic counterparts, so the net is almost a wash. And I believe you’ll find the synthetic flesh the most appealing part of your new body.”
I glanced down at my arms. They looked unremarkable.
She lifted a hand up to show me. “Note the lack of prints along the surface of the palm and fingers?”
“That’s going to be a problem for security devices.”
“Not once you’ve learned your body. Your prints are registered in the system. They’ll be as close to the original as your face.”
I wished for a mirror. “How close is that?”
“Your face? Very. You’ll see soon enough. As for your prints, once you’ve mastered your new limbs, you’ll be able to bring those prints out.”
Or I could go without prints at all. “How long before I get to meet the people who did this for me?”
“Once the reinforcement process has completed, the physical therapists will start working with you. You’ll need to rebuild your torso to support the stress your limbs will be generating. They’ll push you and leave you quite fatigued and sore. The technicians will monitor your cybernetics, and the nurses will monitor your health, but no one is going to slow things down. You’ll have perhaps a month to adapt to the new you. After that, you’ll have to improve via practical use.”
Of course. Someone had a deadline. “You said you did limb regrowth work. How much would it cost to rebuild me right, to get back what was taken from me?”
Her lips pursed. “Five, six million. It’s a significant undertaking, and it doesn’t always work.”
It was far more than I had saved after years of scraping pennies. “Thanks
for what you did.”
She stopped at the door and gave that strange head tilt again. “Wait until you finish the rehabilitation process, Mr. Mendoza. You can thank me then.”
I closed my eyes. Pain had been a part of my life since signing on with the Agency. Before that, even. I was ready for the next phase in my recovery and for the mission that lay ahead.
And when that was done, I had an appointment with Stovall.
Chapter 4
I was released from Guillaume in the middle of February, nearly a month early. Someone had left me a simple outfit—sweater, pullover shirt, jeans, and sneakers. And a long coat. Black. The style I favored, including the integrated light carbon weave armor.
Danny.
The clothes felt strange on me, from a different time. Just slipping into the sleeves took getting used to. Not the coat. Like my rebuilt face, the coat really made me feel like my old self.
It was a cold day, washed in soft sunlight. Smog was a gray smear that nearly blotted out D.C. to the south. A small limousine with reflective windows pulled up outside the lobby. Danny leapt out, looking deceptively thick in a bulky tan jacket and baggy brown slacks. His hair was longer, and whiskers shadowed his sunken cheeks. He hooked an arm around my waist and settled me onto a solid but comfortable seat.
A woman sat across from me, frowning.
Danny took the space next to me as the door closed. “You’re looking good, Stefan. Um, you know Heidi? She’s running the mission.”
Heidi Ostertag. She’d aged since the last time I saw her—brown hair cut shorter now, streaked gray, and noticeably thinner. Wrinkles puffed her face out and swallowed her brown eyes until they were just dark specks beneath the faint trace of eyebrows and thick eyelids. She’d always been slender, but now she was closer to skeletal. A black pantsuit with a burgundy blouse hung loose off her frame, accessorized with gold bangle bracelets that only drew attention to her bony wrist. But her perfume hadn’t changed, still a sweet cherry blossom seeping into the leather and chrome of the interior. She sipped from a shot glass and watched me with those beady eyes until the limo pulled into traffic and headed south. I shivered despite the choking heat in our compartment.