Cold Fusion (29 page)

“Got him,” Erskine said grimly. Her eyes briefly sought mine. “Got him this time.”

My faith in machines and even Alfred’s magic was gone. Once Viv was tidied up, his readouts and electrodes checked, I was allowed back to his side again. There I would stay—meet Alfred’s standards of manhood—obey the tides of the hospital day, back off without being asked when staff came to carry out their routines, but I wouldn’t take my eyes off him. That was all I had left, my sole power. If my presence and attention could keep him in the world with me, he would have it. Sleep could go to hell. Crying too—I wouldn’t let my vision of him blur to that extent.

So I sat dry-eyed on the edge of the bed, his hand in mine. Strange heats and chills coursed through it, outward sign of a struggle I couldn’t join in any other way but this. I made a poem for him, said it and forgot it as soon as it was done. This one was about the future, all the times we’d have together when I put him in the prow of my father’s boat and took him out to sea. It was about the Spindrift dunes, deserted and safe forever in my mind, and how I’d let him roll me down among the seagrass and yarrow.

Dusk fell over Edinburgh, and I barely noticed the city prickle all over with lights. The orange moon described her arc above the horizon, set ghostlike in a chilly rose-blue dawn. The hospital day began, the pulse and pace of life rising palpably around me. The people who came to empty Viv’s catheter bottle, to inspect his passive limbs for signs of bedsores, were kind and unobtrusive. I moved out of their way, but they didn’t ask me to go far. Alfred didn’t insist either, when he brought me another plate of sandwiches I couldn’t touch. He let me be. No priest would come to give Viv last rites, and I understood that in some way this task had been assigned to me.

Erskine had said he wouldn’t regain consciousness, but nevertheless, as daylight began to ebb once more, he opened his eyes. They were dark and fixed. They didn’t move as I whispered his name, passed my hand back and forth across his field of vision. They just filled with tears. I leaned in close to him, covered him with my body, held him as far as I could around the drips and wires. “Oh, my love. My love. Wait a little bit longer, Viv, darlin’, then I swear I’ll let you go.”

* * * * *

“Mallory. Come and see this car.”

I didn’t know how much time had passed. It was dusk now. My mouth was dry, my neck aching, and despite my resolve, apparently I’d wept myself raw and hollow against Viv’s neck. I didn’t give a crap about any car, and I levered myself upright in order to tell the old man so.

But you didn’t speak that way to Alfred Macready. Particularly not when you’d promised to behave. I went stiffly over to join him at the window. He pointed at the sleek charcoal-grey limousine pulling up by the hospital entrance, one rear window rolled down. “Look at it. That one there.”

I rubbed my eyes. “Probably some Tory MSP come to say how much he cares about the NHS.”

“No, I don’t think so. Look at the girl in the back.”

I couldn’t see any girl. My ears had become so attuned to the blip of the machines, the mechanised hiss of Viv’s breathing, that I’d stopped bothering to look for things at all. I focussed and watched as a handsome chauffeur, uniformed to match the car, stepped out of the limo and opened its back door.

A young woman emerged. She was immaculately dressed but her movements were gangly, awkward, as if the immense car had somehow been cooping her up. For a moment I thought the chauffeur must be tiny. It was a matter of scale, though—a group of interns walked by, and I realised that the girl, although barely looking a day over eighteen, was six and a half feet tall.

She looked like Virginia Woolf without the self-doubt. She was beautiful in her way, as if an Italian Vogue model had been dressed by a Victorian Scot. Heather-coloured tweeds, high-heeled brogues and a sharply cut jacket. An ivory silk scarf wrapped around her long throat. She lifted her head expectantly, and the chauffeur ran for the reception doors.

I leaned to follow her movement. “Who the hell is that?”

“It’s our own laird’s sister. Can’t you see?”

Yes. I could. I tried to dart away, and Alfred grabbed me. “Wait.”

“Why?”

“Because you’ll leap on her and scare her back to Rome. You mind Vivian. I’ll go and meet her as befits a member of the family.”

I wasn’t sure she deserved it. A true Calder would have been here months ago, finding out why her brother had been robbed of his inheritance. She might not have been able to do anything about it, but she’d have cared. I went back to Viv’s side. I couldn’t believe she’d come with good intentions even now, and if Alan Frost had found her, God alone knew what he’d said to her to get her here. She was the only other person in the world I wanted to see right now, but I was still ready to fight her off, chase her back to Rome and beyond. I sat down, forcing myself not to shiver. I took Viv’s hand again.

A soft, determined tread approached along the corridor, sooner than the slow hospital elevators could account for. The girl appeared in the doorway, flushed with what I guessed must have been a dash up the stairs. The family’s strong features sat better on Vivian, but the tumble of dark curls around her face was unmistakeable. Then her eyes met mine, and I ceased to ask myself anything further about her. Her blue-grey gaze was full of light. She pointed to the bed. “My brother?”

“Yes. Did you meet Alfred?”

“A rather splendid gentleman accosted me in the foyer. He was elderly, however, and I didn’t have time to wait for him. My name is Cressida Calder-Montoro. Now, what is it that you need from me? An arm? A kidney?”

“No, my dear,” said Dr. Erskine, appearing behind her, clipboard in hand, a fair-haired stranger at her shoulder. “This is Joseph Sondheim from the Sanders GenTech Institute in California. All we need is a handful of your cells.”

* * * * *

Cressida Calder-Montoro was a lioness. Alfred was regarding her with a big-game warden’s cautious adoration from the far side of the room. She’d accepted his greeting, undergone the introductions all around with even-handed grace, but I could tell she wasn’t really concerned about any of us—not the old family steward, not the doctor flown in from America. Not the lover, though she’d scoped me out with one look as she’d shaken my hand and given me a small, unreadable nod. She was here with a purpose. Her whole focus was her brother, and she’d barely taken her eyes off him. She’d accepted the chair Alfred had placed for her at the foot of the bed. She could survey the whole scene from there. “When can we get to work?”

Erskine and Sondheim could hardly wait. They’d been sneaking glances at each other as if the cure for the common cold and cancer had landed in their laps. Erskine cleared her throat. “As soon as you understand what it is that you’re offering. And as soon as we know that you’re capable of giving it. Forgive me, but you just dropped out of the sky. You say you’re of age?”

“I’m eighteen, as of two months ago.” She pulled what looked like an Italian driver’s licence out of her handbag. “You don’t know who I am, or why I came here. It’s easily explained, and then we can proceed.” She unwound her silk scarf and regarded us all with great composure. “Had my father not changed his will, I would have been the Maid of Kerra. It’s a courtesy title accorded to the daughter of a laird. As things stand, I own the place. I became aware of this only yesterday morning, when a very handsome if thuggish person broke into the grounds of my academy in Lago di Bracciano, where I’ve been more or less immured since I was sixteen. He gave my classmates and lady tutors a deeply scandalised thrill, and then he told me that my brother was at death’s door for want of—as you put it—a handful of cells. And that I should call our family lawyers.”

Erskine finished examining the licence and handed it back. “Which you did.”

“Which I did, and was told that, on my eighteenth birthday, the whole of the Calder estate had passed into my hands. My mother had been holding it in trust for me, and somehow failed to notify me of the change—perhaps because she’d illegally sold off a large portion of it to an oil company named NorthEx.” Her expression became disdainful. “I shall deal with that once we’re done here.”

Erskine clearly thought she was insane. So did I, but it was in the divine, imperious manner I recognised from Viv, and made me want to throw myself at her feet.

“I’m not sure I follow,” Erskine said. “You’ve never met your brother in your life. Yet you’ve dropped everything—presumably left your teachers and family enraged—and flown here on the word of a handsome thug.”

She lifted an eyebrow. She had Viv’s sense of humour too. “Well, he was very persuasive. In any event—”

“In any event,” Alfred interrupted, no longer able to contain himself, “the girl did rightly. An outsider cannot understand the ties that bind Calder to Calder, where the blood is pure and the heart good.” He got up and came to stand beside her. “Isn’t that right, ma’am?”

She patted the hand he’d laid on her shoulder as if she’d known him for years. “My steward speaks with emotion, but he’s correct. I’ve been deceived, Dr. Erskine. My mother has used her greed and her morbid fear of the Calder family illness to keep me away from the people I should have loved. She never even told me that I had a…” she glanced at Viv, faltering for the first time, “…that I had a grown-up, clever brother. I know why you’re questioning me. You want to be sure I’m capable of giving consent. I assure you, I am. I intend to do exactly as I want from now on, for the rest of my life.”

“Does that include having a litre of bone marrow harvested from your hipbone under general anaesthetic?”

Cressida’s eyes gleamed. “Absolutely. Will that solve Vivian’s problems?”

“It’s a tentative first step.” Erskine spread her hands. “And very far from my own expertise and the normal reach of this hospital. I’ll let Dr. Sondheim take it from here.”

Sondheim looked more or less bewildered by his introduction to Highland aristocracy, but picked up his cue. “Certainly,” he said, his accent and his tan exotic in the deepening Edinburgh twilight, cold rain tapping on the window behind him. “All I can give you is a simplified explanation, and I wouldn’t be here at all had not Vivian—Mr. Calder—left clear permissions to try any new treatments available to get him off life support, and to benefit future Drescher’s patients. I can extract stromal cells from Miss Calder’s bone marrow. Those are stem cells, and in a fast-acting experimental culture, they’ll differentiate into neural cells, which are the ones we need to support Vivian’s failing motor neurons.”

“How fast-acting?” Cressida was listening avidly. I was pretty sure she’d have unzipped her elegant skirt to let Sondheim get started there and then. “He doesn’t have much time.”

“Almost none, or I wouldn’t be taking the risks with him I’m about to describe. First off, and in his favour, we have you. There’s a thirty-percent chance he won’t reject allogeneic transplantation from a sister, and that might not sound great, but he’s too sick to withstand the suppression of his immune system we’d have to undertake otherwise. Second—also on our side—we don’t have to spend two weeks growing enough stem cells for the transplant, as we would when treating ALS. Drescher’s is incredibly responsive to small numbers of cells, if it’s going to work at all. The extraction won’t hurt you. You’ll be back on your feet within a few hours.”

He fell silent. He didn’t seem like a man who would hesitate much over bad news, and into the whispering silence around Viv’s bed rushed everything he didn’t want to say. The things that weren’t in our favour. The things that
would
hurt.

My voice sounded rusty and unused when I spoke up. “How do we get these cells into Viv?”

“Well, that’s the reason why I’ve made the journey in person. Any good team of lab technicians could grow the cells we need. But recently I’ve pioneered a technique for infusing them directly into the upper spinal cord, to support the motor neurons that control breathing. I’m afraid we’ll need to remove the bone surrounding the cord, and wire his spine together afterwards, inserting screws and plates to hold it secure. If he lives, he’ll heal fast, but—”

“Dr. Sondheim?” Cressida got to her feet. One imperious hand was stretched out towards Sondheim, who looked at her questioningly. “Do be quiet, please. Mallory needs to go outside.”

I opened my mouth to argue. I was fine, and she’d made me sound like a dog that needed to be let into the garden. My face was cold, though, my armpits drenched with sweat. She took hold of me by the wrist and towed me out into the corridor. “There,” she said, indicating the chair by the alcove. “Sit down.”

“What for? I can’t leave Viv alone. I can’t…”

“He’s not alone. And tell me you’re not about to throw up or faint.”

There was every chance I’d do both. I curled up, trying to breathe the visceral reactions away. She crouched in front of me, and I looked into the face of the lioness. “I’m sorry. But…they’re gonna do
what
to him?”

“They’re going to take one last crack at making him better. That’s all you need to know.”

“It sounds like butchery.”

“Think about it. He must have lived under the shadow of this disease his whole life. This treatment won’t just fix him up for a while. If it works, it’ll make him
better
. Forever.” She knocked a strand of hair off her brow, the gesture so like her brother’s that I had to bite back a cry. “How long have you known him?”

“It’ll sound ridiculous. Ten days.”

“Well, I’ve travelled across Europe for him, and I’ve never even met him. Quite compelling, is he?”

“You have no idea.”

“Keep that in mind, then. You might have years with him, not days.”

I chuckled roughly. “Why are you comforting
me
? You’re only a kid, and you’ve got to have this horrible thing done.”

“Wouldn’t you do it yourself if you could?”

In a heartbeat. I was gutted that I couldn’t, sickened. “I don’t think I’ve ever been jealous of someone’s DNA before.”

“That’s just an accident. You’ll be the one to pick up the pieces afterwards, I promise you that. I’d be a rotten nurse.”