Stiletto (68 page)

“I don’t know what that means,” said Odette, “but I am willing to bet it is accurate.”

“Mind if I sit here?”

“Please.” The Pawn sat down next to her and ordered a gin martini. “I see you made it through the Blinding unscathed,” said Odette. “I’m glad.”

“As luck would have it, it happened on my day off,” said Sophie. “I was at home, doing some gardening. So what have you been doing these past few days to exhaust you so?”

“Performing various surgeries at gunpoint and sleeping in a warehouse in an inflatable kiddie pool of slime.”

“That would... probably do it,” said Jelfs. Odette smiled wryly. “You were in the middle of the fog, right? That’s what I heard. It must have been terrifying.”

“It
was
scary,” said Odette, “although I got knocked out for most of it. You know what the worst part was, though? The part I’m having nightmares about? It’s something that didn’t even happen.”

“What?” asked Sophie, looking confused. “What do you mean?”

“When it was happening, all I could think of was my little brother. I kept worrying whether the fog had hit him. He doesn’t have any implants, you know. No protections. He’s just a kid. I looked around and saw all those people lying in the streets in agony, and the thought of it happening to him just, it just —” She broke off and wiped her eyes with a napkin, then took a drink. “He’s innocent in all this. When I woke up, it was the first thing I thought of. And I keep playing it over in my mind. It’s the worst thing that could happen.”

“It didn’t happen, though.”

“I know,” said Odette. “I tell myself that. He was fine. But it’s still the thing that makes me sick to my stomach.”

*

In a darkened room, a doctor removed the coverings from Felicity’s closed eyes and gently washed her eyelids clean before letting her open them. A faint light glimmered in her gaze, and she could make out the doctor in front of her, so she knew she could see, but still her fingers were tight on the arms of her chair. As he peered into her pupils and photographed her retinas, she was secretly braced for the doctor’s scream of horror that it had all gone wrong, that she would go blind, that she must be put down. But instead he sighed with pleasure.

“Everything looks fine.”

“Really?”

“Perfect,” he said reassuringly. “No sign of any injuries or abnormalities at all.” He showed her the pictures, which were of no help except to establish that the inside of her eye looked like a huge orange globe, and then gave her a mirror. As far as she could tell, her eyes looked as they always had — no shift in color, no odd pulsating vessels, no impression of bulging or being about to burst.

Then she peered closely at the rest of herself and admitted that she’d come through it fairly well. The redness of her skin had faded completely, and far more quickly than the radio address had promised.
Of course, not everyone has access to a Grafter-sent gift basket of bath salts
.

The next morning, a car came and drove her back to the hotel. As it took her through the city, Felicity looked out with wary interest. The last time she had seen these streets, they’d been ghostly and silent, with people moaning or lying still on the ground and the fog swirling about. Now, London had returned to normal. The crowds were bustling, and if there was wariness in the air, at least people weren’t hiding in their homes.

The hotel had recovered its haughtiness and was open for business despite being practically ground zero for the outbreak of the fog. The doormen even stood a little more stiffly at attention, as if to say that an inexplicable, possibly terrorism-based disaster was absolutely no reason to let standards slip. One of the lifts had apparently been commandeered for the exclusive use of the Checquy, because as soon she entered the lobby, she saw the guard standing by the doors politely but firmly direct an elderly couple to a different lift. He might be dressed in knickerbockers and a witty allusion to a newsboy’s cap, but he’d been in her class at the Estate and could grow razor-sharp tusks from the sides of his jaw and unbreakable horns from his forehead in moments. She’d once caught him cheating off her math test.

“Kevin!” she exclaimed.

“Fliss!” he exclaimed back, then he put on a sober, serious face and spoke in the respectful tones suited to a man disguised in the distinguished but ridiculous uniform of a hotel employee. “How you doing? I heard you got caught in the manifestation.”

“Right. Is that all you heard, Kev?” she asked as the lift rose.

“I heard you kicked the shit out of some muppet who managed to get away.”

“Anything else?”

“I heard you got the very best treatment in the whole wide world,” he said meaningfully. His eyes flicked upward for a moment.

“And is that a problem?” she asked levelly.

“Not for me,” he said.

“For anyone else?” she asked. He shrugged. “Yeah, I know how it is.”

“They’ll get over it. Just don’t get involved with anything weird,” he advised.

“Course, ’cause nothing weird is likely to happen. My life’s just full of unweirdness at the moment. In fact, it’s full of unweirdness generally.” The lift doors slid open.

“Hey, at least you’ll have fun at the party tonight,” he said encouragingly.

Oh, right,
thought Felicity.
The reception. Shit.

A note on the table led Felicity to the fridge, where there actually was a little parfait waiting for her.

Well, that’s cute,
she thought. Admittedly, it contained kiwifruit, which she loathed, but she appreciated the sentiment enough to choke it down. She settled herself on the couch with the parfait and brooded about the prospect of the reception. In the whirl of everything, she had clean forgotten about it.

It’s probably ridiculous that I would prefer to fight that bastard in the fog again than go to this bloody function.
But it was the truth. Felicity did not enjoy fancy dos. The evening with the Court at Hill Hall had been the second-worst event of her life, surpassed only by the death of her teammates, but still worse than the time she’d had two teeth backhanded out of her head by an elderly woman in a poke bonnet, or the time she was stung into unconsciousness by an ambulatory fern, or even the time she almost had her head pulled off by an insane straw golem that had been wandering around Hampshire pulling people’s heads off.

Couldn’t Leliefeld have ordered me to have an extra day of bed rest?
she thought wistfully. As she sulked and ate her stupid kiwifruit parfait, the door opened and Leliefeld walked in.

“Hello,” said the Grafter cautiously.

“Hi,” said Felicity. “It would have killed you to botch the surgery just a little?”

“What?”

“Never mind,” she said grimly. “Thanks for the parfait. And, you know, the gift of sight.”

“My pleasure,” said Leliefeld. “In truth, keeping Alessio off the parfait was the harder task. So, you’re settled back in?”

“I am on the couch with the shattered remnants of a dessert,” said Felicity. “What more could I ask for? I haven’t even looked in my room.” She narrowed her eyes. “No one went in my room, right?”

“No. We were allowed back in the hotel only after two nights of sleeping on cots in a warehouse.”

“I expect it’s one of our backup business-continuity facilities,” said Felicity. “There are a few dotted around the country. In case of disaster, they can transfer us there to keep doing our work. At least they didn’t put you in the abandoned mine in Cornwall.”

“Yes, I count myself very lucky, but the place we stayed was also a warehouse for tractor parts. The first morning, I almost got run over by a forklift while standing in the queue for the breakfast buffet.”

“Our accountants would never let a warehouse lie fallow,” said Felicity sagely. “Budgets are tight, and they can’t really offer voluntary redundancies to Checquy operatives. You can’t just tell someone whose shadow is a portal to Spain that there’s no room in the budget for him and he’ll need to move into the private sector.”

“It’s nice to know I won’t have to worry about job security, then,” said Leliefeld.

“So, you’ve spent the past couple of days hanging out in a warehouse?”

“No, we’ve just been sleeping in the warehouse. Grootvader Ernst volunteered Marcel’s and my services to assist with the fog fallout. After I operated on your eyes, I was asked to help analyze the traces of chemicals they’ve recovered from other victims.”

“And?”

“And I have earned an undeserved reputation for genius. Well, slightly undeserved.”

“What are you talking about?” asked Felicity.

“I was able to give a lot of useful insights,” said Leliefeld. “The Checquy scientists thought it was because I have astounding expertise. Which I do. But it was because I’ve seen this stuff before.”

“Well, it’s Grafter-made,” Felicity said, shrugging.

“Yeah, but I couldn’t let anyone know that. Anyway, the toxin’s not pleasant. It normally has to be processed inside a living creature before it’s released.”

“That’s... disgusting.”

“It’s science,” said Leliefeld. “Everything’s disgusting. But I’ll admit, this is kind of especially disgusting. The host has to be substantially adapted and needs to be
swimming
with antirejection products and antibodies. We’ve always used swine or sheep, but I think that homeless-looking guy Simon was with must have been the delivery system. I have no idea how they managed to get him ready in such a short time, though. It takes months to reach the appropriate levels of chemicals and hormones, and as far as I know, you can’t just pump them into the host.”

“He was the recipient of an organ transplant,” said Felicity. “All the abductees were.”

The Grafter’s jaw dropped. “That’s brilliant,” she said. “You find very few animals who are given new organs, but people? That’s very clever.”

“Yes, very smart,” said Felicity.

“So, after that, Marcel and I were in surgery working on people’s eyes. Apparently, a small percentage of the populace suffered a horrendous allergic reaction to the fog. We got flown to a few different cities with various large guards escorting us.”

“They assigned you new bodyguards?” said Felicity, feeling an unexpected jolt of jealousy. Leliefeld was
her
charge.

“I don’t know that
bodyguards
is the right word,” said Leliefeld. “We were performing the operations with guns pointed at us.”

“Oh. Well, did they go all right?”

“I think so,” said Leliefeld. “We had to fly in several punnets of eyes from Bruges and Seville.”

“I don’t know why I ask you questions when I know the answers will inevitably make me feel nauseous,” remarked Felicity.

“It wasn’t that bad,” said Leliefeld. “I mean, installing the new eyes was long and tedious, but it took almost as much time to make sure that the colors matched their previous eyes.”

“Is it such a big deal if there’s a little discrepancy?” asked Felicity. “People aren’t as observant as you think. I know of at least one situation where the Checquy successfully replaced someone’s station wagon without his noticing after the original was turned into a column of chutney during a manifestation.”

“Well, cars are one thing,” said Leliefeld, “but people tend to pay a lot more attention to themselves. It’s going to be awkward enough that they’ll no longer need glasses without their eyes suddenly going from blue to brown.”

“How many people were you able to help?”

“Quite a few,” said Leliefeld. “There are going to be a lot of feel-good miracle stories in the press. Anyway, rest assured, no one went in your room, although seriously, I was very tempted.”

“Why?” asked Felicity warily. All the classified documents and files she’d been given were locked in the room safe, but she still didn’t like the idea of anyone sifting through her stuff.

“Because I wanted to see the dress they got you for the reception tonight!” Felicity stared at her blankly. This sentiment was even more alien than the idea of carrying scalpels around in one’s thigh. “Aren’t you even mildly curious about it?”

Be diplomatic,
thought Felicity, and she managed to pull her upper lip back from her teeth in a sort of approximation of enthusiasm. “Do you want to go take a look?” she said finally.

*

They regarded the dress in respectful silence. It was the kind of respectful silence heard at ceremonies held to commemorate disasters.

“I’m no expert in dresses,” said Felicity finally, “but that... that’s not a good dress, is it?”

“I know what I
want
to say,” said Leliefeld, “but I am mindful of my role as a diplomatic envoy here to make peace between our peoples.”

“Just say it.”

“Look, I’m a trained surgeon.”

“Yeah?” said Felicity.

“And as someone who has seen living forms changed and twisted beyond recognition...” She trailed off awkwardly.

“Yeah?”

“I hate to say it, but this dress is the worst crime against nature I have ever seen in my life.”

Felicity cringed a little. The dress lay on the bed, malignant and resentful, like an angry jellyfish. It was technically an evening gown, in the same way that dirt is technically edible. The benighted designer was apparently committed to the principle of “accentuate the negative” and had made the assumption that whoever wore it would have cubical breasts. There were folds and pleats where God had decreed that no folds or pleats ought ever to be, and some sort of structure had been built into the back, giving the impression of a prolapsed bustle. The color could perhaps have been described as sky blue, but it was the blue of a sky that would drive even the cheeriest and most tuneful of novice nuns to slash her wrists. It was a blue that had given up.

“Did you offend someone in the quartermaster’s office?” asked Leliefeld carefully.

“I don’t know,” said Felicity. “I think maybe it’s intended to establish that I’m there in a functionary capacity.”

“It certainly does that,” said Leliefeld. “It practically screams ‘duenna-slash-janitor.’”

“Perhaps they were worried I would overshadow the higher-ranking guests,” suggested Felicity.