“I apologized for that, you know, Mum,” said Richard. “And it was fifteen years ago.”
“I know, love, and I forgave you almost immediately, but the stain is still there. Now, Myfanwy, we’d love to have you over for dinner some evening.”
“Oh, gosh, that sounds really nice,” I fumbled, taking a sip of champagne cocktail to conceal my surprise. There’s very little socializing among the Court members; in fact, it’s almost entirely limited to business lunches and the Christmas party. And I wasn’t entirely sure how it would fit in with my scheduled amnesia.
“We should invite Alrich for dinner as well,” she said. “He looks too thin.” I almost spat my drink out at the thought, but settled for choking uncontrollably. Phillipa patted me on the back and handed me a napkin. After that, I cautiously sipped my beverage, listening to normal people dissect the lives of my very unusual peers. Richard remarked that the Gestalts were peculiar, and they both agreed that Gubbins was a lovely man. Then Richard’s twin, Luke, came over, and I somehow found myself cocooned in the heart of the Eckhart family. As I listened to them squabble and chatter, I grew increasingly maudlin.
It was inevitable, really, that the party was going to be awkward. At least for Gestalt, Gubbins, and myself—the three members of the Court who had been raised at the Estate. Wattleman predated it. Farrier, Grantchester, and Eckhart had come into their powers late in life. And Alrich, well, he’d been doing this dance for more than a century. They all knew what it was like to be a person rather than a tool. But those of us who had been brought up to be assets first, warriors second, and people if there was ever some spare time scrambled to make normal conversation.
What could we talk about, other than work? That one of Gestalt’s bodies had recently finished a yearlong leave of absence to America to get a certificate in administration while the other three simultaneously ran operations all over the British Isles? That Gubbins had been suffering from massive depression since he’d sent five men and seven women to their deaths in an apartment in Vatican City? As for me, there was always the fascinating topic of the impending death of my personality—as machinated by someone in this very room!
I looked at these people and envied all of them, even the leaking baby. No, especially the leaking baby. Normal people were free to go about their daily lives, with their petty trials and tribulations, secure in the knowledge that the supernatural wouldn’t bother them. Christ, they didn’t even have to believe in the supernatural. That was for us to concern ourselves with. And the other members of the Court—the ones who sat there, drinking their beverages and eating their canapés—even they had more freedom than I did. So far as they knew, the future would be good—better even than the present. But I knew that my life would end soon, in the rain.
The Checquy is not a family. Even in the most dysfunctional of families, you don’t send your brothers and sisters off to dangerous places and make them face atrocities, knowing that they’ll probably die in pain and fear. You don’t take the bodies of your older siblings and have them dissected—every piece cataloged and destroyed—and then leave them with no more memorial than a name in a file.
No, we’re not a family.
But we are supposed to be a team. We may not like one another, but we should respect and be loyal to one another. When you go to the Estate, that’s the only thing they promise you. That within the Checquy, you can trust those around you.
Looking around at my comrades, I felt more betrayed than ever. I’d always known that gatherings like these were a pleasant fiction, but tonight’s pleasantries were an outright lie. As we smiled at one another and chatted about the weather, one of my colleagues was planning to destroy me.
Who would it be? I wondered, as I watched them. Who had the power to take my memories?
Farrier? Could she have me erased? Her ability to stroll into one’s mind and tinker as she pleased made her the most likely candidate, but she owed me. My research into her life had turned up some fascinating loose ends, which I’d pursued. She’d made dire enemies in the last British military conflict, and recently they had succeeded in tracking her down. In the past week, they had tried to have her family killed, and I had stopped them by unleashing the Barghests on them. Illegally. She’d acknowledged her debt to me, and since I’d so recently proven my loyalty to her, I didn’t see why the old bird would want to attack me.
Alrich? No one knew exactly what his powers consisted of or what their limits were. We know vampires have strange mental capabilities, including mesmerizing their prey. But why would he bother with me? The files on him were enormous, and his fingers were delicately placed in any number of dirty little pies, but his actions had all been in the interests of the Checquy. There was never a hint that he was involved in anything treacherous.
It was the same for all of them. Crimes might have been committed and subsequently well hidden, but I could not find any indication that they were motivated by anything other than the normal nastiness of humanity. For all my research, I’m not finding any answers.
Love,
Me
37
Myfanwy didn’t even have the breath to scream, although she wanted to, very badly.
It’s like being born, only in reverse, she thought before panic began to set in. Around her, flesh and muscle pulsated, crushing her. Her skin burned, and her senses, not the ones everyone else had but the ones that came with being Myfanwy Thomas, were overwhelmed.
The impulses of dozens of nervous systems screamed in her brain and fought against one another. It was reminiscent of the colony in Bath, but there the minds and bodies had been anesthetized so they were relatively willing. Here, they were being lashed, enslaved, forced together. And the cube was trying to do the same thing to her.
Stay calm, she thought. Don’t panic. She tried to remember what she had done in Bath. She’d probed, hadn’t she? Delved into the mass and read what it was. Right, so she should center herself and do that again now. With a ghastly effort, she cut the screams and conflict out of her perception and delicately, cautiously reached out with her consciousness to touch and assess the enemy.
It was like putting your lips to a straw and having a river poured into your mouth. Just before Myfanwy was washed away, she realized that she was sensing not just what the bodies were doing but everything they had ever done. Pent-up memory, agonizing in its desperation, flooded into her.
Every inch of Myfanwy’s body was suddenly subject to all the sensations that the people in that police station had known. She felt fire licking her fingers while they had ice pressed against them. Her hair was torn out, and her scalp lovingly massaged. She strained to see light, and she was dazzled. Every color permeated her rods and cones. Her lungs took their first breath, and she drowned. Hands and cotton and silk and mouths and leather and water and fingernails touched her skin, and she took a fist to the jaw and a slap to the cheek and a caress along her flank. She tasted spice and sugar and peaches and vomit and the bitterness of burned steak. She choked, and smelled perfume. She made love while she was fucked.
Anyone else might have lost themselves entirely, but she was Myfanwy Thomas, and she had been born abruptly into herself. She knew everything she had experienced in her brief life, and she could separate her own sensations from what was being foisted onto her. Her thoughts floated on top, and she wrenched herself out of the morass.
Okay, so I won’t be doing that again. The whole dizzying experience had taken maybe a second, but in that moment Myfanwy had lived a few lifetimes. Without thinking, she opened her mouth, gasping for air, and felt something squirming against her lips. She clamped her jaws shut.
This jolted her into action. Fuck this! she thought, outraged. She couldn’t scream or strike out with her fists, but her mind launched a wave that would have frozen an army in its tracks. Around her, muscles rippled in shock and lay briefly quiescent. She probed, hard and fast, and found something that made sense. She silently blessed Pawns Motha and Carmine. Thanks to their descriptions, she k
new, vaguely, the layout of her surroundings. The fact that she had little air left in her lungs made thinking difficult. It meant that she’d have to work fast, especially since the mind controlling the cube seemed to be recovering.
It wasn’t like touching a normal person, or a great number of normal people. Conflicting impulses and the patchwork welding of body parts made for a confusing space to navigate. Still, Myfanwy managed to pinpoint the place where all the instructions were coming from and did her best to cut it off from everything else. She remembered a trick Thomas had described and tried to pay the organism back by flooding it with sensations. She now had a fairly ample library to draw upon, and so she gathered up her strength and pushed out a rush of impressions, straining to overwhelm her enemy. But the brain absorbed the information easily, channeling it and distributing it among the array of lobes it had harvested from the victims. Damn it! she thought. That attack, combined with her efforts to isolate the brain, had exhausted her, and she felt her defenses faltering.
Myfanwy’s lungs were burning. Oh God, she thought. Help me! Help help! Soft tendrils stroked against her ears and eyes, and she felt something pushing up into her nose. She was fading away. Help! There was no help. And she was out of breath.
As she lost consciousness, she could distantly feel her body convulsing. Her nervous system was being invaded. And then, just as she had lost command of her limbs, she lost command of her powers. They roared out of her, chaotic, wild. A torrent of a thousand different orders and impulses, projected from her panicking brain and tearing into the meat that held her.
All around her, flesh juddered and changed its grip, levering her body up into a standing position. The tendrils stopped shoving into her nose, and the hideous pressure eased somewhat. Distantly she heard a sizzling noise, and then she was no longer being held up by the cube but was taking her weight on her own legs. She was drawing in air that smelled of blood. Her eyes fluttered open, and she could see a dim pink light that brightened as the walls of meat peeled away.
The cube was dissolving around her, breaking down into fluid with a sizzle like shaken-up Coke. The smell of acid burned her nose and slapped her back into full consciousness. There was a clatter as a framework of bones fell to the floor. She saw a mass of gray tissue that she recognized as brain just before it dissolved away into slime. She heard a sound behind her, and, dazed, she looked over her shoulder.
“Rook Thomas,” said her large bodyguard, the one who had not been yanked into the cube. He was standing in the doorway of the police station and behind him were some wide-eyed members of the Checquy team, including Ingrid and Li’l Pawn Alan.
“Rook Thomas, take my coat,” the bodyguard said.
“Hmm?” she said, before realizing that she was naked and covered in body fluids. Thank God I didn’t turn around, she thought as the bodyguard splashed toward her and draped his coat around her shoulders.
“Rook Thomas, I think I should carry you out before my shoes dissolve,” he said gently. Myfanwy looked down and saw that she was standing barefoot on a little islet of muscle mass. All around her, there was a broad pool of caustic fluid that was wrinkling the leather of the bodyguard’s boots. Clumps of skin and bones were scattered about the room, along with a few bleached corpses. She nodded and he scooped her up like a baby, cradling her. He walked hurriedly, and after they emerged from the building and went down the steps, someone else took her while the bodyguard shucked off his boots. A trickle of fluid was coming down the stairs, but the image that stayed in Myfanwy’s mind was the tiny little island that had kept her free of the acid, perfectly placed under her feet.
Things were a blur for a little time after that. A new incident trailer was on the way, but the emergency room of a local hospital had been commandeered, and Myfanwy received a gentle but thorough shower and resisted the suggestion that they shave her head bare. Instead, the Checquy doctors washed her hair with strange chemicals and warned that it could lose its color and might need to be dyed. Any other day, Myfanwy might have balked at being showered in the presence of several interested people, but the medical tests of the morning had kind of inured her to being looked at. She had then been installed in yet another backless paper gown—her fourth of the day. She pulled it down to her waist while a Checquy nurse very gently swabbed her skin, which was itchy and peeling.
“Rook Thomas, we’ve still got the area cordoned off and are in the process of contacting the families of the civilians,” said Pawn Watson. Cyrus was still at the site, overseeing the release of a massive cloud of black smoke. By the time the forensic team finished with the scene, Cyrus would have created a very controlled, intense fire that would cover up a multitude of sins. It would also explain why the civilians’ bodies could not be provided to their relatives. At the moment, Checquy scientists were wandering around with various pieces of equipment, changing their waders at regular intervals when the rubber began to melt.
“That’s great,” said Myfanwy dreamily. She looked down and saw that the nurse was carefully rubbing off the dead skin and putting it away in test tubes.
“The Rookery is saying the fire will probably need to be explained as the work of some sort of lunatic arsonist,” said Watson. “But they will make it very clear that he was unaffiliated with any group and that he had a long history of mental illness. No mention of anything that is unmentionable.” The dour Scottish Pawn did not smile exactly but managed to look at Myfanwy in a way that suggested she was amused by the cover story.
“Marvelous,” said Myfanwy. “Oh, and don’t forget to get this coat back to my large bodyguard.” She looked around for him, but it turned out he was outside the door with Li’l Pawn Alan so as to give her some privacy. Which left her with just Ingrid and Pawns Watson and Motha, a new female bodyguard who was plump and in her sixties, and the Checquy nurse.
“He’s not going to want it back,” said Ingrid.
“Why?”
“Um, it seems that the acids you were covered in were exceptionally corrosive,” said Watson. “They ate large portions of the leather.”
“They ate the coat, but they didn’t eat me?” asked Myfanwy.
“Yeah, that’s why they’re collecting all the skin samples,” said Motha. “And they kept all the water they used to wash you. The doctors are hypothesizing that your powers protected you from the enzymes in the acid—it was organic, and you were actually in the process of denaturing it.”
“How?” Myfanwy said, confused. She hadn’t even thought of attacking the acid—she’d been too busy trying to kill the brain. Oh, and dying. That had taken up some of her attention.
“It looks like your immune system kicked in to protect you,” said Watson. “And not even that fully—which is why you look like you’ve gotten sunburned.”
“Amazing,” marveled Myfanwy. “So—wait a minute! What about the other Checquy members who were dragged in? My bodyguard? Steele?” Everyone suddenly looked grim. “What happened?”
“They didn’t make it,” said Ingrid in a quiet voice. Myfanwy remembered the horribly bleached bodies lying in the remains.
“Oh God,” she breathed, and stared at the images on the inside of her head. “They were eaten.”
“It’s only through the sheerest of luck that you survived, Rook Thomas,” said Motha gently. “To be honest, much longer and the acid would have started to do some real damage. If you hadn’t destroyed the cube from inside, well…” The young Pawn trailed off in awed silence.
Well, Christ, it’s not like it was easy, thought Myfanwy. I was on the very brink of getting broken down for spare parts. She didn’t feel any real triumph over her survival, just a melancholy over the deaths of all those people, people whose memories she had experienced.
Then another, insidious thought occurred to her. Who knew if the women in this room were all loyal to the Checquy? Even Ingrid had not yet been examined for Grafter implants. This was a crucial development. If it was communicated to the Grafters that Myfanwy could destroy their
weapons, they would waste no time in terminating her. They wouldn’t need to risk using their own biological weapons on her. A perfectly mundane bullet from a perfectly mundane gun would do the job. Regardless of the skinless psycho’s threats against Bronwyn, she would need to communicate to the Court the truth about the Grafters’ involvement in these two attacks. But first she needed to know whom she could trust.
“Ingrid, how far have the medical tests of the Court progressed?”
“Let me check,” said Ingrid, and she turned away with her mobile phone. While she checked up on the details back in London, Myfanwy had another thought.
“Pawn Motha, you saw the internals of the cube—can you tell me how much of the civilians’ brains were left? I remember your saying that some parts had been excised.” The Pawn closed her eyes, remembering what she had seen.
“Well, they’d been truncated, obviously,” said the Pawn. “As far as I could tell, there’d been some selective lobotomizing—designed to remove the parts of the brain that deal with initiative. I’m thinking the idea was to leave the central brain with all the storage capacity without having to deal with individual impulses. The crew back at the site are examining the remains, but the acid is hampering any meaningful study.”
“But you’re saying that most likely the personalities of the civilians were erased or destroyed before I got reeled in, right?” said Myfanwy intently.
“I don’t know for sure,” confessed Motha. “But that would make sense.”
That’s definitely the kind of thing I would expect from the Grafters, thought Myfanwy. Especially that skinless bastard. But I like to think it means I didn’t kill those people. And if there was still some part of them in that thing, then I hope they are at peace now.
“Rook Thomas,” said Ingrid, covering the mouthpiece with her hand. “Security Chief Clovis is on the line. He says that Chevalier Eckhart has been tested and came through with flying colors. He won’t tell me who’s being tested now.”