Stiletto

by Daniel O'Malley

  “Where are you going?” asked Felicity, her eyes narrowed. She had poked her head out of the bedroom before Odette had even put her hand on the doorknob.

  “Just next door,” said Odette. “To see Marie—the head of security. I’ll be right back.” The Pawn looked at her for a long minute, and then nodded her head.

  Damn right, you’re nodding your head, thought Odette with a flash of irritation. You don’t get to tell me where I can and can’t go. Especially since I’ve already been told I can’t go anywhere.

  Felicity stepped out of the bedroom and watched her go, biting her lip. She had no experience as a bodyguard, so she had no idea how paranoid she ought to be. But there are guards all over this floor, including at the lifts and the fire stairs, she told herself. So she’s not going to be wandering out into the city.

  That said, she and I are going to have to sit down and go over the rules, she resolved. She is not going off this floor without me. No harm is supposed to come to her.

  Unless I bring it myself.

  And that was the real issue floating in the back of her mind. At any moment, she might get the call to kill that girl. Felicity knew how to do it, but she’d never been asked to kill someone with whom she was sharing a front door. Felicity was firm that she was not going to get attached to this woman.

  It helped, however, that she was not predisposed to like Odette Leliefeld anyway. Quite aside from the whole Grafter issue, she gave off the vibe of a rich, spoiled Eurotrash girl. Maybe it was the fact that her outfit cost as much as Felicity’s entire wardrobe, or maybe it was the way she seemed completely at ease in the ridiculously luxurious hotel suite. It wasn’t that Felicity would take pleasure in killing her, but disliking the Grafter might take some of the sting out of doing it if she had to.

  Then she turned to see Alessio looking at her.

  And he’s a weird little guy too, she thought. According to the files, he hadn’t had any surgeries yet, although apparently there were some Grafter-type chemicals and inoculations already in his system. Jesus, I hope I don’t have to kill him too. He didn’t even look like he’d committed to puberty, let alone evil.

  “Yes?” she said.

  “Have you finished unpacking?”

  “Yes.”

  “Do you want me to show you around?” he asked.

  “I suppose that’s a good idea,” said Felicity. I should reconnoiter the place.

  “Well, to begin with, this is your room,” he announced grandly, heading toward the room she’d just been unpacking in.

  “You don’t ever come in here,” she told him flatly, shutting the door. Establish boundaries.

  “What if I need to use the lavatory, and my sister is in the other one?” he asked cunningly.

  “Then you hold it. I am obliged to prevent harm from coming to your sister,” said Felicity. “No one said anything about you.”

  “I see,” he said. “Well, then, this is the sitting room.” He gestured around at the room they were currently occupying. “You may be familiar with it, since you’ve already been in here for quite a few minutes.”

  “Yes,” said Felicity, “but I haven’t taken a close look.” It really was a beautiful place, large, bright, and modern. There was a dining area with a polished table large enough to host a fairly big dinner party. The sofas were plush, the sort you could sink into for a good long hibernation. An enormous television was attempting to hang discreetly on the wall and failing miserably. Glamorous coffee-table books lay artfully displayed on glossy coffee tables. You felt more sophisticated just for being in the room.

  The current occupants had added a few touches, however, which detracted a little from the fashion-shoot vibe of the place. Distinctly unglamorous copies of anatomical textbooks, bristling with bookmarks, lay splayed amongst the (seemingly aghast) coffee-table books. There were partially filled-out government forms on the dining table. A small fern in a pot trailed tendrils of green and glittering copper. And on a sideboard stood a large clear plastic box containing a thick layer of wood shavings and a pair of flamboyantly patterned . . .

  “Mice,” said Felicity.

  “Those are mine,” said Alessio.

  “I didn’t think that a hotel would let you bring pets,” said Felicity. “My dog is with a sitter.”

  “I told them that these were my seeing-eye mice.”

  “What?” asked Felicity, looking at him.

  “Not really,” said Alessio. “And they’re not pets, they’re part of my studies.”

  “How did you get them into the suite?”

  “They’re mice,” said the boy. “It’s not like I had to smuggle in a pair of aardvarks. And besides, in a hotel this expensive, they’re used to privileged guests bringing their pets. If it’s not some celebutante with her Chihuahua, it’s a movie star with his angora goat or a pop musician with a large man on a leash.”

  “All right, so what are their names?” asked Felicity. She was trying not to be intimidated by the fact that the kid was obviously much more familiar with a life of luxury than she was. She peered down at the rodents, which were extremely peculiar-looking. Their left sides were pure glossy black while their right sides were a flat, spotless white. The line that divided the colors could have been drawn with a ruler. Their right eyes were red, their left eyes black. Apart from their chromatic bisection, they appeared to be perfectly normal and were engaged in the traditional mouse activities of wandering around and squeaking.

  “They’re Mouse A, and Mouse A(i),” said Alessio, somehow managing to convey through speech the presence of parentheses and a lowercase Roman numeral one.

  “Catchy. Explain.”

  “Mouse A is the latest in a long line of mice that has been bred by the Broederschap. They’re designed to be highly distinctive in appearance.”

  “And what do they do?”

  “The mice? You’re looking at it. They run around, they squeak. They’re mice. But Mouse A(i) is one of my assignments,” said Alessio. “I’ve grown him as a clone of Mouse A. He’s a copy.”

  “You copied a mouse?” said Felicity.

  “Good, isn’t it?”

  “How?” asked Felicity, unable to take her eyes off the Grafter-mice. She kept expecting them to extrude talons and antlers, break through the plastic of their enclosure, and scuttle off in search of cheese and human blood.

  “Do you have any knowledge of microbiology and cellular formatting?”

  “No.”

  “Are you interested in learning about them?”

  “God, no,” said Felicity.

  “In that case, I took some mouse blood, put it in a tub of magic Grafter-slime, added some starch, and a new mouse grew out of it,” said Alessio.

  “How do you know which mouse is which?” asked Felicity.

  “At the moment, I don’t,” said Alessio in a satisfied tone. “Not by looking. No one does. Mouse A(i) is a perfect copy.”

  “So, could you copy a human being?” said Felicity.

  “Yeah,” said Alessio. “I mean, I couldn’t, but the Broederschap could.” She looked at him questioningly. “That description about the slime and the starch, that was a drastic simplification. Mouse A(i) has taken me months of work. A person would be a lot more difficult to make. And, yes, you can make a copy of a person, but you can’t make a copy of memories. Mouse A(i) started out as a fetus, then grew into a baby mouse, and then grew into what you see today. Four months ago, you could have easily told the difference between the two, just by size.”

  “So, you could make a fetus that would grow into an identical copy of a person?”

  “Genetically identical,” said Alessio. “But we don’t.”

  “Why not?”

  “Um, because why would we? Odette says that anyone who wants a clone of himself is the last person you would want more of.”

  “So I’m not going to wake up and see a Stepford me standing over me with a blank expression and a knife?” said Felicity.

  “Like an adult? N
o,” he said definitely. “I mean, we can speed-grow a clone to be an adult, it’s an extrapolation of Podsnap’s Technique, but it still doesn’t have any memories. It’s like a fetus. I think a Stepford you would stare at you with a blank expression and then fall over because it hadn’t learned how to stand yet.” Felicity nodded, still entranced by the identical mice.

  “Show me the rest of the suite,” she said finally.

  “There’s the other bedroom,” said Alessio. “Which I suppose is mine now.” The other bedroom proved to be a little bit larger than hers, with a gigantic bed and various artsy bits of furniture. There was also a goodly amount of expensive-looking luggage lined up against the wall. Felicity examined it enviously. Then with incredulity. Then with a mild sense of horror.

  “I didn’t know Louis Vuitton made a biological-specimen quarantine case,” she said faintly.

  “I think it’s bespoke,” said Alessio. The room had its own little fridge tucked away in a cupboard, but when Felicity opened it, it contained none of the standard minifridge drinks. Instead, it held some decidedly nonstandard minifridge vacuum flasks that were, she noted, each monogrammed with an ornate O and L. Well, I won’t grab anything to drink out of here. There were also some hypodermic needles in sterile plastic wrappers.

  In front of the window, there was a desk with a laptop, a few notebooks, and some large leather-bound books that looked incredibly technical and tedious. There was also a series of framed photos that caught Felicity’s eye since they clearly belonged to Odette and not the hotel. She moved closer.

  The first was a picture of Odette and Alessio with two pleasant-looking people who were obviously their parents. One showed a West Highland terrier smiling from a pile of golden leaves. And there were lots of pictures of Odette with a group of six people her own age.

  “Who are they?”

  “Those are Odette’s friends,” said Alessio quietly. He came up beside her.

  “They’re all Grafters?”

  “Yeah, they all studied together,” explained Alessio.

  From the look of the photos, that wasn’t all they did together. Every photo seemed to have been taken in some glorious location. In one picture, they were all dressed in ski clothes and goggles, and the Alps reared behind them. In another, they were underwater, their mouths drawn open in grinning subaqueous roars. One of the pictures showed them having dinner in a restaurant, holding up enormous steins of beer in a toast to the camera. And then there was a night shot of them clinging to a jagged stone sculpture atop a horrendously steep roof, the lights of a city far behind and below them. It had clearly been taken at arm’s length by one of the men, who was reaching out to the edge of the picture.

  “That’s the cathedral in Cologne,” said Alessio. “They climbed it in the middle of the night.”

  There were pictures of the group in tuxedos and ball gowns, in bathing suits, in nightclubbing clothes, and in cloaks and Venetian masks. It looked as if they had toured all of Europe, always laughing or smiling or perhaps pouting ironically. There was a shot of Odette, in a bathing suit and sunglasses, braiding the hair of one of the other girls as she lay on the sand. In another, Odette was asleep in a rail carriage, her head cradled in the lap of a boy with dark curly hair. Felicity noticed that in many of the pictures, that same boy had his arms around Odette.

  “Who’s that?” she asked.

  “That’s Pim,” Alessio said. “He was her boyfriend.” Felicity noted the use of the past tense but didn’t comment.

  “And none of them are in the delegation?” she asked. “They’re all back in Europe?”

  “They died a few months ago,” said Alessio.

  “All of them?” she asked, startled. The boy nodded.

  “That’s Saskia, and Mariette, and Simon,” he said sadly, pointing to each one in turn. “That one’s Claudia. And that’s Dieter. He was actually Odette’s and my uncle, but he was only two years older than Odette.”

  “I’m, uh, I’m very sorry for your loss. Was it some sort of accident?” she asked hesitantly.

  “No,” said a voice from behind them. They both turned to see Marcel, the older craftsman, standing in the room. “I’m afraid, Pawn Clements, that they were murdered.”

  17

  The Checquy aren’t the only enemies the Broederschap has faced,” said Marcel conversationally. “What do you know about the supernatural on the Continent, Pawn Clements?” Alessio had introduced the two of them—although they each already knew who the other was—and they had shaken hands and moved into the sitting room. Alessio set about making coffee with an incredibly expensive machine that had been concealed in a cupboard.

  “Um, not a great deal,” said Felicity uncomfortably. She wasn’t certain how much information she was allowed to share with the Grafters.

  It doesn’t help that they all look so normal, she thought irritably. Whenever Felicity had pictured Grafters, they had always been disturbing, muddled images—disgusting, twisted, with strange limbs sprouting from their torsos. As a child, she’d been shown some of the surviving armor from the Isle of Wight invasion. It consisted of heavy, asymmetric plates that looked like sheet metal that had been bent around a giant that was part octopus, part wolf, and part musketeer. During her final studies, she had been permitted to read some of the older files, the ones that contained detailed descriptions and a few eyewitness accounts.

  Finally, when she graduated, she and her class had been taken to the Apex and shown the few carefully stuffed corpses that had been retrieved from the Isle of Wight. The students had pretended sophistication and insouciance. A few had claimed to appreciate their design, the cunning that had twisted sinew and muscles around blades and bone. Someone had remarked that the layers of varnish on the one with the scales really captured the quality of the slime that must have dripped there when it was alive. But the few jokes cracked were weak and trailed away uncertainly. By the end, everyone was silent, and that night, no one slept easily.

  So Felicity thought she knew what Grafters looked like.

  But these people looked normal—their skin, their bodies, their hair. None of them would catch her eye on the street.

  She realized that she’d gotten caught up in her own thoughts, and she hastily rejoined the conversation.

  “Right, the supernatural in Europe,” she said carefully. “Um, the Checquy doesn’t maintain any offices on the Continent. We have some outposts in parts of the old British Empire, but we don’t have the mandate—or the numbers—to have people everywhere. Our responsibility is the security of this country. So we rely on the regular civil service—the Foreign Office and the British intelligence agencies—to provide us with information, but they don’t have much to do with the supernatural.”

  “I’m afraid we know very little ourselves,” said Marcel.

  “How is that possible?” asked Felicity. “You live there.”

  “You have to understand, Pawn Clements, that when the Broederschap was begun, they had no idea there was a supernatural . . .”—he seemed to search for an appropriate word, then shrugged—“anything The supernatural is always secret, always discreet. Up until it eats you.

  “The brotherhood, however, is not supernatural,” he said, fixing her with a piercing gaze. “Except perhaps for the genius and the insight that can flare in the human mind. I suppose that can be considered as miraculous as anything in this world. But for everything we do, there is an explanation. Our work is based on a system, on an understanding of the world. The foundations of that understanding were built by our first alchemists, who gained it with no mystical advantages.

  “Over the course of centuries, they built on those foundations and learned a tremendous amount about the nature of biological life,” he continued. “Their understanding of the science was unparalleled. And then, when they marched out of the sea to take the Isle of Wight, they were confronted with something completely outside that understanding.” He paused to accept an espresso from Alessio. “You.”

&nbs
p; “Me?” said Felicity, bewildered.

  “Well, the forces of the Checquy,” he said. “People like you. People for whom there is no explanation at all. Of course, you know what happened next.” Felicity did but expected that the Grafters’ telling of the story differed quite a bit from the Checquy’s. “Can you imagine their horror? When the gaze of a child in a smock un-aged a soldier back to infancy in a moment or an old woman’s gesture sent a battalion flailing upward to vanish in the sky? The Broederschap had worked so hard to leave the superstitions of the age behind, and now those superstitions were slaughtering them.”

  “They didn’t surrender, though,” said Felicity.

  “No,” agreed Marcel. “Not at first, but eventually. And then, of course, they had the disconcerting discovery that these demonic forces were actually servants of the British Crown. Not only did these monsters attack us on the battlefield, but they came at us through diplomatic and legal channels! They forced the dismantling of the brotherhood, wrung out financial reparations—substantial ones, by the way—bound our country with secret treaties, and then vanished back to their island.”

  “The dismantling wasn’t as thorough as the Checquy thought,” remarked Felicity, and Marcel shrugged.

  “Perhaps not, but it left the Broederschap reduced to a fraction of what it had been. They were decimated. The next few centuries were spent rebuilding, and they did it under a cloak of stifling paranoia. Those generations were defined by their fears. To begin with, there was the fear that the Checquy would discover they had survived and would come back to finish their extermination.

  “Then there was the fear that there might be more monstrously unnatural people, perhaps not affiliated with the British government, wandering around Europe, ready to destroy the brotherhood.

  “And finally, there was the fear that some other government might find out about them.”

  “Why were they so afraid of that?” asked Felicity, who had been brought up to regard the government as everyone’s friend.