Stiletto (27 page)

To Felicity, who hadn’t even realized that platypuses
had
venom, it sounded like the most ridiculous defense mechanism ever. She knew that the Grafters were capable of constructing utterly lethal weapons and had been doing so for centuries. But this woman had restricted herself to the equivalent of a pair of dueling pistols or a stiletto dagger.

The spurs
were
lovely, though. There were photographs of them, and sketches that looked like the work of Leonardo da Vinci. They were elegant little things, almost art deco in their design. If they weren’t tucked away in someone’s forearms, you’d want to have them on your desk as the world’s most exquisite letter openers.

Finally, Felicity turned to the itinerary of events that would be held for the Grafters over the next few weeks. Presumably, she would be attending them as well.

“Great,” she said aloud. “I’m going to have to buy a hat.”

*

Odette sat at the Apex House conference table and tried to ignore the looks of passersby. That morning, after the meeting in the graaf’s suite, Marie had pulled her aside to deliver the good news that she would no longer be escorted about the place by Pawn Bannister. It had been swiftly followed by the bad news that it was because the Checquy thought she needed more protection.

“Protection?” she asked incredulously. “From what?”

“Apparently, the Checquy feels you are in need of more protection from, well, the Checquy,” said her cousin apologetically. “It seems that your jaunt to that operating theater has made their people... dislike you a bit.”

“They already hate us!” exclaimed Odette. “You know that.”

“Yes, well, now they hate you a bit more than the rest of us.” Marie shrugged.

“But I only offered to help,” said Odette helplessly. “That boy was going to lose his leg, and I could have saved it.”

“Actually, he did lose the leg,” said Marie. “I checked.”

“Damn!” spat Odette. “What a fucking
waste!
”

“I couldn’t agree more. I gather that it was a traumatic amputation of the leg, perfectly simple to repair. Even I could have gotten him walking.”

“So who am I getting as a replacement?” demanded Odette. “Some huge thug who’s going to follow me around?”

“Actually, no,” said Marie brightly. “You get a girl this time. Here’s the file the Checquy gave us on her.” She passed over a slender manila folder. “And here’s
our
file on her.” She passed over a morbidly obese manila folder.

Although Odette apparently had no purpose to serve in the negotiations that day, she was not allowed to stay in her luxurious hotel room or go exploring in the city, because she would have no bodyguard until tomorrow. So she went to the Apex with the rest of the delegation and was given a room in which she could sit and study. Being a Grafter meant you always had homework, and so she dutifully lugged along her laptop, books, and notes. But once they had settled her in the empty conference room, she shoved her homework to the side and opened the folder Marie had given her.

Pawn
Felicity Jane Clements. Who are you?

According to the Checquy, when Clements was born, twenty-three years earlier, there had been no indication of anything wrong or unnatural. Ten fingers, ten toes, no teeth, no pedipalps. Standard-issue Anglo-Saxon girl child. She slept, she cried, she cooed, she pooed.

Then, when she was three months old, her parents tried to give her some solid food. The instant that the pureed carrots passed her lips, Baby Felicity began screaming like they’d set her on fire. She kept it up for twenty minutes, crying piteously, then settled down to a prolonged whimpering that didn’t stop for hours. Finally, she fell asleep. Her parents, who had tried everything and were on the verge of calling an ambulance, were immeasurably relieved. They were less so when she started whimpering again immediately upon waking up.

A pattern emerged. Baby Felicity could not bear to consume any food but breast milk. Anything else left her screaming and trembling. When she was awake, she did not stop mewling unless she was placed, naked, in a bath of water and held in the center of the tub. If she even touched the sides of the bath, she began complaining again. The Clements parents were frantic, convinced that their daughter had some sort of hypersensitive skin. The family doctor and the physicians at the local hospital were bewildered. Pain medication was prescribed and made no difference whatsoever. The parents made appointments with experts, and waited in agony.

Two days before she was to see a Harley Street specialist, Felicity went into a coma. Her mother found her lying in her crib, eyes open, pupils shrunk to the size of pinheads. The baby was breathing shallowly, but apart from that, she was utterly still. Horrified, Mrs. Clements picked her daughter up. She had lifted the infant no more than four centimeters off the mattress when Felicity went into violent convulsions. Mrs. Clements was so shocked that she actually dropped her child back into the crib. Immediately upon the baby’s returning to the mattress, the convulsions stopped.

A few minutes before the ambulance arrived, Felicity’s pupils dilated; she blinked, wriggled, and started whimpering again. Distraught, her mother still took her to the hospital, where scans of her brain and heart revealed nothing unusual. The details of the coma were added, a trifle skeptically, to the baby’s medical files, which were forwarded on to the Harley Street specialist.

The specialist had never seen or heard of anything like it. He consulted a number of colleagues, and none of
them
had ever seen or heard of anything like it. But the Checquy had. In fact, they had seen it in 1552, 1585, 1634, 1827, 1884, and 1901. The symptoms afflicting Felicity were strong indications that she possessed the power of psychometry — the ability to read the history of any object she touched.

To the Checquy, it all made sense. Felicity’s unwillingness to eat was the result of her powers reaching into the history of the food. To her, it would have felt raw, or covered in dirt, or perhaps as if someone were touching it even as it was inside her mouth. Worse, it might have felt like it was still alive. Her aversion to clothing was much the same — a deluge of images and experiences pouring into her mind. Even the most mundane items would have foisted their histories on her. And the seizure, well, the Checquy had seen that before too. It was a textbook example of a psychometric who’d been deeply immersed in the experiences of an object and then torn away before she’d had time to reel herself back in.

Psychometry could be a terrifically useful power with many practical applications, and the Checquy were eager to have it at their service. So, once they learned of Felicity through their contacts in the medical industry, they made their move.

The dossiers were tactfully silent as to the means by which Felicity had been extracted from her family. They didn’t even mention whether she had any siblings. If, one day, Felicity were to marry a civilian, the Checquy would pull the relevant files to make certain she was not marrying a relation.

She’d retained her birth name. The Checquy’s policy, it seemed, was that if you’d been christened with a name, you kept it. (Although, to prevent anyone from tracking down their members, the Checquy
did
provide new National Insurance and National Health Service numbers, and new official dates of birth. Operatives were also usually posted in different cities from any immediate family members who might recognize them.)

Thus, at the age of four months, Felicity Jane Clements was brought to Kirrin Island, enrolled in the Estate, and, incidentally, was legally made a Taurus instead of an Aries. She was installed in the nursery and given various treatments that an Irish peasant woman had come up with several hundred years earlier for her child’s psychometry. Primary among these ministrations was the regular application of an ointment made out of moss and yogurt (the original recipe called for fermented goat’s milk, but yogurt worked just as well). It smelled terrible but did have the effect of numbing Felicity’s powers somewhat and letting her function. It also left her skin looking terrific.

One of the unexpected problems was that, unlike the Checquy’s previous psychometric operatives’ powers, Felicity’s abilities were not limited to her mouth and the skin of her hands. In fact, they were activated through all of her skin, which meant that she spent the first few years of her life almost completely covered in a thick, green, constantly cracking coating of crud. She also subsisted on raw vegetables that were specially cultivated on the island by one person, in order for them to have as little history as possible.

There was, of course, tremendous incentive for Felicity to gain complete control of her abilities as swiftly as possible. Quite aside from the potential benefits to the nation and the distressing odor of the ointment, there were dangers associated with psychometry. The records of the Checquy told of two operatives and three infants who had fallen into deep comas from which they could not be awakened. Popular theory held that they had gotten tangled up in the histories of some object they had touched and could not find their way out again. They had been discreetly put down, rather than being allowed to linger and rot. The Checquy did not want to lose Felicity.

Fortunately, like all Checquy operatives, her predecessors had left behind copious notes about their powers. These journals were stored in high-security vaults and archives around the British Isles. Researchers immediately began trawling through the documents to sift out useful tips and techniques. As soon as she was able to understand words, Felicity was rigorously taught the mental exercises that would allow her to turn off her powers at will. Some were physical routines akin to yoga, but most involved strict mental discipline, constantly keeping her powers in check and shutting herself off from the world.

The Estate, which took a dim view of its students relying on crutches of any sort, weaned Felicity off her lactose/lichen lotion as quickly as possible. The process was exhausting, especially since she had to maintain her barriers even while she slept lest she lose herself in dreams filled with the past experiences of a bed frame or a set of sheets. But her powers did not penetrate water, and every Sunday she was permitted to sleep in an isolation tank. Drifting gently, she was, for once, at rest, her mind unclenched, untroubled by her dreams or those of the furniture.

The scientists and philosophers at the Estate were fascinated by Clements’s abilities and urged her to explore the boundaries of her Sight. They discovered that it was not limited to the past and that she could use it to augment her perception of the present. Her Sight could spread out to give her a perfect awareness of everything approximately three meters from her skin. In that area, with her eyes closed, she could describe the nature and position of items placed around her. More, she could see through them, whether metal, stone, or plastic. If they placed a gun at her feet, she could read its every component, every bullet.

Under the enthusiastic prodding of her instructors, Clements discovered that she could push her Sight out even farther. Her consciousness would leave her body as an invisible probe that she sent out of herself, taking up about the same amount of space as a basketball. Kneeling blindfolded in a room, she could send it down through her bare hands, across the floors, up the walls, and along every object in the place.

There were blind spots, however. Certain materials were impenetrable to her Sight and key among them was anything that was alive. There was something about living things that caused her powers to slide off them. They were invisible in the present, and she could see their echoes in the past only through the history of nonliving things. She could shake a person’s hand and get nothing at all (unless the cuff of his coat brushed her hand). But give her a corpse and she could read its past from the moment she had zipped open the body bag, through the person’s murder, and back into his life. (The Checquy hadn’t killed someone so she could try this, the file noted, they’d just happened to have a corpse handy.) Decant some blood out of a healthy boy, give the cells a few minutes to die, and she could draw you a picture of the donor.

There were other limitations as well. Her powers would skip automatically over anything that had occurred in the forty-eight hours surrounding a solstice, and there had been a couple of shells and a fork that, for some unknown reason, she couldn’t read at all.

Fascinated, Odette read a transcript from an interview with a nine-year-old Clements as she’d tried to explain her Sight to a group of eminent scholars, including a Nobel Prize–winning physicist, an Oxford don specializing in the philosophy of consciousness, three mathematicians, and the bishop of Bath and Wells, all of whom had been sworn to secrecy under the Official and Unofficial Secrets Act.

It’s sort of like swimming. Everything is an ocean. When you’re exploring the present, you’re swimming along the top of the water, getting farther and farther away from your body. And then, when you want to go into history, you dive down.

The scholars went away and wrote lots of academic papers about physics, space, and the memory of reality that no one outside the Checquy would ever see. Meanwhile, Felicity got used to being pulled out of class to read the history of the occasional murder weapon or blood-drenched obsidian altar stone lifted from the inner sanctum of a dark temple in downtown Plymouth.

She’d done well enough at school, her grades not outstanding, but respectable. Her hobbies included tae kwon do, cross-country running, and a couple of failed attempts at bulimia. The file contained some records from Felicity’s counseling sessions, and Odette hesitated guiltily before opening them. They were unremarkable, which was simultaneously disappointing and reassuring. Rather than stemming from any form of demonic possession or psychic backwash from her abilities, the bulimia had been an attempt to assert some control over her own life. The counselor judged that it was due to Felicity’s being obliged to maintain a constant rigid hold on her abilities combined with normal teenage angst and the fact that she would never be permitted to leave the Checquy. She’d grown out of the second problem and come to terms with the first and the third through some traditional talk therapy.