Chapter Nine-A
The hypodermic needle slipped beneath the surface of her skin, and Malory trembled with the fear of never waking up, of embracing oblivion—a last moment chosen unwittingly. Her sister had forced her to watch a movie when they were kids where the main character was lucid after anesthesia and felt every incision, the incessant carving of flesh and separation. In the middle, they overheard a conversation between the doctors who planned to harvest him for parts to cover their debts. Mal was terrified of the same happening to her. She liked the Doc, respected him even, but trust that deep was difficult to come by. Only three people had ever managed to burrow that deep into her psyche, and letting him in wasn’t easy. She felt the flush of saline, the taste of gargled salt water in the back of her throat and sinuses, and her pulse spiked on the monitor. Each blip felt like an admission, the unfounded worry laid bare, and she tried to distract herself by thinking of the future. This was what she wanted, all she had worked toward. It had to go well, or all the suffering had no purpose. When she flexed her hand, the pain of insertion faded.
“You need to relax,” the Doc said. He finished hanging the bag of fluids and moved toward a tray of surgical equipment. There was an archaic device latched around his forearm to keep his dominant hand steady. “That was just the IV. I haven’t even started, and you’re already shitting bricks. I need to know your baseline vitals to keep you alive.”
“You really know how to reassure a girl,” Mal said. A fat bead of sweat rolled down her temple, and she tried not to hyperventilate.
“My normal clientele are jumped-up assholes that would sooner shiv their own mothers than look weak in front of another person,” he said. In front of him, several sets of scalpels, scissors, forceps, clamps, and needles glittered under the heavy lights in an exhibition of sterile cruelty. “You’ll just have to forgive me.”
“You’re a real charmer,” Mal said. She leered at the cryo container beside him and tried to see inside. He kept the whole thing a mystery, despite her insistence. “Are you gonna tell me what you’re installing yet?”
“No,” he said. He peeled off the packaging of a syringe, the noise far more sinister in the silent lab. His movements were swift, well-practiced, of a career stretching back decades his age had not been able to dull. “It is one-of-a-kind, though.”
“A top shelf mystery, then,” Mal said. There were so many ampules filled with names she couldn’t pronounce, and the thought any of them would be mainlined into her gave pause. “Lucky me.”
“It is, without a doubt, the most unique implant in my library,” he said. He lifted the container and fed it into a slot on the robot that assisted with installation. A system of supports and sophisticated hydraulics suspended it from the ceiling and let it swing free over the operating table. “One of our more committed mercenary contacts brought it in years ago. The schematics are insistent that no other chrome be present in the patient before installation or the procedure will result in death, so it’s been collecting dust in spite of some of the rabid higher-ups.”
“Won’t they be pissed?” she asked. The last thing she needed after revealing her face on the ZenTech job and discovering the ghost in their mainframe was her own gang turning against her. The odds of survival trapped between the two during the brewing war were less than zero.
“That’s exactly why I won’t tell you what it is,” the Doc said. He moved to her side and fastened her head down tight with straps. An unconscious twitch spelled disaster with sharp things near the brain. “As far as anyone else is concerned, it’s still catalogued on a shelf somewhere, and you received antiquated garbage.”
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“Why give it to me at all?” she asked. A secret of that caliber would get him killed, and the risk made no sense. Not being able to move while she talked sparked a fresh wave of panic.
“Because I do what I want,” he said. There was something else there, a painful truth so thoroughly scarred it became separate from everything else. He filled a syringe and fed it into the IV. “Time to say goodnight.”
“I better wake up,” she said. It didn’t take more than a few seconds before she faded. Her last thought before lights out was Nadia’s face beside her in the rooftop pool.
When she was under, the Doc connected his neural net to the lab’s system to blast French hip hop. He hated the sound of surgery. The lids of Mal’s left eye peeled back, and he clamped them open while the rhythmic beats pulsed around the room. Next, an evisceration spoon to scoop free the globe from the socket, and a scalpel to sever the optic nerves—he plopped the waste on the tray, careful to face the pupil away from him. The muscles were there, raw and exposed, waiting to attach to the implant. A suction tube gobbled away any blood that trickled out. He stepped back and watched the robotic arm swoop into place above the girl. The internal mechanisms rattled as it moved, and the hydraulics that kept it suspended from the ceiling hissed; it was old, in need of maintenance. A note for later. When it was in position, he grabbed the loose filaments and connectors and stitched them to the nerves. If he lacked finesse, control over the new eye would be sluggish and strange. The machine arm inched forward while it made micro adjustments to the particularities of her anatomy. When everything was snug and secure, it pulled back, and the Doc moved on to the next step.
A pair of clippers shaved the side of her head and ink marks went on the scalp. A few minor incisions, and it all peeled back to reveal the white of a skull. A drill spun to life, and the high-pitched screech of diamond-bit on bone was discordant with angry rap verses about the crumbling corporate rule. The Doc tightened the device on his arm until it cut off circulation, until he was absolutely sure his hand remained still when he exposed the frontal lobe—the implant came with its own neural network adapter and refused to interface with anything else, so it needed to be slotted at the same time. A single mistake was unacceptable. The girl deserved that much, at least. He threaded the mesh and wiring through the gap until it was flush against the pink, and used a camera and flexible claw to tether it there. Another set of wires that moved down to the new eye brought the whole thing into symmetry. With the installation complete, he triple-checked that Malory’s DNA was coded to the materials, and breathed a sigh of relief. He closed her up, undid the straps that held her in place, and wrapped her head with a pressure bandage.
While Malory was embraced by the void, she found herself in a dream of her mother. She was in bed with a fever, draped in heavy blankets, and felt like her head was going to explode. She spent most of the afternoon crying or groaning in pain, and everything hurt down to the marrow. She shivered while drenched in sick-sweat. In the evening, her mother placed a damp washcloth on Malory’s forehead and read a story of daring adventure from the net. There was a talking bear, a volcano on the verge of eruption, and a magic amulet. When it was over, she made tomato soup. It was the best thing Mal had ever tasted, and she was pissed when she threw it up a few minutes later. Her sister taunted her from the bathroom door as she wretched, and she had to resist scooping the mess from the toilet bowl to throw in her face. Mal compelled the dream to rewind back to the touch of soft hands, the smell of spring flowers, and the story of a brave little bear. Her mother’s violet eyes, so full of love and worry and the knowledge that this, too, would pass, permeated everything.
When consciousness came, it was in stages: there was the dull and quiet knowing, the impossibility of dragging a limp body to the surface of quicksand, and an alarm she was forever different. She tried to open her eyes, and only one responded. It found the indistinct blur of a bed, the glow of a heart monitor, and the Doc slumped in a chair beside her. There were bruises around his wrist from forcing his hand steady, and the crow’s feet on his face seemed deeper, somehow. A fresh concern etched on a weathered visage. She listened to his steady breathing and tried to lift her arms. They were weak, sluggish, and she clenched her fists until her knuckles turned white. The IV stung when she moved, so she pulled it out. When she tried to sit up, she was overcome by a wave of dizziness. The tubing clattered to the floor and echoed around the small space. In all her daydreams of becoming a legendary merc, she’d never considered the extensive recovery periods, and she wanted to power through. There was an ever-consuming drive toward the next thing that needed doing, and the stillness and fatigue that infested her body left her at a total loss. She let out a guttural groan.
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