He was out of most pharmaceuticals. The small bank of tissue cultures had been used up, and he lacked the equipment to grow more. He had no transplantable organs—not even such common ones as eyes, livers, hearts, and kidneys—and no temporary prosthetics. Requests through MedArm to the other hospitals and clinics in Jovian space had netted nothing yet. Not even regrets.
The emergency was over. He had stabilized the situation. None of the remaining tasks couldn’t be done by others.
“Delete last sentence,” he said gruffly. “Continue: It is my considered opinion that only plastic and orthopedic procedures be used on Halen’s partially reconstructed hand, even though it might appear that more cosmetically correct results could be gained by full amputation and replacement. I believe he would refuse the latter course, anyway. This is not an irrational or neurotic response; he simply has a, ah, sentimental attachment to his hand.
“End update.” Let them figure that out. “Close file.”
There, he’d done all he could to look out for his patient. What Jon and the others needed now was a well-equipped team of specialists. Once MedArm got them on-site the people of Ananke would be in the best possible hands.
Just as whatever patient he was being sent to see would be getting the best help available to him or her. Ananke didn’t really need a Bergmann Surgeon any longer, and this person, whoever he or she was, did.
He sat back, pinching the bridge of his nose and feeling a dull ache in his temples.
So why did he keep feeling so guilty about leaving? And in direct opposition to that, so relieved? And guilty about feeling relieved, and—
“Fuck,” he muttered, leaning forward to open a storage compartment a bit above eye level. He stared at what was inside for almost a full minute before taking it out.
Just one. That’s all
He placed the bottle of vodka on the counter in front of him, a glass beside it. Creating a still life portrait of his existence before Ananke.
What’s wrong with this picture? he asked himself.
That was an easy one. The bottle was still full.
The whole day had been a killer. Every one of the people he’d treated had asked him to stay. Some had asked him straight out, practically begging. Others, like Jon, had brought the subject up more obliquely. It felt like fingers and hooks being sunk into his skin in a thousand different places, trying to hold him here, to pull him toward the impossible.
Worst of all was how each and every one of them had been so damned grateful, their gratitude a sort of insidious reproach. After about the fifth one he’d had to bite back the urge to shout at them, to slap them back so things could remain on the safe clinical level where they belonged.
But he had gotten through it somehow. Now he just needed a little something to wash the taste out of his mouth. That was all.
He stared at the bottle, remembering how those first heady hours after Fist’s fall had made him drunk on possibility. He’d let himself think…
Marchey snatched up the bottle, face twisting into a bitter facsimile of a smile at his own naïveté. Giving up drinking had been a grand gesture. I am whole again. I don’t need this any longer.
“I am full of shit,” he muttered, pouring the clear truth into the glass.
He picked it up. The vodka sparkled with promise.
Finally being able to have contact with his patients had seemed like a wish finally granted by a suddenly benevolent universe.
For a few glorious hours, anyway.
But he had quickly found himself in the position of someone who, after years of wandering thirsty on a parched, endless desert, suddenly finds himself snatched up and hurled into the middle of a vast lake. It was no wonder he had begun to drown. There were too many of them, their need was so great, and each and every one wanted a piece of him.
It had been a sobering experience, making him step back and take a long hard look at his situation. The work still had to be done, but he had waded in only as deep as he absolutely had to, keeping his feet on the solid ground of detachment.
For a little while there he’d lost sight of who and what he was, but he’d come to his senses. He was still a Bergmann Surgeon. That meant sooner or later he would have to move on. Which was all the more reason to keep from getting too cozy.
The time to depart had come around again. It always had and always would. He reminded himself that he had left hundreds of places without a backward glance.
He brought the glass to his lips. Closed his eyes.
He’d be leaving this place, too. In just a few hours he would put the people who lived here behind him. Nothing to it. Like falling off a cliff.
Or a wagon.
The vodka went down easy. It brought tears to his eyes.
Angel strode along the gloomy tunnel. She was in a hurry, but made herself move slowly and deliberately. Some of the people she passed smiled at her. She smiled back, carefully keeping her mouth closed each time.
She had put in long hours of practice in front of a mirror to get it right. The face she saw reflected back was still a revelation. Her metal-and-glass angel eye still remained, but for the most part she saw the smooth white face of a young woman. This stranger in the mirror was her.
Slowly she had come to understand that it was a rather nice face. More than one person had even told her that she was pretty—though not the one she most wanted to hear say it.
Still, she had to be careful when she smiled. If she let her lips open, that exposed her teeth. They were not pretty. She now understood that they were not supposed to be. They had been filed to sharp points and capped with white and red ceramyl for the same reason her face had been tattooed; to help make her an object of terror and dread.
The trick still worked. Her teeth could turn her sweetest smile into something that harrowed up chilling recollections of Scylla, like skeletons buried under a thin layer of earth. She did her best to keep them hidden.
He had erased the Scylla face overlying her own with just a pass of his invisible hands. She had been as much asleep as awake, but she had felt it happen, felt it more acutely than anything else in her whole life. That touch had reached a place far below the surface of her metal carapace, deeper than her hidden skin, a secret place she had not even known she possessed.
All the terror and pain she had caused as Scylla could not be expunged so easily, or by another. She knew that. There were few certainties in this new life of hers, but that was one of them.
Not only did Scylla lurk behind her smile, waiting to show if she forgot herself, but her every thought and action had to be considered, guarding against lapses into Scylla-thought and reaction. The line between what she had been and what she wanted to be was fine, and oh so fragile.
There were times the task of rebuilding her life as Angel, and not the other, seemed impossible. Still wearing her angel skin—her exo, he called it—only made the task harder. As long as it was a part of her she could not help but remind both the Kindred and herself of what she had been and done to them.
She had awakened from the long dark dream that was life as Scylla to find herself not found, but lost. All she had known and believed had been cast into doubt. Bereft of purpose, and her identity in fragments, she felt like a creature trained to perform a task that no longer existed.