She stumbled forward a step, protest filling her chest to the bursting point. Dr. Chang caught her arm and held her back, speaking quietly but firmly.
“Not now. Please. Wait until he is done.”
“But his hands, w-what happened to his—” She swallowed hard, silenced as he held up one shining hand. An implug extruded from his palm like an electronic stigma, hung there on a braided silver cable.
He turned to his patient and gently probed the base of her skull. When he found the impline linking her to the table’s life support and monitors he pulled it and substituted the implug dangling from his palm.
Ella shivered and hunched her shoulders. Taps were common, but she had always been revolted by the idea of letting a tap’s quasi-alive nanostrands slither into her brain like electronic worms. Just the thought of it made her stomach churn.
Marchey stood there, swaying slightly, the abstracted look he wore making it appear he was daydreaming.
Dr. Chang spoke up before Ella could find voice for her question. “He’s linked to Shei’s tap and reading her condition. Most imped doctors can do that, but only through a special interface. His interface is built right into his prosthetic.”
Ella mouthed the word prosthetic. It tasted like tin-foil against her tongue and teeth.
There was a soft snick as he disconnected. He hooked the girl back up to the table once more, gently lowering her head back down onto the padding.
Next he placed a hand on either side of the girl’s skull. Keeping them parallel with each other, he moved them in slow wide circles. They emitted the faintest of hums, nearly lost in the background noise made by the other medical equipment.
“Now he’s scanning the location of the fragments. He doesn’t have to do this, we’ve taken full scans. He’s just being careful. In fact, he could go in cold and do better than I could with every scan and test possible at my fingertips.”
Ella watched intently, hearing every word the woman said and even understanding some of it. Her whole attention remained welded to the alien argent metal that replaced the gentle hands she remembered. Marchey seemed lost to all but what he was doing.
At last he straightened up, muttering something under his breath. One silver hand brushed the dying child’s bandaged forehead tenderly.
Something clicked inside Ella. She was suddenly inundated by a flood of jumpcut, staggeringly vivid sense memories of Marchey’s hands touching her: a velvety knuckle kissing her cheek as it wiped away a tear; his warm palms and fingers cupping her breasts; fingers trailing sweet fire along her flanks, heating her nerves to the flash point; thumbs and fingers that knew her secret places and what to do there, possessed of a special wisdom of their own; his warm hand in hers in the dark, comforting and reassuring…
But those hands were gone. Gone. Her skin crawled at the thought of those cold metal things touching her, creeping across her flesh like sinister steel spiders.
“—gone—” It was a breathless whisper, a crack in the speechless silence, forced out by all the things building up behind it. She started toward him to demand that he tell her what had happened to him. How this horrible thing had come about.
Dr. Chang barred her way, grasping her arms. “Ella,” she said sternly, “I know this has to be difficult for you. But you must not break his concentration.” Her voice throbbed with urgency. “Shei’s life depends on it.”
The pleading note in Chang’s voice reached Ella. She swallowed the sour wave in her throat, looking down and meeting the other woman’s eyes. After a moment she nodded.
Her eyes sought Marchey again. Chang turned to watch as well, but kept a restraining hand on her arm.
Marchey stepped back from the table. He crossed his arms before his broad chest and began to breathe deeply, eyes closed, doing some sort of pranayama or breathing exercise. Crossed at the wrist, his silver arms were posed like the ones depicted by the pin on his shirt.
Ella watched in growing bewilderment as his silver hands began fluttering and flashing like mechanical birds in rhythm with his breathing. His face became increasingly strange as his breathing slowed, all expression flattening away to leave a rigid, blankly inhuman mien in its place. The seconds limped by, and his face became colder and stranger still; a sinister Mr. Hyde emerging from the sweet Dr. Jekyll she thought she knew.
She sought the comfort of Chang’s hand against the sense of dread climbing up her spine and wrapping clammy, spatulate fingers around her heart. Chang’s hand was cold, her grip tight. Was she afraid as well?
Marchey’s sunken gray eyes slowly opened, the lids sliding back like shutters over a void.
There was nothing of the Georgory Marchey Ella had known and loved to be seen in them. They were deep dark caves: cold, empty, and forbidding. Not even the faintest spark of who he had been remained in them, every gleam of humanity expunged by whatever radically altered state he had just invoked.
Ella fought the urge to run away from the awful stranger he had become. Had turned himself into, right before her eyes.
Staring straight ahead, his gaze sweeping indifferently across the two women like a scanning beam, Marchey moved to the foot of the table with slow, ratcheting steps. He bent at the waist like a badly made puppet and rested his forearms on it, elbow to wrist flat on the padded surface.
The chrome clockwork birds of his hands were still. His eyes drooped shut. He drew his breath through his clenched teeth sharply, as if trying to lift some impossible burden.
After a moment his breath came out in a long hiss. He slowly straightened up and stepped back. His silver arms remained on the table, abandoned, and somehow obscene. Just below the elbows his arms ended in flat, featureless silver plates. After that, nothing.
Chang clutched Ella’s hand tightly. “It’s all right,” she whispered, her tone reedy and uncertain.
Ella could only stare at her former lover, her face white and immobile as carved bone, her lips pressed tightly together to keep in the contents of her squirming gut. Had what she was seeing always been inside him? Looking out? Watching?
Marchey moved to the head of the table, his movements stiff and jerky. Once there he brought the truncated stumps of his arms down toward the child’s bandaged head, pausing when they were an arm’s length away. His posture, his face, everything about him made it look like he was about to do her terrible harm. Ella’s insides jangled with the impulse to snatch the child out of his grasp, but the thought of going nearer to him filled her with terror.
Then he reached.
Had he still possessed hands, they would have been driven through the skull and buried deep within the delicate tissues of the girl’s brain. He changed position. The silver plates at the end of his arms winked knowingly. His eyes drooped shut to become glittering slits. His face showed no more animation or humanity than that of a granite gargoyle.
Ella forced a question past the knot in her throat. “W-what is h-he—?” What is he doing? What is he?
“He is locating the fragments by touch,” Dr. Chang replied softly. She licked her lips. “Since they are metal, he will trace each path of entry and bring each fragment back along its path to minimize the damage inflicted by removal. If he hadn’t been here, I might have tried to do it myself, but even with nanotic forceps I would have done more harm than good.”
Ella’s bewilderment was total. “But he doesn’t h-have any h-hands,” she stammered, tearing her gaze away to stare at the smaller woman almost accusingly. “They’re gone!”