Bloodsong

CHAPTER FIVE: CRASH AND CRUMBLE

Valerie came to herself.

In bits and pieces at first, consciousness stuttering like an unstable phone connection. Her eyelids, stuck a fraction of the way open, let only a sickle of brightness bleed through; she could neither lift nor shutter them. She existed within her body, residually aware, but her ability to ask questions such as '

what, who, how?'

was lost, adrift in an unbreachable fog.

Valerie lingered like that until she began to perceive voices, distorted and incomprehensible, sounding around her.

The impulse to respond ran smack into the fact that her mouth had been rendered an immovable, monolithic entity. Once she could think clearer, she was glad for it. What would she have said? Asked where she was? Pointless. She knew. Not on what floor, not in which room, but any doubts that she was in the Mayfly were dispelled by a glimpse of black button eyes and skin as milk.

The Ki-laar was saying something, something she should pay attention to, but every noise bled into the next.

The Ki-laar receded from view.

A familiar face replaced it.

Waking to find Jack staring at her, holding something sharp under the harsh lights overhead —

scalpel

, was the word washing up from the wilds of her brain — should have produced a reaction. Instead, Valerie regarded the hand closing in unblinkingly, incapable of doing anything but.

She lost track of the scalpel as it moved into her blind spot. If it touched her anywhere, she didn't feel it. Jack was purposefully ignoring -

no

. No, she realized, he wasn't ignoring her. He believed her still unconscious. Perhaps it wasn't easy to tell she'd woken, with her lying as lifelike as a doll.

Perhaps he was just

that

dense.

The scalpel sailed back into view every so often, always stained red. Jack focused on a spot below her collarbone. Occasionally his eyes strayed to her face and met her frozen eyes as if to check how she was doing, before darting back as if he'd reminded himself that she didn't feel a thing.

Idiot. Cretin. Blind,

absolute

moron.

Yet not wrong. She truly felt . . . not a lot. Not the cutting; not his hand when it repositioned a curl falling over her eye, nor the pressure of his palm when it lingered against her cheek.

She

almost

felt his breath warm her skin when he leaned in to inspect something.

Almost. Barely.

The scalpel danced above her, refracting the lamplight. The Ki-laar fluttered into view to hand Jack things, but he didn't address them except to issue short commands that didn't enlighten her about his aim in doing whatever he was doing. She didn't want to lose herself in wondering, either. Running through the possibilities would only make her sick.

Plink,

went something on her right side. Jack tilted his head and disappeared to her left, muttering something that Valerie was a hair away from making out in full.

She discovered that her eyelids were no longer jammed in place. She could blink now, and signal that she was awake.

She refrained.

Less than a minute later, a pang in her arm let her know that her nerve endings had come back to life. It was lucky that Jack picked that as the time to move her, or he might have caught the flinch that she was unable to suppress.

Click, click, tlack,

and she was turned on her side, then flipped over. She kept herself limp, her breathing sedate, praying that it didn't occur to Jack to take her pulse, because that one was galloping fast.

Slice, slice, slice

. He worked his way through muscles and ligaments with precise cuts, fast, presumably to prevent her from healing over his efforts. It was only when he traded the scalpel for another tool and pulled at something that slid out as though it had never belonged inside her that the pieces started fitting.

Valerie remembered Sykes, him or his men landing a shot where Jack had just cut her or thereabouts. When he turned away, she let her sight slide to her left. She sighted a plastic kidney dish, containing bullets and wads of bloody gauze.

Oh,

she thought, relieved despite herself.

Among the grisly options for why Jack might decide she needed surgery, this ranked as . . . well.

Benign.

She took a moment to curse Sykes and his cohort of dead assholes before wondering about the origin of the other bullets. Omaha, probably. She'd taken plenty of hits there, and since metals other than silver didn't sting once healed around, they weren't so easy to keep track of unless they were somewhere in the way.

Trust Jack to make going over her with a metal detector a priority upon capturing her.

Her relief got flattened to the floorboards of her mind once she turned that thought over. The next peek she stole was urgent and directed at her left thigh, where, sure enough, a black X marked the spot where she'd buried the single card she'd come in holding.

Valerie couldn't swear aloud, but in her head she did. Abundantly.

He'd find the knife. Get to it sooner or later, depending on how much metal she had embedded elsewhere. He'd spend a moment despairing at her lack of self-preservation, and then he'd toss it in the bowl with every other bit of evidence that she couldn't be trusted to mind her own body.

A new voice cut through the haze of her panic, speaking the first sentence she could make out.

"Dude,

what the fuck

? Has the bitch been shoving a pipe factory up her gut?"

"I told you that I don't care for you calling her that."

"Yeah, and I didn't care for having my face

set on fucking fire

. Did she give a hoot?"

Valerie fixed her gaze on a spot in the mid-distance as Nick edged into view. He stopped by her head, blocking the light, and crouched until he was level with her nose. After examining her a while, he huffed with disgust or loathing or contempt or all three, and moved away. Valerie felt herself unwind. Nick was no more likely than Jack to pick up on her being awake, but if by a twist of fate he did, it would have been mortifying.

"I said I didn't want to be disturbed. Do you have a reason for being here?"

"Yeah. I left you three messages and called five times. Byron also tried. Answer your phone sometime, will you?"

"She exploded my phone, and I didn't get around to finding a new one yet. What is it?"

"Lady B wants a word."

A pause, as the atmosphere frosted over without as much as an if you please. Both men had stepped out of Valerie's line of sight, but she could picture Jack's face based on his tone alone.

"Lady? So my blasted aunt, of all people, merits respectful address?"

"Sure." Nick's delivery was just as open in belying his annoyance. "She's always been a class act. Doesn't make a fuss, never set me on fire, never tried to maim me or

stab my mother.

I mean, sucks about Lady Maz,

wanderwillshetillrebirth

, but, dude. Trying to off each other was their bananas way of being sisterly. Fair enough that you want to drag her in front of the Council for it, but— whatever. Look. She was damn insistent, so go down there and check what the fuck she wants so that she'll shut up."

"Does that woman," Jack spat the word like it meant something nothing so neutral, "have the slightest inkling of the position she's in? Does she think herself entitled to my time to the point where I should drop my engagements and rush to meet whatever asinine request—"

"Tell

her

that. I'm taking time off from wrangling the books to play carrier pigeon, and I'd like to get everything sorted before the numbers from the last shipment are in. Can't do that when I keep being distracted by her nattering."

"Why are you doing bookkeeping where you can hear her in the first place? You have an office."

"Doesn't do any good when the others keep calling about this crap asking that I sort it out. None of them want to come within spitting range of your psycho girlfriend." A beat. A sharp inhalation. "Look. You realize that everyone, and I mean everyone

,

thinks that keeping her like . . .

this

, is well. Dangerous? Insane?

Somewhat fucking concerning?

Axis has been passing around a 'please-kill-her-already' petition. Even the

Ki-laar

lined up to sign, without anyone even asking for their input!"

"Axis.

What

."

"Dude, she's not right in the head and murders people. What did you expect? He's not thrilled. No one is."

"I expected that some would think twice before exceeding boundaries," Jack sneered, in a manner suggesting that Axis might soon find himself out of a job and some unfortunate Ki-laar deprived of heads. "She's drugged, unconscious, unarmed and under the effect of a damper. What in the world are they worried she'll do?"

Nick's reply was unvoiced and to Valerie unseen, but seemingly persuasive. She heard the shuffling of feet, felt a shadow falling over her and the icy bite of a chain around her ankles. Her left arm, which had been set at an angle to allow better access to her shoulder, was returned to her side and laid out parallel to her leg, palm down.

Click. Tlack.

"Watch her until I get back," Jack said.

"Sure thing," Nick replied.

They were both gone from the room within a minute of each other.

Valerie waited a while before moving, unwilling to believe that she could be so lucky, certain that Nick had only stepped out to get a stun gun or more chains.

Once it turned out that leaning in with an almighty sneer and hissing '

Bitch

!' in her impassive face had been his parting salvo, that his lack of commitment to babysitting her was genuine and that he'd gone back to engaging in Nick-typical activities elsewhere, Valerie's elation was only muted by her awareness of how much everything remained far from ideal.

Nick had shut the door upon leaving, allowing her a minuscule pocket of time in which to act. The pitter-pattering steps of Ki-laar rushing up and down the hallway outside made her jump and freeze up. She forced herself to stop.

The table she lay on was not built for a Tsikalayan. The ankle chains, of simple, unalloyed iron, didn't strike her as sturdy. The manacles were just hardened plastic, which bordered on insulting. The cyan line on her wrist was all that prevented her from making short work of her trappings.

Although as far as deterrents went, it was an effective one.

Valerie wriggled her left hand, thinking it a godsend that Jack hadn't bound her arms behind her back. Her fingers felt strange. Stiff, as though they needed to thaw. She curled them to her palm, stretched them out, repeated the motion five times to ensure that they responded as they should. They didn't entirely, but she'd have to make do.

She didn't look forward to the next minute.

Deep breaths. Deep breaths. Easy breaths.

This was, all said and done, the best among the worst case scenarios.

Step one, remove the blade. Her left hand was stuck at the right level, but at a four-inch distance from her thigh. The wrist manacle was fixed to the table and afforded her no slack. The ankle chains were less unforgiving, but bending her hips towards her hand so that her fingertips touched her thigh meant straining her legs so much that were she at full strength, she would have popped her feet off.

Pain lanced through her side in a misguided warning to halt.

Valerie ignored it.

She pressed her fingertips against the black cross. Unable to shift her nails, she was reduced to compressing the flesh as much as her reach allowed, to get the knifepoint to pierce through.

Had Jack started from the bottom up instead of the other way around, she'd have been screwed. She might still be. He could return at any moment. A Ki-laar could walk in. Staff could be watching through the CCTV system that Marabeth had made an unpleasant surprise of back in the seventies.

Less important but relevant, what she was about to do would

hurt.

Her skin was getting slippery with blood and so were her fingers, making it a trying endeavor to grab the blade. When she lost purchase and the flesh she'd been pressing back came up to swallow the steel like a cresting wave, she almost cried out in frustration.

But try and try, and try again.

Gnashing her teeth, Valerie started over. This time she strained the leg away from her hand to help the metal pull free. It worked better. She took a deep breath to collect herself as the blade came out.

Step two, now.

Step two, angle the edge towards the base of her thumb, remove the excess flesh and pare down the bone that stood in the way of that hand slipping free. She would have squeezed her eyes shut if she didn't need to see herself work. If the plastic were softer, her hands defter and her grip trustworthy, if she had the time to spare, she could have tried chipping away at the manacle. As things stood . . .

She'd have to remove and regrow that hand either way. Only way to ditch the damper's mark. The reminder did little to cheer her up, but cemented her resolve.

On a practical level, it was easy cutting. The prickling of skin knitting back together was so muted that she could have sworn that she'd been injected with distilled paxpernia, or picked up an askara blade by mistake. When, after a protracted pause, she did start healing, it came as both a relief and an incentive to hasten.

While she worked, Valerie tried to think of happy things.

She had a handful of memories put aside for times such as these.

Lying on her back on warm sand, watching the sun set over the desert horizon, a song she'd forgotten the lyrics of haltingly ground out by a transistor radio.

A colleague from the Southland section, his name yielded to time, holding a plastic bag — '

Redmont, these are those funky sea slugs you like fried, aren't they? We got you a bunch but didn't know how long they kept fresh, so we bought them alive!'

Someone deciding that the slugs were too adorable to be food and adopting them on the spot; an afternoon spent improvising an aquarium.

Curling up in a back row seat at the Vertex Amphitheater on a trip to Cahedros. Trying to watch a play while kicking her companion for complaining that the plot was complete nonsense and the main girl couldn't sing —

'No, I mean it, if you don't keep it down they'll ask us to leave, and this is the last performance of the season—'

Valerie groaned.

No, no, no

. Actual happy memories only.

She couldn't feel her arm anymore, which made cutting difficult, but she might be done or nearly so. Her thumb wasn't off, but hung by a thread, so that when she wrenched the hand through the manacle and it caught there, it was the bone that relented. Her remaining fingers passed through with a slurping sound, helped along by how slick the blood had made them. She danced on the edge of fainting. She didn't have a problem with blood, but only as long as it was other people's.

Still, arm free meant she could move onwards to step —

focus, keep focus!

— three.

Step three. Remove the dampers' mark. Keep from passing out. Restrain the part of her that pondered her odds of making it without leaving behind a piece of herself. Hands were a hassle to grow back from scratch, second only to feet. So many fiddly bones to slot together. She'd only had to do it once. It had taken nine days for the new limb to match the old one in form and function, and the process had been hell.

Focus.

Focus.

With the flat portion of the blade clasped between her middle and index finger, she slid her mangled hand under her stomach, pushing until she had the arm close enough to her right thigh to transfer the slippery instrument into the hand that remained bound. She then aligned the hand that needed to come off over it, so that the metal sat a third of an inch under the blue line left by the damper.

She sucked in a breath, knowing that what came next would be neither pleasant nor clean.

The door slammed open.

Valerie's hesitation got wiped away by boots thundering in and the agitated, profanity laden shouting that ensued. She forced her arm down, wedging steel into her wrist, pushing to bone and beyond, shaking like a leaf, teeth hurting from how hard she clenched them, nerve endings stumbling over themselves to send signals to stop,

stop, cease.

Dizzily, she hissed back a denial.

"What the fuck! What the fucking—FUCK!" Nick shot forward, but too late, much too late, would still have been too late if he didn't slip on something along the way. Presumably her blood. There was so, so much blood, Valerie noted, surprising herself with her own detachment. Blood, rippling from where her hand used to connect, down the side of the table and onto the floor, painting it like a masterpiece of abstract expressionism. She wasn't in an awful lot of pain yet; probably it would come once the shock wore off. "Astara above, what the fuck is wrong with you? Who gets the idea to . . . ack, merciful goddess, that's just

gross

!"

Facing the carved stump, seeing white, sinewy filaments lashing out from where her hand used to connect, Valerie felt inclined to agree. It shouldn't be bleeding so much still, which was . . . concerning. How long did it take for the damper's effect to lift, once the focal point of the magic was tossed a great distance with extreme prejudice? Would she have time to find out?

Stall

, she commanded herself.

Calm down. Stall.

"

Maybe this wouldn't have happened if you hadn't bailed on standing watch?"

"You

. Crazy. Fucking. Bitch.

Don't move. Stay right where you are!" A tentacle sailed past, curving towards the floor and picking up — she'd really made a mess of it, hadn't she? Yet somehow the sick feeling from before was lessened with the anticipation over, the deed done. There was just a slight touch of vertigo as Nick held the gory remains at limb's length, unwilling to bring them closer. "Does this reattach if you glue it back on? Fuck, where does that dipstick keep the tape . . ."

Fire, fire pulsing along her arm. Her face halving, sharp teeth sliding into place over blunt ones, claws springing from her fingertips. There would even have been time to pull her feet free, if Nick hadn't been swift to react. If she herself hadn't been rendered slow by phantom pain, real pain and blood loss.

Either way, the man tore himself outside Valerie's reach and, for once, did not turn tail and run. She was in nothing like prime fighting shape, and he had to know it. He launched himself at her, teeth out, nails sharpened, tentacles surging from his back, chest, thighs, every spot from which they were traditionally brought out and a few from places where Valerie had seen no one even attempt to sprout them.

She stabbed Nick with the knife blade, punched him in the groin, tore at his ear. It gave her enough leeway to extract herself from his grip, but once again she failed to lose the chains before a tentacle got to her neck.

Gods above, if she was faring this poorly against Nicolai Cicerny . . .

Tossing him off took thrice more effort than it should, and the fall didn't knock him out, meaning that she'd need to charge – oh, he was charging her first. Fantastic. She'd also left her only weapon embedded in his side. That scalpel from before, where had it gone to?

Valerie's eyes fell on a tray loaded with syringes and pharmacy bottles. She didn't check the labels, smashing the first within reach against Nick's forehead. She hoped that the second she seized contained poison, because that one she broke the top off and splashed at the gaping maw heading for her throat.

Neither move was as effective in the short term as a knee to the balls and a kick to the face once she ripped both her legs free. Nick fell off and only made one attempt to get up before tumbling against the base of the table and remaining there, folded into himself and wheezing.