The Odin Inheritance (The Pessarine Chronicles Book 1) Read online

  Fear bloomed in her brown eyes, and I held up my free hand in a soothing gesture. “I’ll not tell anyone, I swear,” I said. “But that’s why you can’t go to the doctor, isn’t it?”

  “You will not tell Madame Gildersleeve?” she whispered, a tremor in her voice. “I cannot afford to lose this position, and there are those who would not welcome someone like me working in this house.”

  I shook my head. “No, Sophie. If Gildersleeve doesn’t know, I see no reason to tell her or anyone else. Your secret is safe with me.” I sat down on the floor next to her and placed the candle carefully on the floor beside me. “What I’d like to do is help you if I can.”

  “It is hopeless,” Sophie said, slumping her shoulders in defeat.

  “How so?” I asked. “Surely, even in England there are doctors who treat the Enhanced.”

  Sophie shrank from me. “No,” she said with certainty. “The doctors in this country who repair us are evil people. They change one… make them even less human. I will not go near one of those butchers.”

  That was a surprise. It hadn’t occurred to me there’d be difficulties finding an appropriately trained Enhanced physician in England though I wasn’t sure if she was being accurate with her ‘butcher’ comment.

  “How do you know this?” I asked.

  Sophie looked at me. “I have friends who are…” she paused a moment, “…who are like me. A few of them went to one of those who claim to treat us when we break. When my friends returned, they were not themselves. They cared nothing for their friends or family. Before their repairs, their Enhancements had been hidden, as mine is, but after they returned they had metal in new, visible places. Their eyes...” she shuddered, “…turned to metal spheres, and their souls were broken. Despite this, they reveled in their new bodies, which were stronger and faster than they had been. I found the cost of their improvements to be too high.” She looked down at her non-functional arm. “Being more powerful, or faster or stronger is not better. I am less human than you, but I will not lose what humanity I still possess.”

  I opened my mouth to say something and then shut it, at a loss as to what to say. Why did they increase the speed and strength of their patients while reducing their human nature? I wondered. Why did they turn the eyes of their patients into metal spheres? What sorts of people were these so-called doctors? Why were they allowed to practice if they gravely damaged their patients?

  I thought about how people treated me in the pubs we’d visited before my non-Enhanced status was proven. Even if Sophie had the desire to report the horrific nature of medical treatment her friends received, who would listen? What would be done? Probably nothing, I told myself. Damn and blast.

  “That’s awful,” I finally said, concern for Sophie growing. “Why do you think this happened to your friends? Can anything be done to reverse the damage?”

  She turned her head to regard me. “I do not know, but I will not let it happen to me. I have sat here most of the night because I am afraid to return home. I worry the ones with the silver eyes will force me to go to their evil doctor. Then I will be like them.” She took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “I would rather be dead than be like them.”

  I agreed with that sentiment. What she’d told me of the unpleasant alterations done to her friends chilled my soul. “Where would you have to go to get treated properly?” I asked.

  “France,” she said, her accent particularly strong as she said the name of her home.

  “Ah,” I said, understanding the problem clearly now. The French were the best at Enhanced technology. Their innovations in the discipline far outstripped anything done in England, mostly because of the negative attitude toward the Enhanced here. “It would take too long for you to return home and come back here, then? Not to mention expensive?”

  “And it would reveal my… anomaly,” she agreed. “Entering this country for the Enhanced is difficult. I am here legally, but papers and further approvals are necessary for re-admittance.”

  “I know a professor who might be able—“

  “No,” she said, cutting me off. “It is bad enough you know my secret. I will not risk further exposure.”

  “Then I’ll have to help you myself,” I said and pushed myself to a standing position.

  “But—“ she protested.

  “I know a thing or two about complicated mechanical devices, Sophie. You know that.” I leaned over and picked up the candle, bringing the warm circle of light it shed back up around my face. “It may be that I can’t do anything, or that the mechanism that’s giving you trouble is too complicated for me to fathom.”

  “I do not want you to get in trouble,” she said.

  “With whom?” I asked. “I dare say, no one would care either way.”

  “If it is known you helped me –“ she stopped, thought for a moment. “The ones I fear… if they know you work on the Enhanced, it might be bad for you.”

  “I don’t plan to advertise,” I said, shrugging, “and you have no reason to tell anyone what I do here tonight, do you?” She shook her head.

  I motioned for her to stand up. “If I can figure out how to help you, then you don’t risk further exposure or possible harm at the hands of those who would alter you further. You don’t have to make the trip to France, and you can keep your job here at Towson House.”

  She stared up at me for a long moment. “You are truly willing to help me?” she asked.

  I shrugged. “I’m willing to make the attempt. I’m not well versed in Enhanced technology, but I can at least offer what help I can.”

  Sophie stood, gripping her reticule in her left hand while she continued to press her right forearm into her belly. “You speak sense. I will go with you and we can see if you fix me, yes?”

  I nodded, and my stomach growled loudly. I gave Sophie a sheepish look. “Do you suppose we could grab something to eat before we start? I’m famished.”

  Sophie giggled. “Yes,” she said, motioning toward the other end of the room. “Bring your light. I will make you something and Gildersleeve will never know. Come.”

  Chapter Four

  My hunger sated, Sophie and I went to my room. I shut and locked the door so we would have some privacy. At nearly one o’clock in the morning, I doubted anyone would interrupt us, but it seemed foolish not to take the precaution. I thanked my lucky stars I had no roommate.

  I took my seat at the desk, turning on my desk light. I put my candle on the desk’s surface and indicated Sophie should take a seat on the bed beside me. She did so, looking nervous. Her left hand gripped her reticule tightly. I closed my mathematics books and set them aside with my homework, then reached into my left-hand drawer to pull out my box of tools and spare parts, setting the boxes on the desk in front of me. I moved the desk lamp closer to Sophie so I’d have the best light possible.

  “Can you tell me the nature of the problem?” I asked.

  Sophie nodded. “There is a small box inside my arm. I must have it replaced every four years. I do not know what the box does, nor why it must be replaced. Once I realized my arm began to malfunction in the way I recognized from before, I wrote to my parents and they sent to me a new box. They thought, as did I, it would be a simple matter to find a technician to make the repair.” She held up her reticule. “I have the box here.”

  “You’ve had it replaced before, then?” If what needed to be done was a part of regular maintenance, logic dictated that it would be something easily accessed.

  “Oui,” Sophie said. She set her reticule down on the bed and used her left hand to move her right arm away from her body, laying the unmoving right hand palm up on her right leg. I noticed that the hand looked remarkably human. The color was normal, the fingers fleshy and well made. The nails even had pink nail beds, but something about the sheen of the skin wasn’t quite right. Nevertheless, it was close enough to the real thing that I found I suddenly understood at least one aspect of the English discomfiture with and dislike of the Enhan
ced. The notion that man could create something so like a human limb brought into question the nature of humanity itself. It was a difficult notion to grapple with, particularly when one considered the logical conclusion of the technology… whole mechanical bodies, perhaps?

  Sophie pointed at the area just below the elbow, covered with the black sleeve. Her motion and redirection pulled me out of my philosophic reverie.

  “It goes in here,” she said. “The little box.”

  I reached over and took her right hand in mine, surprised that it was warm like actual flesh, though the feel of it was slightly waxy, like she’d used too much lotion or hand cream. I swallowed hard. I hadn’t expected that. It put me a bit out of sorts.

  “Sophie,” I said, hoping she couldn’t see I was uncomfortable and doing what I could to squash the feeling, “What’s under the sleeve?”

  “It is a thin covering that looks like flesh but is not. It is also warm, like the flesh of the hand, but where the covering meets there is a…” she thought for a moment, “…le joint… a seam, I think you call it in English. My uniform usually covers it.”

  I looked down at the hand again, contorted and frozen. “This workmanship is incredible. I’ve seen nothing like it before.”

  “Oui,” she said. “It is only here in England the Enhanced must suffer with ugly, obvious alterations. The doctor who made my new arm took great care that it would look just like the uninjured one, to the best of his ability.”

  I let go of her hand. I brought my own left hand to my head and rested the elbow on the top of the desk, pondering the skill and technology required to do what Sophie obviously considered to be normal. How much does such a limb cost? How do the fingers move? Can she sense pressure and temperature with her artificial fingers? I supposed she must, chewing my lip as I thought about it. How does the limb know what her mind tells it to do? Sitting there and looking at Sophie’s artificial arm, I marveled. It was far more advanced and complicated than I’d initially thought. Maybe helping Sophie was beyond my skills.

  “Ah… can I see the box your parents sent?” I asked.

  She reached over and opened her reticule with her good hand. She dug within it until she withdrew a glass container. Inside it sat a small silver box that was the size of a thimble. It had three thin wires protruding from it, colored red, black and white. She handed the glass container to me and I examined it very carefully through the glass. It looked like a switch of some kind. I’d never seen anything like it and it was more proof of the superiority of French Enhanced engineering. I wondered what other applications the little silver box could be used for.

  “Does your arm have an independent power source?” I asked, setting the small device in its glass case on the desk. That’s what I would do, I thought, considering the size and complexity of the mechanism her arm requires.

  “Yes.” She pointed at her right armpit. “It resides here.”

  “When you had this device replaced last time, did you see what the doctor did?”

  “He opened the covering along the seam here,” she pointed at the point below the right elbow again, “making an incision about two inches long. He parted the two flaps, pulled out the box that needed to be replaced, and disconnected the wires that attached it to the mechanism. Then he attached the wires from the new box, slid it back into the arm, and sewed the incision shut.”

  I blinked, imagining what it would be like to witness such an operation on my arm, whether or not it was a mechanical appendage or my own flesh and blood. The notion made my skin crawl. “Didn’t that hurt?” I asked.

  Sophie shook her head. “No. When I deactivate the arm, it does not feel pain. The skin on the arm is merely a thick membrane to hide the mechanisMs. It is not like the flesh of the rest of my body.” She tilted her head to the side slightly. “If you do not wish to try, I will understand. It is perhaps more complicated than you thought?”

  “I won’t know that until I see what’s under the membrane,” I said. In for a penny, in for a pound, I thought. “Could you expose and deactivate the arm?”

  “Oui,” she said, and in a minute she had her bodice unbuttoned and the arm exposed, resigned to the necessity but understandably shy. I doubted she’d let anyone other than a family member see her Enhancement in such a way.

  I let out the breath I hadn’t realized I’d been holding. “Oh, Sophie,” I said, “It’s beautiful.”

  A thin ring of silver metal around the middle of her upper arm served as the join between the artificial limb and the living flesh. Pink scarring striped the flesh of her arm above the ring of metal, but otherwise the transition from living flesh to mechanical appendage was a smooth one. The seam of the membrane ran along the inside of the arm, visible but not obvious. There was a similar seam around her wrist. At a distance, the arm would have looked normal. Up close, if someone clasped the hand as I had done, they could tell the arm was artificial, but it mimicked the real thing with impressive accuracy.

  “I deactivate it with a key,” she said, producing it from her reticule. It looked like a small key meant for winding clocks. She lifted her arm at the shoulder, put the key in a small keyhole on the arm’s underside close to the metal ring and turned it. The hand and arm went limp.

  “Right. Let’s see what can be done, shall we?” I said with more confidence than I felt. I opened my toolboxes and picked out the instruments I thought most likely to be of use, including a spool of fine white silk thread and a sewing needle. Gertrude, our resident biology student and bloody-minded in the extreme, had given me a scalpel handle and blades to put in it though I’d doubted I’d ever need to use them. Gertrude had insisted I take them, no doubt thinking I’d make some sort of diabolical surgical device with the lot. I pulled them out as well and attached a blade to the handle. I turned back to Sophie.

  I positioned the arm so the area of the seam I needed to open was easily accessible and used the scalpel to pop the tiny stitches that held the membrane together in the small space Sophie had indicated. Sophie sat perfectly still as I worked, watching with interest.

  I gently parted the membrane to expose the inner workings. Thin wires filled the space in the midst of long metal rods of different sizes and types that mimicked the bones and muscles, I supposed. My mind filled to bursting with questions about what I saw. It was hard to resist the urge to cut away more of the outer membrane to get a better look at the rest of the arm’s innards, but I would not use Sophie as a source of curious exploration. She was a person, not one of my mechanical devices, and I had a very specific job to do.

  I put down the scalpel and pulled out a thin wooden probe, gently parting the wires to see if I could find the component I needed to replace.

  “How are you doing, Sophie?” I asked, looking up at her from my prodding.

  “I am well,” she said. She indicated the candle on the desk. “Shall I hold the candle so you may see into the arm better?”

  I nodded. In a moment, the area was much more illuminated. I picked up a pair of very fine narrow tweezers, and with a few more pokes and gentle moves with my probe and tweezers, I saw the box attached to a thicker wire than the others. With both hands and a very gentle touch, I used the tools in tandem to tug gently on the larger wire. I smiled as I felt it move easily toward me. I pulled it out into the open air.

  “Halfway home,” I said to Sophie.

  “Oui,” she agreed, relief suffusing her face. “You have very steady hands.”

  I set down the probe and picked up a pair of long pliers. I carefully moved the box and the wire so I could see how they attached to each other. The three thin wires wound around three contacts on a metal plate through which the wire travelled. I could see now why Sophie couldn’t do the repair herself. Replacing the box took two hands, since the wires were so delicate and the space they occupied was so small. Once I got my bearings it was the work of a moment to unwind the wires and remove the old box, then put the new box in place and wind the new wires where the prior ones had
been. Then, putting down the pliers and using the tweezers and the probe once again, I gently pushed the box and its attached wire back into the arm cavity, aiming for the space it had occupied before.

  I put down my tools, took the candle from Sophie to place it back on the desk, and heaved a sigh.

  “Let’s see if it works,” I said, leaning back on the chair.

  Sophie inserted the key in its slot and turned it to the right. The mechanism emitted a brief mechanical whirr, and the arm came back to life. Sophie looked down at her hand and ran the fingers through a few quick motions while she bent the elbow back and forth. Other than the whirr at the beginning, the arm made no other mechanical noises. Sophie beamed.

  “You have done it,” she said and leaned over to embrace me in a spontaneous hug with both arMs. The French were clearly a very demonstrative people. “I cannot thank you enough!”

  I hugged her back, laughing a little. “Yes,” I agreed, relieved I’d been successful and glad that Sophie had two working arms again. “I have to sew up your arm yet,” I pointed out.

  She let go of me. “Yes. Do you sew as well as you work with mechanicals?”

  “If you want fancy embroidery and needlework, then no… but simple stitches such as these are within my ability.” I reached over to take up the silk thread and needle. “Unless you’d like to do it?”

  “No,” she said. “I do not feel pain in the arm as you do, but the idea of sewing up my own—“

  “Understood,” I said, realizing I’d rather not sew myself up either. “A few more minutes and you’ll be back to normal.”

  Sophie watched as I sewed up the incision I’d made with stitches as small as those I’d cut had been. It took longer than I thought. When I finished I put the needle on the desktop with my other tools, put the box I’d removed from Sophie’s arm in the glass container, and then leaned back and rubbed my face for a moment. I was weary to the marrow of my bones.

  “I do not know how to thank you,” she said as she dressed herself, sliding her artificial arm back into its black sleeve. “Will you take money? I can pay you—“