Cadaver & Queen by Alisa Kwitney
“Young woman, if you have a question, raise your hand.”
Lizzie raised her hand.
“However, I am not prepared to stop the entire class to address a question that only pertains to one student. Now, let us move on to more pressing matters.”
Taking hold of the skeleton, Grimbald moved it to the center of the stage. “Let us begin with the support structure of the body. The axial skeleton refers to the bones that make up the central axis of the body, as opposed to the appendicular skeleton. All told, there are 206 bones in the human body, and for next class, I expect you to know them all.”
“Kill me now,” said Will under his breath.
In that moment, she could have slapped him. What right did he have to complain? So what if the course was difficult. Medical school wasn’t supposed to be easy, and if you couldn’t handle the work or the sight of a dead body, then you had to expect to be weeded out. Only the most tenacious students would be able to make it through to the end, which was fine, because she knew she was stubborn enough to withstand just about anything.
But it doesn’t matter what I know or what I can do or how hard I try. Grimbald made it clear that he didn’t want her in his class. Even if she passed every exam, the head of surgery wasn’t going allow her to succeed.
On the bright side, he had made the opening gambit and revealed his game plan. All I need to do is think of a countermove.
11
That evening, Lizzie went to Makepiece’s laboratory carrying a bit of bread and a hunk of cheese wrapped in wax paper for the professor. They had repaired the etheric magnetometer two days earlier, but had not yet had the opportunity to test it. Tonight, Makepiece had promised Lizzie, they would give the device an experimental run. Up until today’s anatomy class, Lizzie had been counting down the hours, but now she was so infuriated by Grimbald’s decision to exclude her that she could barely think about anything else.
“Professor Makepiece?” She was surprised to find that the laboratory was dark and there was a faint, metallic, burned odor in the room. She flipped the light switch, but nothing happened. A fuse must have blown. Lizzie was turning to leave when she heard a low moan. “Hello? Professor? Is that you?” Lizzie paused, her heart pounding. “Are you injured?” Another moan, and this time Lizzie followed the sound to its source. Even though it was too dark to see clearly, she could make out a bulky form lying on a gurney.
“Ghhnn.”
“Professor?” She didn’t know why she kept saying that. She knew that the figure on the gurney was not Makepiece. It must be a patient, but something about the size of the shadowy figure made her nervous. “Are you in pain?”
“Ghhnn.”
All right, get a grip on yourself, she thought. You want to be a doctor? Act like one.
“Right, then,” she said, and drew closer to the patient. “It sounds as though you might be experiencing a bit of discomfort.” There was another soft moan, and Lizzie wished she could see better. In addition to being slightly shortsighted, she had poor night vision, and all she could make out of the patient was that he was a large man, his form mostly covered by a blanket.
Surely Makepiece kept a gas lamp on hand in case of power outages. Feeling around on the table, Lizzie’s hand came in contact with a glass lantern. “All right, matches, matches...” Her fingers closed on the box, which she recognized by the strip of sandpaper along its side. “Now the trick is to do this without burning my fingers.” Lizzie turned the lamp’s knob, waited to hear the low hiss of escaping gas, and struck a match. Success. She adjusted the light, then moved the lantern so that it illuminated the patient with its pallid yellow glow.
“Gnnn!” The patient closed his eyes tightly, as if recoiling from the light. That might mean a migraine, thought Lizzie, moving the lamp away.
“Is that better?” The patient took a deep, shuddery breath. “Good,” Lizzie said, hoping she sounded more confident than she felt. “Now let’s take a look at you.” The patient’s face was badly bruised, with swelling around his left eye, a cut on his right cheek and a split lower lip. He was also taller and younger than she had expected, with untidy thick, dark hair and the broad shoulders of a manual laborer. She reached out and brushed back his thick hair, which was surprisingly silky to the touch, and pressed the back of her hand to his forehead. “Fever. You are in a state.” The patient squinted up at her, clearly trying to adjust to the light. “But is it a contagious fever? Are you injured?”
She pulled back the covers to continue her examination. He was not wearing the usual nightshirt, and Lizzie tried not to feel missish about the firmly muscled expanse of bare chest that was revealed, or the metal plate that covered the left side of his chest. It was a dull brass color, and appeared to be fused with the flesh. She had never seen anything like it before. “What is this?”
The patient frowned. Perhaps he didn’t speak English. She wished she had paid more attention to her father’s French lessons. “Um...parlez-vous français?” She moved her hands down one well-developed arm and realized that there were leather restraints on the man’s wrists, tying him down to the gurney. His left hand was partially encased in a brass gauntlet, and the fingers appeared quite discolored, at least a shade or two darker than his right hand. She decided to loosen the restraints while she was there, to allow the blood to circulate better. Leaning across him to untie his left arm, she saw that the scars and the metal extended all the way around the forearm. Whoever this poor man was, he had clearly suffered some grievous injuries in the past.
“All right, I need to cleanse your wound.” Lizzie paused, wondering if she dared pull the blanket farther down, uncovering the man’s torso and abdomen. It would be absurd to waste time treating his upper body if there were other, worse injuries lower down.
Sapere Aude, she thought. Dare to know.
She folded the blanket back and saw that the man’s abdomen was marked with bruises. There was a long friction burn running along his right side, which looked terribly painful, and should have been covered by ointment and a bandage. There were also older scars, making Lizzie wonder if her patient had been a soldier, or a prisoner of war.
She licked her lips. “I am going to touch you. Let me know if this hurts, and I will stop.” She reached out one hand to touch the largest bruise, and pressed gently to see if any of the underlying organs might have been injured. She glanced up at his face, to find that the patient was lying back with his eyes closed. He looked exhausted, as if watching her took too much effort. Biting her lower lip, Lizzie hesitated only a moment and then tugged the covers down another inch. A thin line of dark hair bisected his flat stomach, which was ridged with muscle. Lizzie felt a strange twist of nervous excitement in her own belly as she drew the covers down past the patient’s hip bones.
The patient grunted, and one of his hands closed over hers. Lizzie gave a startled yelp. The man’s eyes opened and his blue gaze held hers, and then, in a low, clear voice, he said, “No.”
* * *
Victor looked up at the young woman who seemed intent on removing his last claim to modesty. Where was he, precisely? The last thing he recalled was...shuffling. Manacles. The monkey-faced guard. And then the knowledge, slamming into him like another kick: they’ve changed me. On the heels of that thought came another: I don’t want to live like this.
A memory: Henry, staring into his glass of ale, saying, “It’s easy to think well of yourself when the world keeps telling you how wonderful you are. You don’t know what you might become if everyone started to treat you as though you were defective.”
“Oh, dear,” Victor had replied at the time, “are we getting maudlin? Best stop drinking, old man.”
But Henry had been right; Victor hadn’t known himself. He wished this young woman would go away and stop looking at him. He wished he could close his eyes and fall back into the dark of unconsciousness. God, his head hurt.
She really was determined to get him naked, thought Victor. Despite the pounding of his head, he was bemused to realize that he was not too far gone to see the humor in the situation. “Muh heh,” he said. He had managed that first “no” without even thinking, but now he felt as though he were rediscovering some old path that words could take from mind to mouth.
“Your head hurts?”
She understood him! Victor let go of the nurse’s wrists and allowed her to run them over his head. He knew the moment she saw the electrodes jutting from the side of his neck, because she sucked in a sharp breath. When she looked up at him, there was new understanding in her eyes. She had thought him a man. Now, she knew he was a thing—a construct of cold metal and dead flesh. Victor waited for the nurse to recoil. In his experience, nurses did not like to attend to Bio-Mechanicals. They treated them with cold efficiency, but they did not speak softly to them, or smile, or offer palliatives to ease their pain. As women, they were more in touch with feeling and nature than men. They had no elaborate intellectual justifications to blind them to what was right and what was wrong.
But this young woman was frowning down at him as if he were a chess problem. Then, very slowly and deliberately, she touched his neck again, near the metal implants. “Is this where the pain is coming from?”
Her fingers were cool and comforting on his head, the light pressure she exerted a relief. “Ehsh,” he said, even though he wasn’t completely sure if the stabbing pains were traveling up to his head or down from it.
“Hmm. I have an idea.”
Laudanum. Thank God, she would give him laudanum and he would sleep and perhaps, if she was inexperienced enough, she might give him too much laudanum, enough to send him floating off out of this nightmare existence.
The nurse stepped out of the circle of light, and he heard her stumble once in the dark. Victor was disappointed to see that she did not carry a little brown bottle in her hands when she returned. Instead, she held a purple velvet bag, which she set down on the bed, unnervingly close to sensitive areas. Did the woman have no concept of male anatomy?
“Here,” she said, fiddling with an instrument he couldn’t see. “All right, this is going to make a crackling sound, but don’t worry.” She took a deep breath. “It won’t hurt.”
That didn’t sound terribly convincing. Now he could see that she was holding a glass wand over his chest. He grunted, making it a question.
“It’s a treatment. Too complicated to explain.”
Now she sounded like a doctor. Victor watched as she turned a dial, then stiffened as the glass tube crackled with violet light. “Wuh.” That light. A memory flashed through him: blue-tinged lightning, machete-sharp pain slicing down his spine.
“Wait? But why? This will make you feel better.” She moved her hand, and he grabbed the wrist holding the wand. She looked at him, hazel eyes bright with purpose. “Really. It’s all perfectly safe. Trust me.” Victor realized what she was trying to do: shock him back into unconsciousness, the way Grimbald did with experimental animals.
He released her wrist. If this nurse couldn’t kill him, then perhaps she could turn him into a proper Bio-Mechanical—one with no thoughts or feelings.
“That’s better. It will all work this time. You’ll see.”
Victor waited for the charge of electricity to jolt through him. The first time the nurse waved the wand, small tongues of electricity arced down over his chest. Then she raised the wand closer to his face, and he felt the electrodes in his neck begin to vibrate, setting up a low, unsettling hum inside his head.
She looked down at him, smiling a little. She was quite pretty, he realized, with lovely, thick-lashed hazel eyes. His head felt warm, and the heat traveled down his body. Hope I don’t embarrass myself. Then, in a shocking surge, he felt a sudden paroxysm of pain that had something of pleasure in it. No time to feel embarrassed now. He convulsed, fists clenching, before the darkness he had been praying for released him at last.
12
For an awful moment, Lizzie thought that she had killed her first patient. She began to check for a heartbeat, then paused, looking down at the strange metal plate covering his heart. After a moment’s hesitation, she placed her ear near his mouth instead, and was relieved to hear him draw in a breath.
“Are you all right?” He gave no sign that he heard her. Lizzie touched the electrodes with the tip of one finger, then gasped as a jolt of electricity shot through her. She swallowed, trying to get rid of the odd metallic taste in her mouth. Why had the magnetometer knocked the Bio-Mechanical unconscious? It had never had that effect on any human patient.
She was about to slap the subject’s face to bring him around when she heard the sound of voices outside the laboratory. “I still say we ought to wait.” Lizzie recognized Grimbald’s voice.
“We’ve waited too long already. The queen is malfunctioning and needs to be regalvanized.”
“The last thing we want is to draw attention to ourselves with a royal visit. I do not want to see the school’s name in the broadsheets again.”
“I still don’t see why you’ve dragged us all out here, Makepiece.” That was Moulsdale, sounding irate. “Couldn’t we have met in my study?”
“No,” said Makepiece. “I have something to show you.”
Lizzie looked down at the Bio-Mechanical and found that his eyes were open and that he was looking in the direction of the voices. He turned back to her, and for the first time, Lizzie saw the clear light of intelligence in his blue eyes.
“Hide,” he said.
“But...”
“Now.” Said without garbling or hesitation.
Lizzie quickly extinguished the lamp and gathered up the pieces of the etheric magnetometer. Where could she conceal herself? Looking around the laboratory, she spotted the small wardrobe where Makepiece kept lab coats and aprons. Lizzie moved clumsily through the dark room, knocking into a salamander tank and nearly upsetting a glass vial before she found the wardrobe. She made it just in time. As she pulled the door shut behind her, she heard the professors’ footsteps as they entered the lab.
“Botheration, Makepiece, the fuses have blown.”
“No, I did it deliberately, to make sure we had no unwanted visitors.” Through the cracks in the wardrobe, Lizzie saw the lights come on.
“Dear Lord, isn’t that...?” Moulsdale’s voice trailed off.
Grimbald scowled. “What’s he doing here?”
“Got into a fight with the guards,” said Makepiece mildly. “Could be a promising sign.”
Lizzie put her eye up to the crack in the wardrobe door and saw that the three men were gathered around the Bio-Mechanical.
Moulsdale had his hands tucked into his waistcoat pockets as he considered the Bio-Mechanical. “A display of aggression. Very promising. Was it provoked?”
“The guards say no,” Makepiece said in a dry voice. “He also seems to have attacked Henry Clerval.”
Moulsdale nodded, taking this in. “And was that provoked?”
“Whether it was provoked or not is immaterial,” said Grimbald. “It was aggression. This could be the breakthrough we’ve been searching for, Ambrose.”
“Or it could be a setback,” said Moulsdale. “We need to be able to control them, Graham.”
“We need them to be able to attack an enemy,” countered Grimbald. “Right now, all they do is shuffle straight into the line of fire.”
All Lizzie could see now were the professors’ backs as they bent over the patient.
“He appears to be unconscious.”
“His breathing is too rapid for that. He’s shamming.” There was a loud slap. “There. Now he’s awake. Well?” Grimbald’s voice was edged with excitement.
“Grimbald, his hands...he’s not restrained.”
“So let him attack me.” Another slap.
“Grimbald, stop.”
“Why?” Another slap, louder than the other. “He’s not a man, remember? He doesn’t feel pain.”
“Grimbald, that is enough,” said Moulsdale. “He’s not responding, so can we please go back to discussing the more important issue? We need to know when our esteemed royal visitor should return to us.”
“It’s not the more important issue,” said Grimbald. “It’s a bloody distraction from our real work—creating Bio-Mechanical soldiers for the queen.”
“Yes...for the queen,” said Moulsdale. “And that is why we must tend to our most powerful patient.”
Grimbald snorted derisively. “You and your political machinations.”
“You’ll thank me someday. We can send Makepiece to tinker with her, but for a full overhaul, Her Majesty needs the equipment we have here. Makepiece, what do you say?”
“She needs to be brought in, and the sooner the better. And that means we need fresh cadavers.”
“What about the locals?” This was Grimbald. “They’re always particularly superstitious of us around Christmastime. The last time we had a late delivery, the rumor mill started buzzing about grave robbers.”
“It can’t be helped. We need to work on her now, and for that, we need cadavers.”
“Fine, don’t listen to me,” said Grimbald. “I don’t know why I even bother to come down here.” He glanced at the figure on the gurney. “What do you suggest we do about...it?”
“Don’t worry, Graham. He’s my concern.”
“Good.”
Lizzie waited as the voices moved away. For the first time in her life, she felt thick and stupid as she tried to make sense of the things she had heard. Why was Grimbald so angry with this Bio-Mechanical? She recalled her father telling her that, in his experience, anger was mostly a disguise for fear or guilt, or the curdled artifact of love gone sour.