The hope on her face said she had. “Yes. Thank you—both of you!”
“Now how do I get—”
Ella’s fingers gripped him even tighter. “I know the way. I’m going with you.” The look on her face defied him to argue.
He didn’t plan to. “Good.”
He knew then how she was going to learn what he’d been hiding from her. The end of the suspense gave him no real comfort. This might just be the best way, but would it make any difference in the long run?
He pushed all those thoughts to one side. There was no turning back, not for any of it. All he could do was keep going and try to cope with where events carried him.
He shoved his chair back and stood up, Ella rising to her feet beside him as he took a last look at the screen.
“We’re on our way.”
“I have seen your Dr. Marchey’s name in the medical journals several times,” Dr. Chang said as she poured two cups of tea. She smiled back over her shoulder at Ella. “And please call me Carol.”
“All right, um, Carol.” Ella had expected to hate on sight this woman who had spoiled their reunion. Much to her surprise the opposite had been true.
Chang had greeted them at the door to her office and ushered them inside.
All Ella could do was wait for whatever happened next and wish she had a sketchpad with her. Lacking that, she tried to memorize Chang’s every move and gesture.
The head of Ixion Medical Services stood just over a meter and a half tall. She was flawlessly proportioned, uncannily graceful, and had an almost perfect genotype with straight jet-black hair, almond eyes, and skin the color of aged amber.
Though she had to be an unrejuved fifty, Chang had one of those faces whose beauty time could not diminish. Ella’s artist’s eye subtracted her crisp white coverall and the small silver crucifix worn outside the coverall’s blouse. Dressed in a kimono, she could have been one of Hiroshito’s exquisite porcelain figurines come to life. But warmer, not so aloof and opaque. Old, young, and ageless all at once. She planned to ask the woman if she would sit for her when this was over. Nude, if possible.
As for Marchey, he might as well have been in another room. He’d asked to see the young accident victim’s medical records and stats the moment they reached Chang’s office, and had been hunched over her Medicomp and oblivious to all else since.
Ella’s nostrils flared at the spicy aroma of the tea when Chang handed her an eggshell-delicate cup. “Thanks.”
“You are most welcome.” Chang remained standing. That put her and the seated Ella nearly eye to eye.
“It is I who should thank you,” she continued. “There are only a handful of Bergmann Surgeons as yet. Your, ah, friend is one of the first and most accomplished of them. Now I know that they are somewhat, well, controversial, but I don’t doubt that in the end the prejudice will disappear.” She turned her head to gaze at Marchey, hope filling her face. “For myself, I can only say that his being here at this time is the answer to a prayer. His special skills give Shei a better chance than anything I can do for her.”
Ella frowned at Chang over the rim of her cup. “I’m not sure I know what you’re talking about. You called him that before, a Bergmann Surgeon. What’s it mean?”
Marchey heard Ella’s question. He risked a glance at his old lover. Her whole attention was focused on Dr. Chang as she waited for an answer.
Chang’s poise faltered. She took a sip of her tea, her movement uncharacteristically jerky and uncertain. After an uncomfortable pause, she said, “You don’t know.” It came out as both a question and an unhappy statement all at once.
Ella frowned, puzzled by her reaction. “Gory has always been a surgeon. Is this different somehow?”
Marchey spoke up at last. “Yes, it is.” Both women turned toward him, Chang looking relieved and Ella clearly baffled by the sudden tension.
“I must see the child now.” He met Ella’s gaze. “I want you to come and watch. There’s something you don’t know about. Something I haven’t been able to tell you. The only way to understand is to see it for yourself.”
He spoke firmly. His apprehension showed only in the way his gloved hand strayed for a moment to the silver pin over his heart.
Chang put her cup aside and started toward the door. “This way, please.” She strode ahead without looking back.
They both followed, Marchey moving with a businesslike briskness, Ella trailing uncertainly behind.
Chang led them to a small combination Surgery/ICU just two doors down from her office.
The brightly lit, antiseptic-smelling room made Ella even more uneasy. She didn’t want to think about the type of things done in such a place. Invasions of the body and dignity. Proof that the flesh could fail in all sorts of horrible and humiliating ways.
Her unanswered questions weighed heavily on her, leaving her off-balance. From the very first she’d felt Gory’s reserve, suspected that he was holding something back. Hiding something. It seemed that the veil was about to be lifted. She had a sinking feeling that she wasn’t going to like what was behind it one bit.
When she finally made herself look at the small, white-swaddled form on the padded table in the center of the room, took in the tubes and sensors and other medical arcana hooked up to it, the urge to turn and escape screwed tighter around her. There was nothing here she wanted to know about. This was all a part of him she had kept at arm’s length the first time around.
Yet she stayed, hovering fretfully near the door. Her hands worried and plucked at each other nervously. Her question remained: What was a Bergmann Surgeon?
Marchey went straight to the table, his face intent, and began his initial examination in silence. Chang dismissed the medico in attendance and started toward the table. He waved her back without turning around.
“Will the secondaries take over if I unplug her for a moment?” he asked over his shoulder while checking the pupil response of Shei’s undamaged right eye. The other one was hidden under a thick sterile covering. The whole left side of her head was heavily bandaged; her face had been partly averted when the toy cannon had turned into a pipe bomb.
He shook his head at what he saw. Her pupil was dilated and showed only minimal response. Hang on, my brown-eyed girl Help is here now.
“Yes, it’s a full table.”
Marchey nodded absently at Chang’s answer. He sighed, squared his shoulders, then turned to look across the room at Ella.
The expression on his face made her take an involuntary step back. He wore the face of a condemned man, despairing and apologetic, the face of a man saying a final farewell. Part of her was drawn to comfort him, to tell him that nothing could be that bad. But she could only stand there, the anxiety buzzing through her bones defeating that impulse.
Marchey’s gaze dropped, and he turned away. First he shucked off his jacket and laid it aside. Next he rolled up the sleeves of his red-silk shirt. The gray-velvet gloves covered his arms up to his elbows.
He began stripping off the right glove. The fabric slid down his forearm, revealing not white skin but burnished silver. His wrist was silver. His hand, palm, thumb, and fingers were silver; gleaming metal shaped into smooth, perfectly sculpted folds and curves, supple seamless biometal shaped to mimic the flesh and bone it had replaced down to each knuckle and crease.
He removed his other glove, his already-bared silver hand gleaming and flashing as it moved like a thing alive. His left hand and arm were the same, a mirror twin of the right. Face burning self-consciously, he put the gloves aside. Through all this he kept his head down, studiously avoiding Ella’s shocked and uncomprehending stare.