Poor Stephen.
His face is much the same as it’s always been: leathery, hook-nosed and bearded. He’s got a lot more hair than he had at the trial-cloneplants, the saviour of balding men. Did he get one of his minions to perform the procedure, or do it himself? Always the perfectionist. Always the huge ego.
The floors pass and one by one the others leave until she is alone in the lift with Stephen. Oblivious to her presence he works one of his delicate surgeon’s fingers up that huge, hooked nose. Round and round and round he digs, before dragging something out and peering at it.
She closes her eyes and does not watch him eating what he has found.
The lift shudders to a halt and she waits for him to leave the car first-just like a good halfhead should-then follows him out into a cluttered reception area. The walls are peppered with inspirational posters, pictures of happy, smiling children, thank you letters, news clips and awards. The cloneplant ward of Glasgow Royal is one of the best in the world. And Dr Stephen Bexley is it’s grand vizier.
The security guard checks Stephen’s ID, running it through the scanner as if he were a potential terrorist instead of the head of the department. Only when the reader plinks ‘ALL CLEAR’ does the guard smile and ask him how his wife and children are.
He has a family now. A new head of hair, a pregnant wife, and children. How sweet. That makes things a lot easier.
Stephen shares a few pleasantries with the guard, then walks through the doors. No one bothers to check the ID of the halfhead with the mop and the bucket, she just shuffles past into the depths of the cloneplant lab.
It’s bigger than she remembers it. The equipment in here is all new to her, but she’s a fast learner. She mops the floor, up and down between the rows of work benches, nice and slow, watching what the technicians are doing. The first stage seems easy enough: place patient samples in a sequencer to fabricate stem cells. The next bit is harder: working out how to direct the growth. There will probably be stored procedures in the system to get the results she wants, but she needs enough time to find the proper commands. So she keeps on mopping until the lunch bell goes and they all bustle off to sample the canteen’s deep-fried delights.
They’ll be back in forty minutes: she has to work fast.
Getting the sample for the sequencer isn’t easy. She needs good, healthy tissue. There’s no way she can scrape cells out of her cheek, or her oesophagus; so she peels a strip, five millimetres wide and ten millimetres long, from her abdomen with a fresh blade. It’s not a deep wound, but it stings and bleeds more than she expects. She presses a handful of sterile wadding over the wound, stopping the worst of it. A small sacrifice to get her real face back. To be herself again.
Should have taken a tin of skinpaint from the storeroom, but she never expected to get this far so soon. Ah welclass="underline" carpe diem.
With her free hand she slips the rectangle of flesh into a fresh crucible-a circle of complicated plastics and electrics sealing off a bag of growth medium. She snaps the top back on, slides the whole thing into the sequencer and sets it in motion. From here on everything is automated; all she has to do is tell the system what she wants the cells to grow into.
Which is more complicated than it looked.
She’s still searching for the right commands when people start returning from lunch: she can hear them chatting in the reception area, dragging their heels, not wanting to get back to work too quickly.
The sequence has to be in here somewhere…
Her left leg starts to tremble.
Where the hell is the damn sequence?
Bees and broken glass.
The door clicks open and the staff drift in, heading for their work areas.
Time to give up. Come back later. Don’t take any risks.
She tabs through the command list as quickly as she can, speed reading from one file to the next.
Someone sits down at the next bench along, talking into his finger: ‘Yeah, no, a pint sounds great…’
A sequence flickers up on her monitor, every last cell division worked out in perfect detail. It’s a lot more tissue than she needs, but she doesn’t have time to search for something else.
‘Hey, what’s that damn halfheid doin’ tae ma desk?’ The voice is rough, coming from the other end of the room.
The man sitting at the next bench looks up at the noise and then glances at her.
It’s just enough time to peel the wadding off her bleeding stomach and pretend to polish the desktop with it.
‘Cleaning,’ says the man. ‘What’d you think it was doing, Rob, reading your pornmail?’
They laugh, and Rob blushes. ‘Shut up.’
She stabs the button, downloading the instruction sequence into the crucible.
‘What’s all the hilarity about?’ Dr Stephen Bexley stands at the front of the room, running a hand through his new hair.
‘Rob thinks the halfhead’s reading his dirty emails.’ More laughter.
‘No ah don’t!’
‘Children, children.’ Stephen smiles at them, always the self-appointed father figure. ‘Play nice.’
The workbench is covered with thin streaks of blood where she’s been rubbing it with the wadding. She dips the cloth into the bucket at her feet and wipes it clean before anyone can see.
The crucible drops down the feeder rack and slips off to the incubation room. The first cell division will already be under way, expanding and growing at an accelerated rate.
Now all she has to do is wait.
15
‘Feelin’ any better?’ Special Agent Brian Alexander plonked himself down on the end of Will’s hospital bed. The little private room was comfortable enough, if you liked machines that pinged and gurgled at random intervals. ‘You look like a mouldy jobbie, by the way.’
‘What took you so long?’ Will swung his legs out of bed, then stood, his hospital-issue smock flapping open at the back. The left side of his face felt as if it had been stretched over a head three times too big for it. And every breath was like being stabbed in the chest.
‘Last time I do you a favour.’ Brian sniffed. ‘We knew they took all your clothes in as evidence, so me an’ Jo went shoppin’!’
Will stared at him. ‘Oh, no. Tell me you didn’t let…’ He ground to a halt-DS Cameron was standing in the doorway. She was still wearing the same florescent pink, triple breasted suit she’d had on in the park that morning. Given her taste in work clothes, and the dirty big grin on Brian’s face, Will got the nasty feeling they’d bought something that would make him look like a complete idiot. He forced a smile. ‘I mean…Thanks.’
It was the thought that counted. And besides, whatever fashion-disaster they’d bought, he’d only have to wear it from here back to the apartment. Twenty minutes, half an hour tops.
Will reached round and clasped the gown closed at the back, making sure DS Cameron didn’t get subjected to an eyeful of buttock. ‘Honestly, you shouldn’t have gone to all that trouble.’ They really shouldn’t have: they could have just gone past the flat and picked him up a change of clothes-and Brian knew it-but that wouldn’t have been as much fun as buying something hideous.
‘Oh no,’ Brian’s smile grew wider. ‘It was a pleasure! Wasn’t it, Jo?’
DS Cameron handed Will a bulky bag in luminous yellow with something trendy written on the side. ‘Hope they fit.’ Was she blushing?
Suddenly Will felt very uncomfortable. ‘Em…thank you.’
Brian let the silence drag on for a bit, before taking DS Cameron by the arm and leading her out into the corridor so Will could ‘get some privacy’. Wink, wink. The bastard was loving every minute of this.