As he climbed the tree, his own agility surprised him. No more than ten minutes ago, he'd felt barely able to run the distance between two buildings, and now here he was, pulling himself up branch by branch. He came to the limb he had spotted. Leaning over, holding onto it with his left hand, he stretched out the fingers of his right hand and fastened upon the blade of the fan. He pulled, hard, but it would not budge. He tried three times without success. Then he climbed higher, stood upon the branch sideways and edged his feet out until he was within striking distance. He leaned outward and gave the fan a swift karate kick. It fell inside and hit the floor with a thud. He waited breathlessly to see if anyone came. No one did. He disappeared into the hole.
Inside, the attic was no bigger than a crawl space. It had apparently been built for storage, though it appeared that it had never been used. The darkness was cut by blades of light shining up through the floorboards from the room below. A sliding ladder was pulled up in its resting position next to a trapdoor. It looked as though it would descend into the ward where the Gemini were. That was a stroke of luck. It would save him from having to climb down the tree and break into the room from outdoors.
The attic gave him a perfect vantage point to reconnoiter the hospital. Through the cracks he could see into every room. He leaned over and put his eye to the sliver of light. Directly below was the ward with the clones. From here he could see the thick belts that bound them to their beds, their fearful, uncomprehending looks. They made no noise, and he wondered if they had been sedated. If they were heavily medicated, he realized, his chances of saving them, remote enough to begin with, were practically nonexistent.
The beds were lined headfirst against the wall, but one was out of place. It had wheels on it, and he could only see the foot. Moving quietly on his hands and knees, he positioned himself above it and bent down to look again. It was not a bed but a gurney, he saw, and lying upon it — the knowledge struck him like a slap across the face — was Benny. His friend was instantly recognizable, though he looked small and wan and was swathed in white with sheets and pillows surrounding his round face. An IV stood beside the gurney, feeding his veins with liquid of some sort, but he was not unconscious, not yet. And his eyes darted around nervously, even at one point passing by Skyler's, so that there was briefly an illusion of contact.
Skyler tore himself away and moved on, crawling to another position. He looked down and saw a room with no one in it. It had swinging doors on both sides and banks of monitoring equipment and five empty beds, ready for occupancy. Clearly, a recovery room. He crawled on and came to the point where a second, smaller ward joined the room he had just seen. Looking through the crack, he saw something that he had already feared seeing, something that was pointing him toward a conclusion his mind resisted. There, right beneath him, was another gurney, and lying upon it was a patient who looked exactly like Benny.
The prototype.
They're going to perform a transplant, thought Skyler. They're getting ready to take out Benny's organs and put them into the prototype.
He knew he was right even before he looked down into the next room. But what he saw there confirmed the hideous realization. For he found himself looking down upon a fully equipped operating room, in which surgeons were washing up and preparing for surgery.
"Jude — is that you?"
Tizzie talked at a half whisper, even though she had heard the jailers leave.
"Yes."
"So they got you, too."
"I was at the computer. I had just downloaded the files when they grabbed me."
"The phone — do you have it?"
"No such luck."
"So you know what's going on — about the operations?"
"I saw a schedule on the computer. They're going to do all of them right here. We've got to figure out some way to stop them."
She looked around her cell-like room. It was sparsely furnished with a tiny window high up on the wall, covered with wire mesh embedded in glass and beyond that metal bars. The door was thick, but it was not metal, and it did not quite touch the threshold.
"That's not going to be easy — from in here," she said.
"Where did they get you?"
"In the auditorium. They recognized me. Even that guy Alfred was there. I was stupid to go. And you want to hear something amazing? Uncle Henry — it turns out he's Baptiste. All that time Skyler was talking about him, it never occurred to me that he was the same person."
"Me, neither."
"It was unbelievable — all those people, my age, they look like normal people, like yuppies. And they're about to kill off all these other people, just like themselves, without a second thought."
"They're desperate. Their whole lives have been dedicated to a single proposition — that they'll live twice as long as anyone else — and now they're dying twice as fast. It's enough to make you believe in a higher power. I always thought God had a highly developed sense of irony."
"Jude. What about Skyler? Do you think they got him?"
He was sure they had by now.
"He's probably all right. He's a pretty smart guy. Hopefully, he's kept himself hidden."
"What do you think they're going to do with us?"
He was tempted to lie again, but then again, he thought, she deserved to know what he really thought.
"I think — if you really want to know — that we're dealing with fanatics. With people who will do anything to achieve their goals. And like I said, they're desperate. I think they're going to kill us."
She didn't answer right away, not only because what he said was frightening to her, but also because she was partly occupied examining her cell, inspecting every inch of it — looking for a way out.
From his vantage point Skyler could see and hear almost everything that was going on in the makeshift O.R. There were five people, three men and two women, dressed in faded green scrubs, moving around the room in a complicated choreography. Some were checking instruments, others taking readings from machines or taking inventory. At first, Skyler couldn't tell which were the doctors and which the operating assistants.
The room itself was small and packed with equipment. Beside the operating table, an impressive array of tools had been laid out, ranging from minute knives to saws and mallets. There were four-foot-tall cylindrical tanks for the anesthetic, a white cabinet with sliding tray doors for surgical implements, drawers filled with large swaddling bandages, bins for trash. One bin, mounted on wheels, had a thick white plastic liner, which he realized — with a rush of horror that almost caused him to shudder — was probably for discarded body parts.
When they talked, their voices were so clear that Skyler felt as if he were in the room with them.
"This year I did two of these at Minnesota," said one of the men. "I thought I needed the experience."
"How'd it go?"
"The operations themselves, okay. The patients — that's a different story. One lived for a while and the other died. The one who lived — I don't like to tell you this, but it wasn't easy. Poor son of a bitch didn't know whether he was coming or going. Eating, crapping, pissing, you name it — it was done by someone else's organ. With all those wastes backing up, he blew up like a beach ball. Eventually, his body rejected the organs. Or the organs rejected his body — it's hard to say which."
"That won't happen here."
"True. But you should know — it's no picnic."
"I've done three," said one of the women. "They're tricky, but not impossible. Believe it or not, the hardest part is lifting the organs out all at the same time. There's always some little connection or other you forget about. And their viability times differ. So you have to reconnect them in the right order and do it fast. Once I forgot to connect the urethra. That didn't work out so well."