was so intense, so absolute, that it threatened to overwhelm him, consume him. He clenched his fists, holding on to his tenuous grip on wakefulness. Did his fists really clench? He couldn’t tell, couldn’t be sure. No matter now, what really counted was the pain. All that counted was the pain.
He calmed his mind, remembering the techniques they had taught him years before in Magistrate training. A Magistrate is never ruffled, never swayed by emotion.
The pain was in his right leg. High in the leg. A line of pain across the top of the leg, close to his groin.
And the left? The left leg? What did that feel? Was he trapped under something? He felt as though he may have blacked out and had lost his immediate short-term memories. Even in not remembering how this came about, he still recognized the symptom, the feeling of bewilderment.
The pain continued, a blazing sensation that felt so strong across the top of his right leg.
Pain equaled danger, which meant that Grant needed to be awake, needed to find out what the pain was, what was going on. To escape perhaps? To save himself? Perhaps even to save others.
He struggled once more to turn his head and open his eyes. I’m awake, he told himself, but I can’t wake up.
It seemed impossible, but suddenly the pain became worse, went beyond absolute into a whole new level of agony that Grant had never even imagined existed. He felt the muscles of his mouth strain, stretching open, trying to scream, yet no sound would emerge.
And suddenly his eyes were open, assaulted by lights so bright that it stung to look. His vision blurred immediately, salty tears streaming across his eyes, rolling down his cheeks. He struggled, blinking the tears away where he couldn’t move his hands to reach them, and he saw properly for the first time where he was.
Safe.
That was Grant’s first thought when he realized where he lay. He was on his back, bright lights around him, people bustling about in the familiar, starched uniforms of the Cobaltville medical hub. Behind the lights it was hard to see. Everything was lost in comparative darkness, but he could smell the disinfectant, the antibacterial wash. He counted six—no, seven—people in the room with him, reduced to silhouettes by the overhead rig of fierce lights. As Grant watched, he began to discern their features, his eyes getting used to the bright halogen lighting. They were looking at him intensely, with concern and furrowed brows and much muttered, hasty discussion that he couldn’t seem to make out. They were looking at him intensely, but not at his face. They were staring at his legs.
Grant tried to look down the length of his body, to see what had transfixed them, but he found that he couldn’t move, couldn’t make his body react.
The pain in his right leg burned and ached, but he could not see why, could not see what was going on.
Suddenly, one of the doctors, a middle-aged man with a shaved head and vibrant blue eyes, wearing a cotton mask over the bottom half of his features, leaped back from where he stood at the foot of the gurney, and Grant watched as a fountain of blood flew up and splashed over the doctor and the other people there.
The bald surgeon bit out a curse, and Grant saw something glinting in his hand, a whirring blade of some kind, attached to a wire that led to a socket in a portable machine.
Please, Grant thought, please let me know what is going on. And, once again, the salty tears blurred his vision until all he knew were the frantic voices and the sounds of the machines beeping steadily in the far distance.
“Doctor?” It was a woman’s voice, softly spoken yet urgent. “Doctor, look. I think he’s awake. The Magistrate is awake.”
“In the name of the baron,” said a man’s voice, fearful but with anger bubbling beneath the surface, “where the hell is that anesthesiologist? He shouldn’t be awake for this. Put him out, Elaine.”
Tears swam across his vision, and Grant saw the blur of a woman dressed in white rushing closer to his face, the sound of her heels clattering on the hard tiled floor. She was reaching toward him, her hand a pinkish, blurred rectangle that smelled of antibacterial wash.
Suddenly something hard was pushed against Grant’s face, wrapping itself around his mouth and nose, coiling and shaping itself as though it were alive. And the woman, the nurse, was pushing her hand against his forehead, holding him in place as though he could move.
“Upping feed level to 3.8,” she said.
The sensation of pain in his leg was abating and, for just a second, the thick tears seemed to clear. Grant saw the nurse close to him, leaning over the gurney, her white uniform starched with perfectly creased lines down its edges. The uniform was unflattering, but Grant could see that she was a curvaceous woman, the tunic straining against the swell of her breasts. Above that, russet hair, her head turned away as she spoke to the chief surgeon, counting down in her clear voice, her frank concern clear in her tone.
She turned back then, looking at Grant, her hand still pushing at his forehead to hold him down. His eyes seemed to see only her smile for a moment, white and dazzling beneath the lights, with large, straight teeth; a photogenic smile. The canine teeth at the edges of her burned-umber lips were just visible as she spoke, her tone a soothing purr but the words lost.
Grant’s vision swam and he looked at the nurse’s face, trying to make sense of it. Two dark, watery eyes looking back at him, set deep in her face. Her beautiful, flawless teeth showing in her sweeping jaw, following the curvature of the long muzzle that poked toward him, the pink-and-black nose twitching slightly amid the rusty brown fur.
Grant realized then that the nurse was some kind of animal, a dog. A German shepherd or maybe a timber wolf.
And as he looked up, gazed across the room, the surgeons and the other nurses and personnel in the room all appeared the same. Dogs. He was being operated on by dogs.
BRIGID BAPTISTE’S EYES opened and she looked at the computer screen before her through the small, square-rimmed glasses perched on the bridge of her nose. The glasses were a symbol of office, marking her as a Cobaltville archivist, but were also a medical necessity. Years of computer work had left her slightly shortsighted. Her eyelids felt heavy, and the information on the glowing screen seemed unfamiliar. Her vivid emerald eyes scanned the glowing screen for a few seconds—it showed an archival report on an island in the Pacific that had been used for bomb testing back in the 1900s.
Strange, she thought, glancing surreptitiously around her, seeing the familiar forms of her colleagues as they worked at their own terminals, running through and amending the documents from the old days, the days before skydark. Everything seemed normal, and yet there was something that Brigid felt in the back of her mind, and the feeling had begun when she looked at the document on her screen.
I blinked, she thought, going through her preceding actions, and when I looked at the screen again it was like seeing it for the first time.
Perhaps there was something in the document? Perhaps she had seen something, or noticed something, or perhaps something had changed even as she was looking at it, almost subliminal and yet different.
“Refresh,” Brigid ordered into her mike pickup. A wipe panned down her terminal screen at the instruction, refreshing the information as though she was loading the file from scratch.
Nothing. No differences. Brigid’s eidetic memory would alert her instantly if something had changed.
“Go
