Twelve
“What have you done?” ChoVa said as she rushed
over to PyrsVar’s side. “You have killed him.”
“I removed the organs that do not belong in him,”
Maggie said. “He is not dead.”
Nor was he anesthetized, I saw, but mercifully he
was unconscious. “Was he awake when you started cutting into
him?”
“I made him go to sleep,” Maggie said. “The other
one was already asleep.”
“What other one?” I demanded. “Who is that? One of
the interns? Where did you get him?”
“I did not get him. I made him.” She nodded toward
the Jorenian body on the second gurney. “I used the stunted,
sleeping one trapped in the Hsktskt’s chest to make the form. I
needed something to serve as the receptacle, and he was not using
the other.”
As soon as she had transferred the organ into the
Jorenian body, I shoved her aside and inspected the rogue’s chest
cavity. She may have been using some form of light energy to
perform the horrific surgery, but she was no surgeon. She’d
butchered him.
“Shon, get into your gear.” I pulled on a shroud, a
mask, and gloves. “ChoVa, see to the Jorenian.”
“I will help you,” Maggie offered.
“You will stand aside,” I told her, “while I try to
repair what you’ve done to this man.”
She looked mystified. “I have done the work. I have
separated him.”
“You’ve hacked him to pieces.” I put PyrsVar over
onto the heart-lung machine and pulled down the lascalpel. Maggie
had cauterized the severed vessels as she removed the organs, which
would buy me a little time. “I need four scrubs nurses in here,” I
shouted.
ChoVa had pulled on her gear and was now focused on
the Jorenian, although she kept looking over at PyrsVar.
“It’s all right,” I told her. “I’ve got him.”
“We could put him in stasis now,” she said
desperately. “You could use the retroviral compound to rebuild his
body.”
“I designed it to work in an immersion tank, and
he’d never survive that.” I turned my head and saw the monitors
weren’t hooked up. “Shon, scan him and give me his vitals.”
“BP is dropping, heart rate decreasing,” he told me
as he performed the scan and then started anesthetic. “He needs
blood, but what type?”
“Auto-infuse him for now.” I looked over at the
nurses coming in. “Do we have any crossbreed blood
synthesized?”
“He is not a crossbreed any longer,” Maggie
announced. “I have purified him.”
“Shut up,” I snapped, and turned to Shon. “Type his
blood.”
“I already have.” He met my gaze. “It’s Hsktskt,
type J.”
Thirty minutes ago PyrsVar had been a crossbreed.
“It can’t be. Do it again.”
“I have, three times. All the readings are
identical.” Shon sent one of the nurses to retrieve all the units
of Hsktskt J blood we had stored. “Maybe we should permit the Jxin
to complete the separation.”
“It is done,” Maggie told him. “You said you wanted
them separated, Cherijo. That is what I did.”
“Can you repair all this damage?” I asked
Shon.
He gave the chest cavity a long look. “The organs
will have to be in their proper position for me to heal
them.”
“That I can do.” I pulled down the lascalpel and
started on the heart. “ChoVa?”
“The Jorenian’s heart has begun to beat on its
own,” she told me, her voice harsh. “I am completing the liver
transplant. Can you save him?”
I exchanged a look with Shon. “We’ll bring him
back.”
As I worked on putting PyrsVar’s remaining organs
back in their proper places, I cursed myself for leaving Maggie
alone. Her literal interpretation of our casual remarks might cost
the rogue his life, and ChoVa the love of hers. As soon as I could,
I was putting her on a launch—or pushing her out of the nearest
convenient air lock.
“You are angry with me,” I heard Maggie say in an
astonished voice. “That is why you behave this way. But why?”
“I’m not angry,” I assured her. “I’m furious. I
could kill you with my bare hands.”
She looked sulky again. “No, you cannot.”
“What makes you think you can rip open a man’s
chest and start pulling organs out of it?”
“He was dying.”
“He was fine.” But even as I said that, I moved
down and saw the condition of his only remaining kidney. It was
atrophied, but with a little luck Shon could heal it. “What did you
do with his other kidney?”
“It was dead tissue, and it was poisoning him,” she
replied blithely. “I removed it and destroyed it.”
ChoVa made a strange sound. “That explains the
strangeness in his color. He was very pale today; he must have been
in renal failure. But he never said anything to me.”
PyrsVar probably thought admitting something was
wrong was unmanly. Since his Jorenian kidneys had not been
functioning, without treatment he probably would have died in a few
hours.
“Why didn’t you come and tell me this?” I asked
Maggie.
“I wished to, but the male said I should not,” she
told me. “He believed that you would not permit me to separate him.
He said it was his decision, not yours.” She came over to the
table. “The derma will take several weeks to regenerate. I promised
that I would also help regrow the two missing limbs and his rear
appendage.”
“You’re not to touch a single scale on his body,” I
said through my teeth. “Or anyone else on the ship. Ever again. Is
that clear?”
“Your language is quite simple,” she assured me. “I
understand you perfectly.”
I finished reconnecting the organs in PyrsVar’s
lower abdomen and checked over the major vessels in the rest of his
limbs. “All right,” I said to Shon. “Your turn.”
He stripped off his gloves and came around the
table, inspecting the open chest. “I will begin with the heart, and
work out from there. It will not take long. As soon as his pulse
and respiration restart, you must remove him from the
machine.”
I took Shon’s place by the equipment. “I’m ready
when you are.”
The oKiaf placed both paws over the open chest
cavity and closed his eyes as his pads started to glow.
“He uses the light as we do, for purification,”
Maggie said, astounded. “Why did you not have him separate
them?”
“Be quiet,” I snapped at her, staring at PyrsVar’s
organs as Shon healed them one by one. As soon as the heart pulsed
and the lungs inflated, I took the rogue off life support. “His
heart is beating, ChoVa,” I said over my shoulder. “He’s breathing
on his own now.”
She murmured something under her breath, maybe a
prayer. “I will need your assistance when you are finished there,”
she said. “This Jorenian could awake before I am able to
close.”
When Shon nodded to me, I left him with PyrsVar and
went over to the second gurney. Despite her distress ChoVa had done
an excellent job transplanting the remains of the Jorenian liver,
although there appeared to be another half still intact in the
chest.
I started anesthetic to keep him unconscious before
I inspected the rest of her work. “The heart looks good. What about
the bowel?”
“It was not as lengthy as it should be, and then .
. .” She looked at me over the edge of her mask. “It began to grow
inside him.”
“I accelerated the growth of some of the organs
that required enlargement to attain the correct size,” Maggie put
in. “That is the only way they would work.”
“I’ll take it from here,” I told the Hsktskt. “Go
and see if Shon is ready to close.”
Once I had scanned the Jorenian’s chest and ensured
all the organs were functioning, I closed the cross-shaped incision
Maggie had used to open his chest. The last of my sutures ended
just below the collarbone, and I noticed a small black spot on the
side of the throat. It was the male’s ClanSign, the uplifted wing
that was the mark of HouseClan Torin.
I hadn’t thought about what Maggie would build out
of PyrsVar’s Jorenian organs—or whom.
The male’s black hair had already grown several
inches out of his scalp and had fallen to cover half his face. I
knew that mouth, but I still tugged off my glove and brushed the
hair back so I could see the nose and eyes and brows. The four
parallel scars that had been on PyrsVar’s face were gone.
I looked down at the face that I had never expected
to see again in this lifetime or any other. “Kao.”
Maggie pushed me away from the gurney, tearing my
shroud at the same time. “Cherijo, you must go out into the large
room now.”
I wanted to deck her, but as she’d pointed out on
the planet, I’d just hurt my hand. “I’m not done here.”
“You are needed.” She wrapped her hand around my
wrist, used her other hand to blow a hole through one of the wall
panels, and dragged me through. She gestured at the gaping medical
staff. “Make them move.”
“Move where?” I tried to pull free, but she had a
grip like a snow tiger’s. “Stop it.”
Maggie turned to the staff. “Move back. Hurry.”
When several of them extended their claws, she jerked on my arm.
“Make them move. If I do it, they will be hurt.”
I didn’t want her to kill my people. “I Shield the
Jxin,” I said to keep them from attacking her. “Evacuate
immediately to the corridor.”
The staff quickly filed out, although several still
looked back at us with murderous expressions.
I turned to Maggie. “Now, what is the big—”
A wide, powerful surge of energy shot from the
lower deck and punched a hole through the upper, scorching the
alloy and then melting through it. The blast fanned out from there
into a dozen and then a hundred crackling streams. The displaced
air slammed into me, and only Maggie’s hand kept me from being
knocked flat on my back.
In the center of the energy streams a dark vortex
formed, pulling in the power all around it and billowing outward.
Every piece of equipment in the bay went dark, while datapads,
charts, and instruments flew into the air and began whirling around
the twisting mass like debris until the last of the energy was
swallowed up. The vortex brightened and began to shrink as if it
was collapsing in on itself.
“Can you move it off the ship?” I shouted to Maggie
over the noise.
“Wait,” she said, peering into the mass. “They are
almost through now.”
“They?” I echoed, squinting as the light grew
blinding. “Someone is in that thing? Who is it?”
“I do not know.” She looked almost afraid now. “Now
they come.”
Without warning the vortex disappeared into itself,
and the small cloud of debris that had encircled it fell to the
deck. A few crackles of residual energy still buzzed in the air as
two figures appeared: a tall adult and a small child.
I didn’t believe my eyes, even when they
solidified. “Reever?” I had to walk over and reach out my trembling
hand so that I could touch my daughter. “Marel.”
Her face looked dead white, and when she spoke, her
voice came out in a whisper. “I found her, Daddy.”
Reever caught her as she fainted, and lifted her
against his chest. Over her golden curls he stared at me, becoming
my mirror, both of us gaping at each other as if we were seeing
ghosts. “Cherijo?”
I took Marel from my husband and carried her over
to the nearest berth. She lay limp and unresponsive in my arms, and
as soon as I checked her vitals, I knew she was in shock. I shouted
for a nurse as I checked her pupils, which barely contracted, and
quickly her small form for external injuries.
“What happened?” I demanded.
“I don’t know. We were on Joren, at the Torin
pavilion.” Reever’s voice sounded hollow. “Marel and I were sitting
in the courtyard.”
“Where you were sucked into an energy vortex that
transported you six million years into the past, where you just
happened to land on this ship in my medical bay?” I glared at him.
“You might want to run that by me again, Duncan. Starting with,
how?”
“We were in the courtyard,” he insisted. “She has
been trying to signal the Sunlace without success, and
asking me each day when you would be returning. I felt it was time
to tell her the truth. I explained to her that your ship had
vanished into a rift in space.”
I scanned her for internal hemorrhaging, but found
nothing. “Then what?”
“She claimed she could find you. I told her that
the rift had disappeared, that it was impossible even to know where
you were.” He flexed his fingers as if they were stiff. “She put
her hand in mine and smiled up at me. The next thing I knew, we
were here.”
“You’re telling me that our daughter can tele-port
through time?” I snarled. “Have you lost your mind?”
“He speaks the truth.” Maggie appeared beside me
and looked down at Marel. “She can sense the places where space is
thin and conduits can be made. She is not particularly skilled at
making them stable, however. I felt it begin to collapse before
they emerged.”
My daughter was in shock, I was surrounded by crazy
people, and we were all stranded millions of years from the nearest
medical facility. I shouted for the only person who could help me
save my daughter’s life. “Shon.”
“Here.” He didn’t spare Reever a second glance as
he looked at my kid. “She is very weak. I can hardly feel
her.”
I could barely take in enough air to speak. “Can
you bring her back? Please?”
“This is not damage to the body, Cherijo,” he said.
He turned to Maggie. “You know what has to be done, do you
not?”
She lifted her chin. “She said I was not to touch
another being on this vessel.”
I grabbed the front of her robe and yanked her
close. “Don’t you dare start acting snotty again. If you can heal
her, do it. Now.”
“The conduit was unstable. As she tried to keep it
from collapsing on her and the man, she left some of herself
between. She cannot live without it.” Maggie looked down at my
fist. “You are angry with me again.”
“I apologize.” Knowing my daughter’s life hung in
the balance, I could afford to lie through my teeth. “Please, if
there is anything you can do to repair the damage, help her.”
“I do not have what she needs,” Maggie told me.
“What she left behind is lost. It can be replaced, but it must come
from the source. It must come from you.”
“I don’t understand.”
“She is not exactly like you,” the Jxin said, “but
she has some of you, and some of him.” She nodded at Reever. “She
needs what you gave her before, when you made her.”
“What? What exactly does she need?”
Maggie tapped my wrist. “It is in your
blood.”
“My blood is poisonous,” I snapped. “I can’t give
her a transfusion. It’ll kill her.”
Maggie nodded. “You must take away what is lethal
before you give her what she is missing. I can do this.”
My daughter’s pulse had grown so faint I could
barely detect it on my scanner. “What do you need?”
A few moments later we had rigged a transfuser from
my arm to Marel’s. I clamped off the tubing halfway and fitted a
dialysis reservoir between us.
“All right, now what?” I asked Maggie.
“I will purify it.” She crouched down, releasing
the clamp and slowly filling the reservoir with a pint of my blood.
As soon as it was full, she cupped it between her hands, bombarding
it with the strange light energy she used.
I watched my blood turn clear. “You’re removing the
platelets. If all she needed was some plasma, why didn’t you say
so?”
“It is more than plasma,” Maggie murmured as she
concentrated. “It does not have a name because you have not yet
discovered it. Now shut up.”
I bit my lip and looked over at my husband. He was
kneeling beside the berth and holding our daughter’s hand, but he
was staring at me.
“How long has she been able to do this?” I asked
him.
“She teleported herself and TssVar’s son on Vtaga,”
he said. “That was the last time that I know she attempted
it.”
I was still angry with him. “Why didn’t you just
lie to her when the ship disappeared?”
“After you went missing from Oenrall, I lied to her
for years,” he said, the lines of weariness around his mouth and
nose deepening. “I told her you were still alive and just waiting
for us to find you. That we had to keep looking.”
“That wasn’t a lie.”
“I knew you were dead. I wouldn’t admit it to
myself—I couldn’t—but somewhere inside me, I could feel it.” His
eyes turned to a glassy blue. “Lying to myself and our child was
all that kept me sane during those years. Finding Jarn was . . .”
He trailed off and shook his head. “It was wrong to take Jarn from
her friends and her people. But we needed you, and she was all that
was left.”
“You can stop there.” I didn’t want to hear the
story of his big romance again. I looked at Maggie, who had taken
her hands away from the reservoir. “Is it ready?”
“Yes.” She released the clamp on the transfuse tube
and allowed the clear fluid to slowly seep into my daughter’s
veins.
“If this poisons her,” I said in a low voice, “I
will spend the rest of my existence finding a way to kill you,
Jxin.”
She looked more puzzled than worried. “Even if you
could, then you would die.”
“Why would I want to live without her?” I felt
dizzy and closed my eyes.
It took what felt like an eternity before I saw the
first signs of color returning to my daughter’s small face. Then
her blood pressure rose and her heart rate steadied. As I removed
the needle from my arm, her breathing became more regular.
I didn’t relax; what we had done was beyond
foolhardy. But after another hour of constant monitoring, and no
signs of any toxic reaction to the transfusion, some of the tension
eased out of my shoulders.
“She will be well now,” Maggie said. “You have
saved her life.”
“So did you.” I studied her lovely, indifferent
face, and wondered how she could rip apart a man and then save a
little girl, all within the space of a few hours. “Thank
you.”
She imitated my smile. “Now will you tell me how
you were able to use the collector?”
ChoVa and Shon took over monitoring PyrsVar and
Kao in recovery so that I could stay with my daughter. Maggie
seemed content to watch the maintenance crew repair the damage from
the vortex, and when that palled, she created exotic concoctions at
the prep unit and tried to coax the nursing staff into sampling
them. To be safe, I summoned a couple of security guards to keep an
eye on her. That left me alone with Reever in the isolation room
where I’d moved Marel so she could rest undisturbed.
I expected that my husband would want to know what
had happened to us since the Sunlace had been swallowed up
by the rift. When he held his hand out to me, I realized giving him
access to my mind was the simplest and quietest way to update him.
So I let him initiate a link, but I didn’t try to project any
thoughts to him. Instead I let him search through my memories and
see whatever he wanted.
You have not discovered how to return to our
time, he thought to me. Can Maggie re-create the rift that
brought the ship here?
I don’t know, I admitted. Maybe. She has
tremendous power, but she’s also unpredictable. I’d rather find our
own means of getting back home.
I could attempt to communicate with the
protocrystal and persuade it to help us. He winced as the
memories of the Core plague and the possession of the oKiaf welled
up into my thoughts. Then again, perhaps not.
After seeing what it did to Shon, I vote no.
I could feel the edge of something dark in his mind, an emotion he
was trying to suppress. All of it centered around Marel. I have
been through this before, Duncan. If my blood had hurt her, I would
have found the beginning stages of toxicity by now. She’s going to
recover.
I believe you. He seemed a little
uncomfortable that I had picked up on his negative emotion. I
can’t lose her now, Cherijo. Not after losing both you and Jarn. I
would not survive it.
You found me again. Resentment still filled
a few corners in my heart, but the prospect of never seeing my
family again had made his betrayal seem less monstrous than before.
If I was going to be completely honest, he hadn’t betrayed me; he’d
simply tried to cope. It wasn’t his fault he’d fallen in love with
Jarn, or because of it he’d realized that he’d never been in love
with me. None of this had happened by my choice or his.
Maybe, I thought, if I let go of the last of my
pride and tried to take Jarn’s place in his life, eventually he
might learn how to feel some affection for me again.
What are you thinking?
You’re occupying my mind, Duncan. If you can’t
tell, we’re both in a lot of trouble.
He laced his fingers through mine. You are not
as simple to read as you once were. Part of your mind is closed to
me now. It has been since you returned.
I was thinking I’d rather be a poor substitute
for Jarn than go on living alone. I squeezed his hand. When
all this is over and we’re back on Joren, we should do like you
said, and talk about it. Try to work things out.
You would do that? He touched my
cheek.
My motives are completely selfish, trust me.
I glanced up and broke the link between us as I saw ChoVa gesturing
at me from the view panel. “I’ll be back as soon as I can,” I
murmured before I slipped out of the room.
“I regret disturbing you, but the Jorenian male has
regained consciousness,” she told me. “Shon thought you should be
the one to first speak with him.”
“Signal the captain and ask him to come down here,”
I said. “Assign one of the nurses to keep an eye on Marel and
Reever for me, too.”
It wasn’t easy to walk into recovery and see Kao
Torin sitting up in his berth and looking around him with his
gentle, curious eyes. When he saw me, he made a simple gesture of
greeting and smiled when I returned it.
“How are you feeling, ClanSon?” I asked as I
scanned his chest.
“I fear I am a little confused.” He politely waited
until I had completed my first scan before he asked, “Where am
I?”
“You’re on the Sunlace.” Giving him too much
information might cause him to panic, so I kept the details to a
minimum as I briefed him. “What’s the last thing you
remember?”
“I cannot say for certain. I had left Joren to
serve as a pilot at a new colony. I remember being on patrol.” He
peered up at me. “May I know your name, Healer?”
“I’m Cherijo Torin,” I said, watching his face. He
gave no reaction to my name. “Your HouseClan adopted me some time
ago. I’m the Senior Healer on this vessel.”
“Tonetka Torin retired at last, did she?” He
chuckled. “Captain Pnor often despaired that she never would. May I
speak with the captain?”
“Pnor embraced the stars some time ago, ClanSon.”
His readings were in good ranges; he was simply weak from blood
loss and, I imagined, the shock of being built out of an
alterform’s spare parts. “We have a new captain now.”
“Kao?”
Xonea strode into recovery and stood over his
ClanBrother, his eyes wide as he looked all over him and then at
me. “How has this happened?”
“You would have the Senior Healer explain the
matter of our kinship, ClanBrother?” Kao joked. “Surely you have
not forgotten the hundred times ClanFather has told that tale at
the gatherings.”
“Mother of all Houses. He is Kao.” Xonea turned
chalk white. “Returned to us as you were.”
“There’s a bit more to it than that.” I touched
Xonea’s arm. “Your ClanBrother’s last memory was his last
assignment as a pilot.”
He pinned me with a sharp glance. “He does not
recall you?”
“Have we met before, Healer?” Kao asked mildly.
“Your pardon, but I do not remember you.”
“No pardon is required, ClanSon. Would you excuse
us for a moment?” When he nodded, I led Xonea out of recovery and
closed the door panel. “Maggie removed all the Jorenian organs and
DNA from PyrsVar, and re-created Kao from them. He has retained
some memory of his past life, but evidently nothing beyond his
transfer to K-2.”
“These organs taken from the Hsktskt were cloned
from my brother’s cells. This male never lived as Kao Torin. And
yet . . . he is my ClanBrother. His voice, his hands . . .” He
looked through the viewer. “I know that bodies can be duplicated,
but how could anyone re-create a life lost?”
“His life was not lost, Jorenian.” Maggie came to
stand by the viewer and looked in on our patient.
“That man died in my arms ten years ago,” I told
her, my hands curling into fists. “Don’t you tell me he was still
alive when we put him in that capsule.”
“The body died,” she assured me. “Before that, you
gave him your blood. It changed his cells. It preserved what he
was.”
“No.” I swallowed. “My blood is what killed
him.”
“This is because you are impure. Like the other,
but more complicated.” She regarded me. “Do you wish me to separate
you?”
I thought of Jarn, and how happy Reever would be to
have her back. “Sorry, but I don’t have another body sitting inside
my chest.”
She shrugged, and started to say something else,
when she frowned and turned toward the starboard side of the ship.
“There is another vessel approaching.”
“You claimed that you did not have any ships,”
Xonea said.
“It does not belong to the Jxin.” Her expression
cleared. “It is only the undesirables.”
Something hit the side of the Sunlace,
rocking the deck under our feet.
“They are shooting at you,” Maggie said
helpfully.