Cadaver & Queen Read online

  Yes. That made sense. Yet it didn’t feel quite right. If only he could remember more about his life before the transformation.

  A rush of images assailed him: hands tied behind his back, trying not to stumble on the rough wood stairs leading up to a platform, the sun shining in his eyes. He could hear the low roar of the crowd below, punctuated by jeers and catcalls: Give us a jig! Let’s see you twist! The big man in the black hood was waiting for him, noose in hand.

  The memory faded, leaving Victor feeling dizzy and disoriented. A trickle of cold sweat ran down the back of his neck. His initial sense of exhilaration faded, leaving a sour taste in his mouth as he realized the truth: somehow his left arm, grafted from another’s man body, was possessed of that man’s memories. He was not just Victor, a former medical student. He might feel like him, might share his name and resemble him superficially, but in reality he was something new and strange—an amalgam of metal and flesh, of student and criminal, of good and evil.

  Elizabeth, oblivious to his convoluted thoughts, was beaming at him. “This is so incredible, Victor!” Her fingers squeezed his, and suddenly, that shock of awareness was back again, replacing the icy fear with something warmer. “You are a breakthrough, you know. A medical marvel.” Well, that was putting him in his place. Still, being seen as a medical marvel might not be as good as being perceived as a man, but at least it was better than being lumped in the same category with Igor, who was still sweeping the same corner of the floor, oblivious to everything going on around him.

  “Victor, surely we need to tell someone now. We need to tell Makepiece.”

  He shook his head. “Not yet.” Hearing how abrupt that sounded, he turned it into a request. “Please.”

  Her brow furrowed. “But why not? Victor, this is too big to keep between us.”

  “There’s something else. Something I need to remember.” He concentrated, trying to dredge up the memory. “I don’t know.”

  “Well, why not enlist Makepiece’s help? I can see why you might not trust Moulsdale and Grimbald, especially since Grimbald seems to have it in for you, but I’ve gotten to know Professor Makepiece, and I think we should trust him.”

  Victor was still trying to parse the rapid-fire burst of words, but his left hand was miles of ahead of him. Reaching out, it seized her right wrist. “No!”

  She stared at him, openmouthed with shock. Obviously, she assumed that he was shouting at her, instead of his own rogue limbs.

  He swallowed, fighting to unclench his gauntleted fingers. “I mean to say...don’t tell him. Yet. Please.” It would have sounded better if his huge monster hand wasn’t still clamped around her wrist like a vise. Her bones were so slender, so fragile. Don’t hurt her. It would be so easy to hurt her by mistake. His hand relaxed, but did not let go. So it could be reasoned with, if not controlled.

  She glanced down at his hand, then back at his face. “I wasn’t going to tell Makepiece without your permission.” She spoke slowly, as if reasoning with a small child, or an idiot. “Besides, the professor is in York today, remember? You told me so yourself.”

  “I did... Of course.” And still his hand held her. Let her go, he thought. You’re going to frighten her. But this time, the hand didn’t listen to him.

  “I’ll wait until you’re ready, if that’s what you want.”

  Her face was tipped up to his, as if in anticipation of a kiss. He was still holding her gaze when he felt his hand release her, gauntleted fingers sliding down the outside of her arm and making her shiver, even through the cotton of her blouse.

  “Forgive me,” he said.

  She licked her lips, a nervous gesture that nonetheless made his blood rush south. “There is nothing to forgive.” She paused for a moment. “But do you really imagine that Professor Makepiece would treat you like...like some sort of giant salamander?” She said it as if it were the most absurd idea imaginable.

  Or like his own child. Should he tell her about Justine? No, he couldn’t do it. If Elizabeth were to learn about the pain Makepiece was inflicting on his own daughter with the etheric magnetometer, she would feel obliged to step in, to speak out, to do something. “I know you are fond of Makepiece,” he said carefully, “but when it comes to getting what he desires, he is more ruthless than you might imagine.”

  “Let’s say he is as callous as you suspect. How much longer can you keep your intelligence a secret from him? A week? A month?”

  “Long enough to remember what it is that I know.”

  She walked over to the window, and stood for a moment, lost in thought. “So you want me to lie to Professor Makepiece.”

  “You’ve already lied to him once.”

  She looked over her shoulder at him. “And if I say no?” If she had been another, less earnest woman, he might have thought she was flirting with him.

  “How about I offer you a deal?” The words were out, unplanned, before he could consider them.

  She raised her eyebrows, as if skeptical that he had anything to bargain with. “What kind of deal?”

  He smiled, because something had clicked in the back of his mind. “You keep my secret for a little while longer, and I’ll teach you gross anatomy.”

  19

  Lizzie had hoped that she would be able to have her first anatomy lesson the same day as the rest of her class, but Victor was more pragmatic, explaining that he needed to plan a little in advance. In the end, it took two weeks of clandestine meetings before they found the right opportunity. Grimbald announced that the cadavers were being brought out of the cold room again, as the class had not made many inroads during their first session. The plan was for Victor to take her to the dissection room right as the rest of the class departed, but before the Bio-Mechanicals came to clear up the room.

  “We’ll have about twenty minutes, maybe thirty,” said Victor, “so we had better make the most of it.”

  She nodded, aware that over the past fortnight, the student had become the teacher. Victor had been coaching her with anatomy diagrams and growing more and more confident as the material sparked old memories. There was one thing she didn’t understand, though. “So how, precisely, will we get in and out without being seen?”

  Victor grinned like a pirate and opened a door in the back of the laboratory. “We travel like Bio-Mechanicals.”

  Heart pounding, Lizzie followed Victor out of the laboratory and through a side door in the main building that led to a long, low passageway. She knew that Ingold contained a hidden network of servants’ tunnels, originally built by the abbey’s monks in case of attack and now used by the Bio-Mechanicals to move about the four main buildings, unobtrusively entering common rooms in order to clean them or take away rubbish.

  Some of the more daring students had attempted to navigate between the buildings this way, but no one made a habit of it—the tunnels had been scaled to accommodate diminutive medieval monks, and if you ran into a Bio-Mechanical, one of you would have to back up until there was some sort of switchback. In more than one section, the ceiling was so low that Victor had to bow his head to keep from scraping it on the ceiling, but the tunnel widened and sloped upward right before he stopped rather abruptly beside a door. To Lizzie, it looked exactly like all the other doors they had passed.

  “This is it,” he said. “But we have to wait. They’re still inside. Look.” He gestured to a decorative metal grille that was set at her eye level in the wooden door. The grille had a vaguely Ottoman design of swirls and curlicues, and allowed a person to stand unobserved while spying on the occupants of the other room. Pressing her face closer to the latticed grille, Lizzie could see that all twenty of her fellow first year students were present, divided into groups of four around five cadavers. Byram and Will had been placed with Outhwaite and Mothersole, and it was impossible to tell which pair was more unhappy with the arrangement. They had all removed their jackets and rolled u
p their sleeves, and were wearing long white aprons flecked and stained with bits of brownish blood and gore. Despite the scalpels they held, they looked more like butchers than doctors.

  “By now, you should have located the inferior vena cava and the descending aorta.” Grimbald’s voice held an edge of exasperation.

  “I don’t think this fellow has one,” complained Will. He was making an uneven sawing motion, like an inexperienced cook carving a joint of mutton. Beside her, Victor made a strange, muffled sound of surprise. She looked at him, but he didn’t spare her a glance, all his focus on the classroom.

  “I found a kidney,” said Outhwaite, holding up the dark pink organ in the palm of one hand.

  “I could murder a steak and kidney pie right now.” That was Mothersole, a sheen of sweat on his plump face as he pulled a handful of greasy yellow fat out of the cadaver.

  “How can you talk about food,” said Byram. “The smell of this place is making me gag.” His movements were more precise and controlled than the others, but he looked appalled by his corpse, as though it were doing something vaguely offensive just by lying there.

  “Well, I’m hungry,” whined Mothersole.

  “And my hand is cramping from trying to saw through this tough old bugger,” said Will. He continued sawing with vigor.

  “That’s good, Shanley,” Grimbald was saying to someone out of view. “No, no, Jenkins, that’s the esophagus.” As he came into view behind Byram, Lizzie saw that Grimbald looked drawn and tired, with dark shadows underneath his eyes. “Now, what’s this?” He twirled the edges of his mustache as he bent over Byram and Will’s cadaver. “Artery and vein, and neither one damaged. Not bad, Frankenstein, not bad at all.”

  “Ac-ac-actually, Byram’s the one who did all the work,” said Will, but Grimbald had already moved on to the cadaver’s lower half, where Outhwaite and Mothersole were working.

  “Good Lord, boys! What a pig’s ear you’ve made of this fellow’s innards.” Grimbald took a probe and moved a flap of flesh to one side. “I don’t understand. He’s almost completely empty. Where’s his liver? Where’s the large intestine?”

  “I think we might have mistaken some of it for fat. I removed a lot of adipose tissue,” said Mothersole.

  Grimbald just stared at Mothersole, the right side of his mustache twitching.

  “Here’s his kidney,” offered Outhwaite, trying to make a joke of it.

  Grimbald wasn’t amused. “You’re supposed to be training to be a doctor, not preparing a body for Egyptian burial.” He shook his head. “Study your charts, boys. Go to the kitchens if you must, and ask the cook to point out the bits of offal to you.”

  “Oh, I should have thought of that,” said Lizzie, turning her head and nearly bumping noses with Victor. She hadn’t realized how close he was standing, watching through the grille alongside her. With a jolt, she saw that their mouths were just inches apart, and she forgot what she was saying.

  It was only after staring at his mouth for a moment that she took in the fact that his jaw was clenched, causing a muscle to jump in his lean cheek. “What’s wrong?”

  “That young man.” He closed his eyes for a moment, took a deep breath. “William Frankenstein.”

  “Will? He’s my friend. What about him?”

  Victor closed his eyes for a moment, then said, “He’s my brother.”

  She stared at him for a moment. “Are you certain?”

  He scowled at her. “Yes, I’m certain. What did you think? That I was grown in a vat like yeast?”

  “No, of course not.” Suddenly it all seemed painfully obvious, and she wondered why she hadn’t made the connection herself. Will’s exceptional older brother, the school’s star student—no wonder he was defying what everyone thought they knew about Bio-Mechanicals. “Oh, God,” she said. “He’ll be... He talks about you all the time,” she whispered. “He thinks he can’t live up to your example.”

  Victor wasn’t even looking at her. “Enough.”

  “He’s going to faint dead away when he finds out.”

  That got her his attention. “No,” he said, his words so soft she could barely hear them.

  “No, he’s not going to faint, or...?”

  “We’re not going to tell him.”

  “But why? Don’t you know how much it would mean to him?”

  He held up one hand, and the grandfather clock in the corner chimed the noon hour a moment before the bell tower followed suit. That caused a flurry of activity as medical students hurried to hang up their aprons and put away their instruments. A few threw rumpled sheets over their cadavers, but Mothersole and a few others left the bodies where they lay in their rush to be first in line for lunch.

  Grimbald gave a “tsk” of disapproval and scribbled notes in his book.

  Lizzie turned back from the grate and gave a squeal of surprise; there were three Bio-Mechanicals standing behind Victor. “Sorry,” she whispered.

  Victor’s expression told her to be more careful. She tried not to stare at the Bio-Mechanicals, who wore flat caps and dark, shapeless jackets, but it was hard not to keep stealing glances at their scarred, seamed faces, corpse-pallid where they weren’t smudged with dirt. At first, they looked like miners, but then she began to notice their blank stares and slack mouths, and something else—something indefinable that felt wrong and raised the small hairs on the back of her neck. She had gotten used to Igor, she supposed, but there was still something a little unsavory about these Bio-Mechanicals. She wondered if, in life, they had committed crimes more serious than Igor’s.

  There was a rattling of the door from the other side, and Victor stepped aside to let the other Bio-Mechanicals through. All three shambled past her without any discernible change in expression. Victor surreptitiously took a strip of surgical gauze out of his pocket and slipped it between the door and the frame, allowing it to close without locking. Then Lizzie peered through the grate again.

  “You and you, take the cadavers back to the morgue,” Grimbald barked at one of the Bio-Mechanicals. “You, put the dirty instruments in the bucket.”

  The Bio-Mechanicals swayed in place.

  “Ah, damn it, where’s the guard? It’s like talking to monkeys. You, take the feet. You, take the head. No, not the head, the arms. Good. Now take him to the morgue. The cold room, yes? Then come back for the next one.”

  Grimbald left the autopsy room, muttering to himself.

  Lizzie waited for Victor’s nod before she followed him into the Gross Anatomy classroom. “Why don’t they have a guard, like usual?”

  “Part of the training. So the Bio-Mechanicals can function on their own in battle.”

  “And can they?” The two Bio-Mechanicals carrying the cadaver were having trouble navigating the doorway, repeatedly slamming their corpse’s head into the door frame.

  “Jury’s still out.” Victor gestured for the Bio-Mechanical holding the cadaver’s hands to wait, then moved the head so it was no longer lolling sideways. Without a glance or a nod, the two Bio-Mechanicals carried their burden out the back door and disappeared back into a tunnel. “All right,” he said, standing beside the cadaver Will and Byram had been dissecting. “Ready? We won’t have long.”

  “I’m ready, but if you don’t feel up to doing this now, I understand.” She kept trying to see Will in Victor’s features, and thought she might detect a resemblance around the shape of the eyebrows and eyes. All in all, though, Victor’s was a darker, far more masculine face, and she couldn’t imagine him as a child, the way she could with Will.

  “I am up to this. Are you?” It was a challenge.

  “I’m not getting an attack of the vapors. I just thought, given what you just told me about Will...”

  “Do you want to dissect or gossip?”

  “Dissect.”

  “All right,” he said to Lizzie. “Find
an apron.”

  The used aprons were hanging from hooks along the wall. She selected one that appeared relatively free of splatter, and was still tying the strings around her waist when she realized that Victor was already starting on a cadaver. “Now, pay attention.” With one neat, economical movement, he widened the opening, exposing the thoracic cavity. “Can you identify the respiratory organs?”

  “Trachea, bronchi and lungs.” Lizzie pointed to each one in turn. “Are we going to talk about Will, or just pretend it never happened?”

  “Digestive system.”

  All right, then. She had her answer. “Liver, stomach, small intestine, large intestine.” She could play this British game of cool containment as well as he could.

  “Esophagus.”

  “There.”

  “Gall bladder.”

  That one threw her. She looked down at the cadaver, and suddenly all the organs looked like a collection of gray rubber toys jumbled together. “It looks so different in the chart.”

  “Think about your location. Consider the landmarks.”

  Lizzie summoned a mental image of the diagram that divided the human body into territories. “Caudal, so it’s the appendix.”

  “Good. So you’re still trying to locate the gall bladder.”

  She paused, looking up at his face as he looked down at the cadaver. He seemed so sure of himself here, more like an assistant professor than a student, and nothing like a Bio-Mechanical. She had no idea how to act around him from one moment to the next. He was like some sort of shape-shifter, always surprising her by revealing some new side of his personality. Right now, he seemed very aloof and British upper class. “I’m being rude and American, aren’t I? Asking you personal questions.”

  “I don’t know the answers.”

  “You know that Will is your brother. He can help you figure this out.”

  Victor gave a small twist of a smile that had absolutely no humor in it. “You mean, I can put him in harm’s way. Just like I did to you.”