March 5th, 1956
Draem arrived at the facility at half past nine.
He came from the west through the old passages. The stone buildings on either side were dark. The only sound was his own footsteps and the footsteps of the people behind him. Pelt walked two paces back and to his left. Veya walked behind Pelt with her two Saltfang men flanking her.
Draem did not hurry. He had never hurried to a procedure. Hurrying produced sweat. Sweat produced contamination. Contamination produced failure. He had not failed in eleven years.
The facility was a two-storey stone building at the end of a row. Heavy door. No windows on the ground floor. He had been here twice before. Both times routine. He did not make routine visits anymore. He had people for routine visits.
This was not routine.
The report had come through three hours earlier. A boy. Seven years old. Logged at dawn by the facility's intake staff. Standard blood work on intake. The strip had turned a colour the functionary had seen once before in six years of processing. She had sent the result up the chain immediately. It had reached Draem within the hour.
Rare blood. The rarest classification on Voss's standing demand list. The boy was seven. A child's organs with rare blood sold for not ten times the standard rate. Not even fifty. But a thousand times.
Draem had left the Cradle within thirty minutes.
-x-
Pelt knocked on the door in a specific pattern. The door opened.
The large man from the morning was inside. He looked at Pelt and then at Draem and then at Veya and her men. His face did not change. He stepped aside.
The ground floor was a single room lit by oil lamps. The woman sat behind a table. She stood when Draem entered. Her eyes dropped to the floor. Her hands pressed flat against her thighs. She did not look at his face. She looked at the bag he carried and then back at the floor.
"Where is the product," Draem said.
"Upstairs," the large man said. "Second room."
Draem looked at the stairs. Stone. Narrow. He looked at Pelt. Pelt nodded and went up first. Draem followed.
Veya watched them go. She pushed off the wall and followed them upstairs. One of the Facility guards went with her. They took positions in the corridor outside the second room. The other Facility guard stayed on the ground floor in the lobby near the woman. The two Saltfang thugs positioned themselves outside. The large man went back to his post in the hallway between the lobby and the staircase. The last Facility guard sat inside near the heavy gate as a gatekeeper.
-x-
The second floor had two rooms. The first was empty. The second had a door that latched from the outside.
Pelt opened it.
The room was small. Stone walls. Stone floor. A single oil lamp on a bracket. No window. A bucket in the corner. The air smelled of urine and old sweat and the sour odour that children produced when they had been frightened for a long time.
The boy was in the corner opposite the bucket. He was sitting with his back against the wall and his knees drawn up and his arms around his knees. He was large for seven. Wide through the chest and shoulders. His face was swollen on the left side where the man downstairs had hit him. The blood from his split lip had dried in a line down his chin.
His eyes were open. They tracked Draem as he entered.
Draem set his bag on the floor. He opened it. Inside were instruments. Clean. Arranged. Each one in its cloth sleeve. He did not need most of them tonight. Tonight was assessment.
He crouched in front of the boy. He looked at him the way he looked at all product. The body first. Then the details. Weight. Frame. Skin colour. The visible condition of the teeth. Whether the eyes were clear or clouded. The way the chest moved when the child breathed.
The boy stared at him. His jaw was tight. His hands were fists against his knees.
"Open your mouth," Draem said.
The boy did not open his mouth.
Pelt stepped forward. The boy's eyes moved to Pelt. Pelt was not as large as the man downstairs but his hands were thick and his face carried the flatness of a man who would do what was asked of him without hesitation.
The boy opened his mouth.
Draem leaned in. Teeth intact. No visible decay. Gums pink. He pulled the boy's lower lip down and checked the tissue. Healthy. He released the lip and tilted the boy's head left. Then right. Checked the lymph nodes under the jaw. Checked the pulse at the throat. Counted.
He sat back.
"Good," he said. The boy showed no sign of disease or deficiency. Nothing that would compromise the blood and the organs.
He took the kit from his bag — a pin, a treated strip, a glass vial. He pricked the boy's finger before the boy could pull away. Blood welled. He pressed the strip to the drop and held it.
The colour rose in the treated paper. Draem watched it. His face did not change and his breathing did not change, but his pupils dilated a fraction. Enough that someone paying attention would have seen it.
The strip confirmed what the functionary had reported. Rare blood. The classification that had been on the standing list for six years with no match.
He held the strip up to the lamp. He turned it. He looked at it for a long time.
Then he smiled.
It was not a warm smile. It was the smile of a man who had just found something he had been looking for. Something he had not expected to find in a satellite facility in a middle-ring Bloc run by functionaries who would not have known the value of what they had if the standing protocol had not required a blood test on every intake.
"Well," he said. He looked at Pelt. "This definitely changes the schedule."
-x-
Draem had been Voss's senior surgeon for eleven years.
He had come to the Cradle from outside. Not from the city. From a hospital in Yorknew. He had been a resident there. Good steady hands. His attending had called him gifted. But his colleagues called him cold. Both assessments were accurate.
The hospital had dismissed him for malpractice. Three terminal patients had died faster than their conditions predicted. The intervals were too short. A junior nurse had flagged the pattern. The board review found negligence in the management of pain medication dosages. Draem had not contested it. The finding was close enough to the truth that contesting it would have brought the board closer to the actual truth. He had been adjusting the dosages. Not to manage pain. To accelerate organ failure in systems he had already identified as harvestable. A buyer in Yorknew's eastern district paid well for organs that arrived fresh from a hospital setting with clean documentation. Three patients had died on schedule. The fourth would have died on schedule too if the nurse had not started counting the days.
The dismissal had closed every hospital in Yorknew to him. It had not closed every door. The buyer in the eastern district had a contact in the contraband transit network that ran through the Yorbian interior. The contact had passed Draem's name to Dessa in Bloc Two. Dessa had passed it to Voss.
Voss had sent Pelt. Pelt had sat across from Draem in a rented room in Yorknew's eastern district and explained what the Cradle needed. A surgeon. Not a butcher. Someone who could extract organs from living donors and keep the donors alive long enough to extract again. Someone whose hands did not shake and whose conscience did not interfere.
Draem had not needed convincing. The hospital had paid him a resident's salary. The buyer in the eastern district had paid him ten times that for three sets of organs. Voss was offering a percentage of every procedure. The arithmetic was simple. He had one condition. The junior nurse who had flagged the pattern was still working at the hospital. He wanted her. Pelt had looked at him for a long moment. Then he had nodded. The nurse disappeared from her shift three days later. She was never found. Draem had taken his time with her. He had used the skills the hospital had taught him to keep her alive for as long as possible. He had said yes before Pelt finished the terms. But the nurse was the reason he had smiled when he said it.
He had refined the process over eleven years. Two hundred and fourteen procedures. Every patient had survived his table. The ones who died later died from other causes. His table was clean.
He was proud of this, not the way a surgeon at a hospital was proud of outcomes but the way a craftsman was proud of tolerances. He cut to the millimetre and sutured to the stitch. His hands did not shake.
He would have preferred to keep the donors alive indefinitely. A living donor with rare blood was a renewable resource — the blood could be drawn in cycles, the body replenished what was taken, and with the right supplementation the donor could produce for years. Organs were a single transaction. Blood was an income stream.
But keeping donors alive carried risk. Alive meant conscious eventually. Conscious meant resistance. Resistance meant complication, and Draem did not accept complication.
So his patients stayed alive and unconscious on a dosage he had refined over eleven years. The body kept producing, the mind stayed dark, the outside buyers received their product on schedule, and Draem received his percentage.
The boy in the corner was worth more than anything he had processed in three years.
-x-
He did the full workup. Blood draw for the cross-match, tissue sample from the inside of the cheek, heart rate, lung capacity measured by counting the seconds the boy could hold his breath before panic overrode his will. He wrote the results in a small book he kept separate from the facility's ledger.
The cross-match would take time. He had a portable kit — not the full lab at the Cradle but sufficient for a preliminary comparison against the standing catalogue of donor profiles that had passed through the system.
He ran it while the boy sat against the wall and watched him with apathy and greed.
The comparison flagged a match.
Draem looked at the result. He looked at it again. He went to the lamp and held the strip next to the reference card from his catalogue.
The match was not just a blood-type match. The genetic markers aligned. Parent and offspring. The boy's blood was a direct descendant match to a donor Draem had processed around six years earlier.
He remembered her. He remembered all of them, but he remembered this one because her blood had been the first of this type he had ever seen. A woman in her early thirties, weak, coughing. The Ledger enforcers had brought her in. She had not resisted because she could not. The procedure had taken four hours. She had died on the table — not from the procedure but from the disease that had already been killing her. He had extracted everything usable before the body failed. The outside buyer had paid the highest single fee in the Cradle's records at that time.
He had wished then that he had found her earlier, before the disease had compromised the organs, before the blood had been thinned by whatever remedies she had been taking. He had gotten perhaps sixty percent of what a healthy donor of that type would have yielded.
He looked at the boy.
The boy was healthy. Seven years old. His organs had not been compromised by disease or age or chemical dependency. His blood was the same type as his mother's. The boy was everything the mother had not been.
Draem stood up and put the strips in his pocket. He walked to the boy and crouched in front of him again.
"Do you know who your mother was," he said.
The boy said nothing. His jaw was locked and his eyes were wet.
"I processed a woman with your blood six years ago," Draem said. His voice was easy, conversational, the way a man spoke when sharing an interesting coincidence at a dinner party. "She was sick. Coughing. She had a scar on her left hand. Does that sound familiar."
The boy's face changed. The blood left it. His lips parted and his hands unclenched.
"She was my first of this type," Draem continued. "I was disappointed. The disease had reduced her yield. I got sixty percent of what she should have produced." He tilted his head. "But you. You are everything she was not. Young. Healthy. Undamaged." He paused. "I would have liked to find you both at the same time. The mother and the son. The yield would have been extraordinary."
The boy's mouth moved. No sound came out.
"She died on my table," Draem said. "I want you to know that she did not suffer. I am very good at what I do. She was unconscious before I began. She never woke up." He smiled again, the same smile. "You will not die today. You are too valuable for that. I will keep you alive for a very long time."
Renn's body shook. The tremor started in his hands and moved through his arms into his chest. His breathing came apart. The held-together thing he had been maintaining since dawn broke open and what came out of him was a sound he had not made since he was two and a half years old and his mother had left him at the crib.
He screamed.
Not a word. Not a name. A sound that came from the centre of his chest and hit the stone walls and filled the small room and went nowhere because the room had no windows and the walls were thick and the door was latched from the outside.
Draem stood and brushed his knees. He picked up his bag.
"I will begin the extraction protocol in the morning," he said to Pelt. "Have the supplementation prepared. Standard regime. I want his blood volume at peak before we start the first draw."
He walked out. Pelt followed. The door closed. The latch dropped.
Renn sat in the corner with his hands over his ears and his mouth open. The scream had ended but the shape of it was still on his face. His eyes stared at the door.
His mother had said be good. But she was dead.
He pressed his forehead to his knees and closed his eyes.
-x-
10:40 p.m.
Sable reached the eastern edge of Bloc Nine at ten forty.
She had run the entire distance from the crib. Twenty minutes of hard running through the dark passages. Her breathing was controlled, her heart rate steady. The blood on her hands had dried.
She stopped at the last row of buildings before the deposit margin and pressed her back against a wall and went still. She closed her eyes and listened.
The building was ahead of her, across the passage. Two storeys. Stone. Heavy door. No windows on the ground floor. She had never been here. Marre had described it and the description was accurate.
She opened her eyes.
Two outside. One standing at the front near the heavy door, one moving. Patrol route. He walked a circuit around the building's perimeter every few minutes. She timed two circuits. Three minutes each.
One inside near the entrance. The door had a gap at the bottom and lamplight came through it. A shadow cut across the light at intervals. Seated. The breathing was low and even — not asleep. Awake.
She could not hear or see anyone else from here. The stone walls were thick. There were more inside but she did not know how many.
She looked at the building, then at her hands, then at the knife in her waistband.
Her heart rate climbed. The blood in her veins pushed harder. She could feel it in her wrists and her neck and behind her eyes. The world around her slowed — the patrol guard's footsteps stretched apart, the wind against the stone wall dragged, her own breathing came long and even and far away.
The pull in her chest was louder now. Renn was in there. She could not explain how she knew. She knew.
The patrol man's circuit took three minutes. When he rounded the rear corner she would have ninety seconds before he came back into view of the front.
She waited.
-x-
He was one of Veya's Saltfang men. Twenty years old, in the Saltfang for two years. He had never pulled perimeter duty before tonight. Veya had told him to walk the perimeter and stay sharp and he had walked it nine times and nothing had happened and he was not sharp anymore.
He whistled as he walked. A tune his mother had hummed when he was small. He did not remember the words but he remembered the melody. It always came out of him in the dark without thinking.
He came around the rear corner of the building. The passage behind it was narrow, the deposit margin starting three metres beyond the back wall. The ground was uneven. He watched his feet.
He reached the far end of the passage. The deposit margin opened up ahead of him. A pile of refuse sat against the far wall — he could see the shape of a broken refrigerator, its door gone, shelves gone, white enamel yellowed and cracked. His stomach tightened. He had not eaten since noon. The refrigerator had nothing in it. He knew that. His stomach grumbled.
Suddenly he was looking behind him.
The pile was gone. The passage was gone. He was looking back down the way he had come and the rear corner of the building was in front of him. He had just passed that corner.
A girl landed on her feet in front of his face.
Small. Dark hair. Dark eyes. She had come from above him, from behind him, from an angle he had not seen. Her hands were at her sides. She was looking into his eyes.
His neck was wrong. His chin was over his spine and his face was above his own back. He could feel his shoulders below his jaw. The angle was not possible. He understood this but did not understand how it had happened.
He pitched forward. Her palm came up and pressed flat against what was now his back. She held him. The momentum stopped, his legs buckled, and she lowered him face-up onto the stone. His body lay on its front. His face looked at the sky.
He tried to speak. His mouth opened but no air came. His chest was not moving. He could feel his heart beating but the beats were wrong — too far apart, slowing.
The girl stepped over him and moved toward the gap between the buildings. The sky above him was dark. The stars were out. He had not noticed the stars on any of his nine rounds.
He noticed them now.
The whistling had stopped.
She did not look back.
-x-
The gap between the building and the adjacent structure was still there — the same gap Renn had found. The stone had settled unevenly and left an opening at ground level. She had seen it in the dark from twenty metres away. The gap was narrow but she was smaller than Renn. She went through on her stomach and came out inside the ground floor on the far side of the room from the entrance.
The second guard was the facility guard posted inside the entrance.
He was sitting on a stool to the right of the heavy door. He had been there for an hour, his back against the wall, his eyes on the door. The oil lamp behind him threw his shadow across the floor.
The door was closed. It had a gap at the bottom. Draem had complained about the draught when he arrived. The guard did not care about the draught. He cared about staying awake until his shift ended so he could sleep.
He was looking at the door.
A thin line appeared at the centre of his vision. Dark. Narrow. It grew. He stared at it. He did not understand what he was looking at.
The line was the blade of a knife. It had entered through the soft tissue at the back of his neck between the first and second cervical vertebrae, passed through the spinal column and the base of the tongue, and the tip had emerged through his open mouth.
He was looking at the blade. It was in front of his face. The point of it was red. It had come out between his teeth.
He tried to close his mouth but his jaw would not move. The blade held it open. Blood filled his mouth and ran over the steel. His hands came up and touched the blade and his fingers closed around it and then opened because the edge cut them.
Sable twisted the knife ninety degrees and pulled it out. The man's body fell sideways off the stool — the sound was the stool scraping the stone floor and then the weight of him hitting the ground. Loud. Louder than she wanted.
She listened. Outside. Footsteps. Someone had heard the sound and was coming.
She moved behind the door. The hinges were on the left. She pressed her back flat against the wall where the door would cover her when it opened.
-x-
The third guard was the other Saltfang man, posted at the entrance outside. He had heard the sound from inside — the stool, the weight of a body on stone.
He pushed the door open. He was not careful. He was irritated. He assumed the Voss man had knocked something over. The Voss people were soft — everyone in the Saltfang knew this. He came through the door fast with one hand on his belt.
He stepped inside and looked around. The stool was on its side. The Voss man was on the floor. The lamp was still burning. Blood was spreading across the stone in a black pool that reflected the lamp's light.
His hand went to his belt. He had a knife. His fingers found the handle.
The blade opened his throat from behind. She had been behind the door when it opened and he had walked past her. She closed the distance in one step. Her left hand grabbed his jaw and pulled his head back. The knife drew across his neck from left to right, deep, through skin and muscle and trachea. Air hissed out of the opening and blood sheeted down his chest.
He reached for his throat with both hands, his knife forgotten.
She drove the blade through his back between the fourth and fifth ribs on the left side. The point found the gap and went through the intercostal muscle and into the pericardial space and through the wall of the left ventricle.
His hands dropped from his throat. He fell forward and made no sound except the exhalation of air his lungs pushed out as his body hit the floor.
She pulled the knife free. Blood followed it out in a pulse that slowed immediately because the heart was no longer pumping.
Three down.
-x-
The fourth guard was the large man from the morning, the one who had caught Renn. He was on the ground floor in the area behind the staircase where a second room opened off the main space. He had heard both sounds — the thud and then the heavier sound of the Saltfang man hitting the floor.
He was not irritated. He was alert. He had been doing this work for six years and knew the difference between a man dropping something and a man dropping.
He came around the corner of the staircase with his hands up, looking for what had made the sounds. He saw the Voss man on the floor beside the toppled stool. He saw the blood. He saw the Saltfang man on the floor near the door.
He did not see the girl.
She was on him before he finished processing what he was looking at. She came from below his line of sight — small enough that his scanning eyes had passed over the space she occupied. His eyes were looking for an adult, a threat, something at his height.
She was not at his height.
She jumped onto his back. Her legs wrapped around his torso, her left hand grabbed his collar, and her right hand drove the knife into the left side of his neck. The blade found the carotid artery on the first try. Blood hit the wall. He roared. His hands reached back. She pulled the knife out and drove it in again two inches lower — the jugular. His roar became a gurgle. His hands stopped reaching. She drove the knife in a third time at the base of his neck where the trapezius met the spine. The blade severed the nerve trunk. His legs stopped working and he pitched forward and hit the floor face first.
She rode him down. Her feet found the ground on either side of his back — one knee down, one foot planted, her knife hand out to her right, her left hand flat on his shoulder blade. Blood pooled outward from his neck across the stone.
She stood. Her breathing was even. Her hands were red to the wrists.
The woman at the table scrambled out of her chair, knocked the ledger off the table, and ran for the stairs.
The facility guard in the lobby had a baton. He was not shaking. He was charging.
He swung the baton at her head. She dropped under it. The wood passed over her. She planted her left foot on his forward knee and pushed off, her right foot found his shoulder, and she drove her knee into his face. The impact was clean — his nose collapsed inward and the cartilage and bone behind it drove upward into the base of his skull. His eyes went white. He was dead before his back hit the floor.
In the same motion she threw the knife. The blade turned once in the air and buried itself between the woman's shoulder blades. The woman's arms flew out, her legs stopped, and she fell forward onto the stairs. Her body slid down two steps and stopped.
Sable walked to her. The woman was still breathing in short wet sounds, her hands clawing at the stone step. Sable put her foot on the side of the woman's head and pressed down and twisted. The neck broke with a sound like a green branch snapping. The woman went still.
Sable pulled the knife from her back and wiped it on the woman's coat.
She looked up the stairs.
Two people stood at the top. Veya on the left, the last facility guard on the right. They were looking down at her. The lamplight from the upstairs corridor lit them from behind and their faces were in shadow.
Veya's arms were uncrossed. Her weight was forward on the balls of her feet, her lips pulled back. She was smiling. The smile was wide and showed her teeth.
The facility guard had a blade in each hand. He looked at the bloody girl, looking uncertain.
Sable stood at the bottom of the stairs with her knife in her right hand and her left hand loose at her side. Blood on her face, her arms and her clothes. Her eyes were red — the whites had gone dark at the edges. Her breathing was even.
Behind the closed door at the end of the upstairs corridor she could hear Renn. His breathing. His heartbeat. He was alive.
The stairs were narrow. Stone. Room for one person at a time.
Veya took the first step down.
Time for round two.