All Chapters of The Surrogate’s Blade: Chapter 91 - Chapter 100

I have seen a lot of faces I was supposed to be afraid of. I made a study of them, once, for work. This is the first one that has ever made me want to look away from a window instead of through it.It was a person. That is the part the mind refuses, the part it keeps trying to file under animal or machine because either of those would be bearable. It has the bones of a person.A jaw, a brow, the deep architecture of a human skull, all of it gone wrong in the slow way that pressure and time and whatever they did to it have rewritten the surface.The skin pale and faintly luminous and stretched too tight, the eyes very large and very dark and lit from within by a banked silver I would know anywhere because I carry the same light under my own. It does not look angry.There are seams along the cheeks where the pressure has split and healed it wrong. The mouth is too wide now, or maybe the lips have shrunk back from the teeth. A strand of hair floats around it

Damian makes the call the way he makes all of them, fast and final and without asking the room to agree.“Down,” he says.Sarah does not turn from the hull where she is listening to the plate.“I gave you two doors. You want the one where we sink faster into the thing that cracked us.”“I want the only door that doesn’t end in the net.”He has bound his shoulder with a strip of his own ruined shirt, one-handed, and he is already back to the cold arithmetic that is the truest thing about him.“Surface, and we go up eleven thousand meters of open water with a wounded hull and a Sovereign aboard, straight through a net that has had our scent since the beach. It will have a hunter on us before three thousand. We will not survive the climb.”“And down?”“Down, the crack grows and the plate might hold and there is exactly one structure in this trench with a press

We walk in like guests, because that is the only weapon we have left.The young man, who gives his name as Caleb the way you would offer a hand, leads us up off the dock and into the city, and we follow with the postures of people who have come willingly.The whole way I can feel Damian beside me running the same play I am running, the old play from the house, the one where you wear the face the captor wants to see and use the time it buys you to learn the building.We were good at this once, the two of us, on opposite sides of it. We are better at it now that we are on the same side, which is its own small horror.“Smile when he points at things,” Damian murmurs, under the cover of an awed tourist’s pause.“You’re a defector. You came to come home. He wants to believe it. Let him.”“And you?”“I’m the broker who delivered you. Greedy, reasonable, here to be paid.”

They do not put me in a cell. I keep waiting for the cell, the way you wait for a second shoe, and it never comes, and the absence of it is its own message.Instead they take me to a room that is almost beautiful. Pale curved walls, warm light, a chair that adjusts itself to my spine when I sit, a low table with water and a bowl that smells like real fruit.It is the room you would put an honored guest in, or a difficult patient, or a very expensive animal you intend to keep a long time and want to keep calm. A cell tells you what you are.This room is worse, because it asks me to forget. Caleb stays.Two others come, a woman with a tablet and the still hands of a clinician, and a tall man who does not speak and whose only job, as far as I can tell, is to be the size he is by the door.None of them are armed in any way I can see, and that is the most frightening thing in the room, because it means they are not afraid of me, which means they think t

The dark-haired woman, whose name is Mara, shows me how to find my brother. It is not a place you walk to.It is the first thing I have to unlearn.Leo is not somewhere.Not in a room. Not behind a door. Not a body I can reach with my body.He is the walls answering back.Mara takes me to a maintenance alcove deep in the residential tier, a dead-end space full of the city’s plumbing, conduit and ductwork and the soft roar of the systems that keep ten thousand sleepers alive, and she puts my hand flat against a cold access panel and tells me to use the leash, the bud in my skull, here, where the field is thin and the cameras do not bother to watch the pipes.“He found this spot for us,” she says.“He finds things. Reach for him here. And brace yourself, the first time. It will not feel like a call.”I press the bud. I reach down the dead relays the way I always have. And for the first time it is not