Jovah's Angel (52 page)

“If I'd kept her long enough, you'd be on board ship, and I'd never have to return her,” Caleb said with a smile.

Thomas laughed. “Well, then, I'd be happy knowing you were caring for her and still meeting your obligation to me.”

“But I didn't come just to return the horse,” Caleb added. “If you're in a mood to sell her, I'll buy. And I can't imagine you'll have much room for horses on your boats.”

Thomas beamed at him. “No, indeed. I was thinking to just set her free, but this pleases me much better. Name your price—I won't haggle.”

They came to a quick agreement and Caleb handed over his cash. Then he glanced around the campsite, which was in a frenzy of packing and dismantling. “You look like you're all getting ready to move.”

“Yes, the Gathering's in about two weeks now, and the whole clan must be in Breven by then. And most of us won't be coming back, though some will. Had you come even a day later, you would have missed us entirely.”

“Is Noah traveling with you? I don't see him.”

“No, he's in Breven already. Working on the ships.”

Caleb felt a sudden sharp sense of loss, brutal and unexpected. “So he won't be coming back? And is he—is he still set on leaving with you on the voyage to Ysral?”

Thomas nodded happily. “Yes, and we're glad to have him! Skills like his will be sorely needed, both on the journey and after.”

There was no way for Caleb to finish his task here, make it quickly to Breven to say farewell, and still get to the Eyrie in three weeks or less. Well, perhaps he could be late. Alleya would no doubt be sympathetic. And yet, he had so much to learn and so little time.

“If I give you a message, will you take it to him? I can't believe—I didn't realize—I hadn't thought he would set sail before I had a chance to see him again.”

Thomas laid a hand on Caleb's shoulder. “Yes, any farewell is difficult, and this one is hard on us all. I wish all the Edori would board those boats, and live or die together. As it is, to leave so many behind—It's tearing many apart. Edori have a close bond, and this trip will sever it. Yet still I am impatient to set sail.”

“And if you find Ysral?” Caleb demanded. “Will some of you come back and tell the rest?”

“If we can,” Thomas said. “If the boats are still seaworthy, if our navigation has been good enough to allow us to retrace our route. I am not thinking of the return journey as much as the voyage out. Turn your face forward, and don't be afraid of the next horizon.”

Scant comfort in that. Caleb stayed only a few more moments before heading back to town. A leaden depression weighed him down as he thought of never seeing Noah again, he with his quick mind and his easy soul. He felt a flare of hatred for Delilah, who had driven Noah to this desperate venture; but he could not long curse the follies caused by love. He was about to pray to a manufactured god before an audience of thousands, and nothing but love could drive him to that.

He was in Luminaux again before noon, making his first stop at the house of a man named Nathan Lowell. Caleb had come by this house the night before to make arrangements, and he found Nathan awaiting him with a small blue suitcase at his feet.

“Ready?” Caleb asked.

“Eager,” the man replied.

The housekeeper at Delilah's place informed them that the angel had just risen and might not be interested in company, but Caleb laughed at her and said, “She must see me. Tell her Caleb is here and that I won't leave.”

In a few minutes, the housekeeper ushered them into a room Caleb hadn't seen before, pink and plush with fatly padded furniture. “It is my curiosity and not your impudence that brings you to this room,” the angel told him. She was lounging in a narrow-backed chaise, her wings spread carelessly around her on the floor like so much drifted milkweed. They had apparently interrupted her at breakfast, for she was sipping on some bubbling juice, and a plate of fruit was set on a table to her right.

“Were you expecting me to feed you?” she inquired next. “I don't know that there's much in the kitchen, but I could ask—”

“We've had breakfast and lunch, thank you very much,” Caleb replied. “Delilah, I want you to meet a friend of mine, Nathan Lowell.”

“Yes, I noticed you brought company. Do excuse my atrocious manners, Nathan Lowell, but Caleb Augustus brings out the worst in me. You I am truly delighted to meet.” She extended her hand but made no effort to get up. Nathan came forward and kissed
her fingers, which pleased her and surprised Caleb. Nathan was a staid middle-aged man with a near-fanatical intensity when his professional skills were called upon; Caleb had not expected him to fall so instantly to the angel's charm.

“You I have heard much of, all to your credit,” Nathan replied. “The honor of the meeting is mine.”

Delilah waved lazy hands toward various chairs. “So, sit down! Tell me what has brought you here so early that you almost found me still sleeping in my bed.”

Caleb perched on the edge of a footstool, thinking he might be leaping to his feet any moment. “I've come to ask a favor.”

“Don't you always?”

“Which you are going to refuse. But you can't refuse it. It's too important.”

Delilah turned toward Nathan Lowell and said conversationally, “I distrust this man most when he sounds so sincere. He is quite manipulative.”

“The favor is to me, really,” Nathan said seriously. “I've been the one studying the effect of artificial stimulation on damaged nerve tissue—”

Delilah's head whipped back toward Caleb. “No,” she said flatly. “Once before I agreed—”

“And I didn't have the tools to help you,” he interrupted. “Now I might. Now I think I do. With Dr. Lowell's help—”

“
Doctor
Lowell!” she cried, sitting up so swiftly that her wings made a slurring, sibilant sound. “How
could
you bring a surgeon into my house without asking me—knowing how I hate the very thought of doctors—”

“I knew you would be angry,” he said. “I knew I had only one chance. Delilah, I have discovered a device that supplies directed independent energy—it can stimulate the muscles in your wings that have been disconnected from—”

“I will not listen,” she broke in, clapping her hands over her ears and shutting her eyes. “I will not listen to you—”

He came to his feet, crossed to her side, and knelt before her. “You must do it,” he said quietly, putting his fingers around her wrists and seeking to pull her hands away. She resisted. “You must. Before you fling your life away on a doomed voyage across the sea.”

“I will not listen to you. Go away.”

“It is your last chance, do you understand me? If you leave for Ysral, no one else, not Noah, not any of the Edori, not Jovah,
not you—no one can ever give you another hope of regaining your wings. It is all I have, Delilah, a hope—but it's a good hope. It might make you whole. How can you throw that away? How can you say no? No one will ever ask you again. This is the last time I will importune you. Delilah, you have to try.”

Slowly, she allowed the insistence of his fingers to ease her hands from her head. She looked pale, defeated and sad. “You hurt me more than anyone else by making me hope again,” she whispered. “Why do you do that? Why can't you leave me in peace?”

“Because I can't give up on you,” he said, standing. He held out his hand imperiously, and she laid hers in his, allowed him to pull her to her feet. Nathan Lowell had also risen, clutching his blue bag. “Doctor? Where would you like to perform the operation?”

“Some place that's very clean.”

Delilah laughed mirthlessly. “Not here, then.”

“I have room at my clinic. Would you like to meet me there in an hour or so?”

“No,” Caleb said instantly. “We will come with you now.”

The room was white and sterile, though someone had painted a border of violets along the baseboard. Delilah, lying facedown on a narrow cot, seemed absorbed in the repetitive pattern of purple and green. Since they had left her house, she had spoken only to answer direct questions; she seemed disengaged from the whole operation, as if they were not about to touch her body, change her life. On Nathan's instructions, she had unfolded her damaged wing as best she could. Caleb and the doctor spread the chiaroscuro feathers over a long metal table.

There followed a series of exercises similar to the ones Noah and Caleb had performed so many weeks ago, as the doctor determined exactly where the break lay and how the wing was affected. The two men laid the battery over the severed tissue and debated where to insert it, how to connect the working muscles to the alien cylinder, and how to conduct its power through the failed synapses. They had discussed this the night before—and weeks before when Caleb had brought the doctor the existence of the battery as a hypothesis—and they had theoretically determined that such a patch would be effective.

“Well, then. I'm ready if the angela is,” Nathan finally said.

“Oh, I'm ready,” she said.

“You must take a sleeping drug,” Caleb told her.

“I don't want one.”

“Well, this would be very painful without one,” the doctor told her briskly, measuring out a draught in a silver cup. “So no quarreling now, drink up.”

She had propped herself up on one elbow to protest, but the doctor's chiding tone caught her off-guard. She gave Caleb a smoldering look, but accepted the drink meekly enough from Nathan's hands. “What will I feel like when I wake up?” she asked.

“The area of your wing where you still have feeling will hurt,” Nathan said.

“And the part beyond that?”

“If you have any sensation, it will be dull and muffled. I expect the battery to give you back gross motor skill but not much refined sensation. I could be wrong.”

Delilah pillowed her head on her folded arms and closed her eyes. “I expect nothing,” she said, and drifted off to sleep.

Nathan nodded. “Good. Let's begin. This shouldn't take long, but there's no need to dawdle.”

It was a strange, fascinating brand of engineering, Caleb decided, this rewiring of the human body with its own circuits and cables. Nathan Lowell worked with painstaking care, knitting the living tissue to the metallic to the dormant; and then he neatly sewed up every cut and fissure.

“It's small enough and light enough that I can't imagine it will disturb her, but there will be a period of adjustment all the same,” Nathan commented. He gave a final pat to the small lump that marred the perfect fluid line of the white wings.

“If it works at all,” Caleb said.

“If it works at all,” the doctor concurred.

“When will we know? How long before she wakes up?”

“She may sleep another hour or so, depending on the condition of her body and the strength of her will. We may as well let her sleep in peace.”

But Caleb lingered a moment after the doctor left, looking down at the slumbering angel. “The strength of her will is immeasurable,” he murmured. “But I don't know that she has ever slept in peace.”

He joined the doctor for a brief snack and to discuss the possible complications from surgery. “You never told me,” Nathan said at last, “where you discovered these—batteries.”

“At Mount Sinai, in an old library room,” Caleb said, lying smoothly. “I wouldn't have recognized them if I hadn't seen a nonfunctioning one in a machine at the Eyrie.”

“It's amazing. I wonder how they work—what their components are.”

Caleb grinned. “I plan to try and find out.”

Long before Nathan expected the angel to awaken, Caleb took an engineering manual with him into the operating room, and sat beside her, reading. He could not bear for her to wake up, alone and in pain and choking down hope. He had brought her here; he would, to the best of his ability, see her through.

It was early evening when she first stirred, murmuring wordlessly, rubbing her forehead against her forearms. Caleb laid his book aside and scooted nearer, wondering if she might just be dreaming. But a few minutes later, she opened her eyes, rolled halfway to her side and looked around her.

“I feel horrible,” she said in a slow voice. “What did you make me drink?”

“Some evil medical potion,” he said, handing her a glass of water. “Are you in pain or just feeling groggy?”

“Both,” she said, accepting the water and swallowing half the contents. “So I take it the operation was a failure.”

“Why do you think that?”

“Because you haven't greeted me with ecstatic smiles and cries of good news.”

“I don't think we can tell anything until you try to work your wing. But you don't look strong enough even to stand—”

She laughed weakly. “Well, let us see what we can discover.” She pushed herself to a sitting position, then closed her eyes briefly, waiting out a dizzy spell. Then she smiled at Caleb and held but her hands. He pulled her to her feet and kept his hold on her.

“You could wait a little,” he suggested. “If you're so disoriented, you shouldn't—”

“I think I'm well enough to flap my wings,” she said. “My wing. Now watch me.”

And she unfurled her wings with a rippling, stretching motion, as a man might extend his arms to loosen his muscles after a long sleep. The feathers made a shushing noise across the floor; the black-tipped edges made a serrated pattern against the stark walls of the office. Right side and left, the wings made mirror images of themselves behind her back.

“You moved it,” Caleb said neutrally.

She glanced automatically to her right side, where the damaged wing had never responded to her will, clearly expecting to see it trailing limply on the floor behind her. Her breath caught; her pale face grew chalky white.

“I cannot feel it,” she whispered.