House of the Wolf (Book Three of the Phoenix Legacy) Read Free Page B

on total opaque from the outside. A hulking man stood guard near the cubicle; from all appearances, he hadn’t moved a muscle since Jael posted him there. A “blade,” Jael called him, a paradoxical term; the man wore the usual Outsider’s knife, but it was obvious he didn’t depend on that to carry out his duties, but on the imposing X 2 holstered on his hip and the metal-studded gloves covering huge hands that curled menacingly even in relaxation.
    She turned and went to the chair by the bed. As a psychosociologist, she should be making use of the fund of information available to her now on the Outside, its customs, traditions, behavioral codes, and people. “Members” would be more apt. Like Dr. Cedric Eliot. What had brought a man so skilled and dedicated to his work into the Brotherhood? She’d been apprehensive about the staff in Amik’s infirmary; this wasn’t a case to be trusted to incompetents. But Eliot had been a pleasant surprise—if anything in these last four hours could be called pleasant.
    She sagged back in the chair, letting her eyes close.
    Three hours in surgery, and there was so little they could do. The muscles and tendons had been repaired to some extent, bone cultures implanted, skin grafts made. But Alex needed vascular and neural implants if the arm and hand were ever to function at anything close to a normal level. Dr. Eliot didn’t have the facilities or the expertise for that kind of surgery. It was all they could do to save the arm.
    And what was so bitterly galling was the knowledge that the specialists and equipment necessary to treat this wound properly were available in Fina.
    She opened her eyes and looked up at the biomonitor screen on the opposite wall. The moving lines spelled a general state just short of deep shock. Dr. Eliot had hesitated for that reason at giving Alex a sedative after he came out of the anesthesia, but it became a necessity, the lesser of risks. It was imperative that his arm be kept immobile, but even restraining straps didn’t contain his desperate thrashings. Eliot had been at a loss to understand the uncontrollable emotional reaction, recognizing it as a response to something more than physical pain. Erica hadn’t tried to explain it, but she understood it.
    The cubicle still seemed to echo with those agonized cries. She looked at Alex, half her mind still operating on the level of a physician. He lay in a nulgrav bed, enveloped in an invisible bubble of controlled warmth, a respirator mask covering half his face, mechanically pacing his breathing. Taped on the inside of his left elbow was a tube to supply saline and nutrient solutions; electrodes for brainwave monitoring and emergency cardiac shock were attached to his forehead and chest; a biomonitor cuff was strapped to his left wrist, its readings projected on the wall screen. His right arm was bandaged from the knuckles to the deltoid muscle, tented in bacteriostatic gauze, a rack of inverted plasibottles mounted above it with eight tubes looping down, disappearing under the bandages, meting out protein-enzyme solutions.
    Barring infection or rejection of the grafts, the arm would heal. How well it would function, she couldn’t guess, but she doubted he’d ever be capable of full digital apposition.
    But the arm wasn’t her real concern.
    She had seen Alex Ransom weep, and knew what that meant. The locks on the mental chamber where he’d jailed his grief for Rich, for his mother, and even in some senses for his father, had broken with this new grief. Erica had warned him years ago that the locks wouldn’t hold forever, but he’d been unwilling—or unable—to open them himself and endure the natural process of recovery.
    Now he was under a double assault, both mental and physical, and the rigidly disciplined control crumbled in the face of that devastating combination. His last coherent words were, “Let me go—in the name of mercy, let me go. . . .”
    He meant,
Let me die
.
    And