Page 28 of Eden and her Mercenary
Eden let out a harsh little sigh and darted forward to take the bundle from Declan. She pressed her nose to Stella's fur, muttered something so quietly I couldn’t make it out, but I saw the dog’s tail move faintly, once.
“Sedative going in,” Mack said. “She’ll be under in about five.”
Wren had brought coffee and paper-wrapped pastries with her, because somehow, she anticipated the things you’d need even before you did. She handed me a cup, then joined Eden at Stella’s side, running a hand down the pit mix’s body. Her fingers stopped at the white scar behind Stella’s ear, pressing there untilshe found the edge of the implant.
“She’ll pull through,” Wren said to Eden, but loud enough for the rest of us to hear.
“Will she remember any of this?” Eden asked. “Afterwards, I mean?”
“No way to know,” Harrison replied, glancing over at me. “Short-term, she’ll be confused. Long-term…well.” She shrugged, as if the future was something we’d all have to share.
Chen, already gowned, motioned for us to clear the room. “I work alone. Unless you plan to hold her down through the tremors.” She lifted a scalpel in one hand, as if demonstrating. “If you hear shouting, do not come inside.”
Eden balked, but Wren gently looped an arm through hers and steered her into the side hall. I followed at a distance, keeping an eye on the windows.
For what felt like hours, we paced the perimeter of the house, listening to the soft rise and fall of the dog’s anesthetized breaths from the next room. Rain had started up again, drumming the porch and masses of rhododendron leaning into the glass. Wren and Eden sat together, sharing what passes for quiet in that kind of situation—Eden speaking low and raw, Wren listening with her whole face.
Mack joined me at the window. “She’s got a one in three shot,” he said. “Hope you told the girl that.”
“I did.” But even saying it, I realized I’d never told Eden the odds about anything—not the getaway, not Ryker’s record, not how this would end for her dog.
“Endings are the easy part,” Mack said, as if he’d read my mind. “It’s the after that fucks people up.”
“Since when are you the poet?” I asked.
“I save it for rare occasions, like impending criminal surgery at dawn.”
I must’ve laughed, because he smiled and went back to twiddling with his phone.
There was a yell from the den—the kind of noise that signaled something had gone wrong, or gone right in a way nobody wanted. I peeled off the wall and headed for the door, shrugged off Wren’s hand as she tried to stop me.
Inside, the air was thick and sharp—metal and blood, and Chen’s voice screaming at Harrison, “Hold her head, hold it, don’t let go—” The neural mapper’s screen showed a frenetic bloom of data, and the pit bull was bucking on the table, jaw locked open, eyes wild and spinning in two directions at once.
Mack darted left to steady the legs, but Chen was all about the head, hands pinching the skull just above the cut line. “Harrison, activate!” she shouted.
Harrison’s fingers flew over the mapper. Blue light flooded the surgical field, refracting off the surgical steel. For ten perfect seconds the dog went rock still.Chen worked with a speed that would’ve seemed slapdash if it weren’t so precisely violent—scalpel, tweezer, a hissed curse, and then a monstrous little object, dark and wet, lifted from the pit bull’s head like it was a pearl pried from an oyster.
“Bag,” Chen ordered. Harrison moved, trembling but efficient, and the implant was dropped into a vial of clear gel.
Eden rushed to the table, with me, only a few steps behind. Stella was limp, blood pooling under her jaw, but the monitors said she was alive. Eden pressed her palm over the shaking ribs and started to cry—just little sharp hitches.
“You did it,” she said. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re okay.”
Chen didn’t answer, just stripped her gloves off and left the room. Mack was already loading the dog with fluids and a line of antibiotics. “She’ll sleep for a while,” he told Eden. “She gets up, you hold her head straight until those stitches set.”
“Show me the implant,” I said to Harrison.
She handed over the tube, glass trembling in her grip. The thing inside was a small cube wrapped in filaments, but it writhed and shifted like it was alive. I turned it over, watched chemical bubbles eat away at the outer matrix, and wondered if it was a mercy or a crime to destroy it.
Harrison was staring at the vial with a face I couldn’t read. “That was years of my life,” she said.
“I know,” I told her.
There was silence in the den for a while—Eden bent over the dog, Mack taking vitals, Wren sitting back, just watching us. I asked, “What now?”
Eden lifted her head, eyes swollen but clear. “Now we take her home.”
“Where’s that?” I asked. Maybe I meant it for both of us.
