own blood was hosing out in a hard scarlet stream. I hit the floor — the pain of the injury having yet to reach my brain — and reached out in reflex for the stump. But only one hand presented itself; my left arm had been curtailed neatly above the wrist. In my peripheral vision I saw my detached hand, still gloved, perched on the floor like an absurd white crab.
Pain flowered in my skull.
I screamed.
SIX
‘I’ve had enough of this shit,’ Hirz said.
Childe looked up at her from his recovery couch. ‘You’re leaving us?’
‘Damn right I am.’
‘You disappoint me.’
‘Fine, but I’m still shipping out.’
Childe stroked his forehead, tracing its shape with the new steel gauntlet Trintignant had attached to his arm. ‘If anyone should be quitting, it isn’t you, Hirz. You walked out of the Spire without a scratch. Look at the rest of us.’
‘Thanks, but I’ve just had my dinner.’
Trintignant lifted his silver mask towards her. ‘Now there is no call for that. I admit the replacements I have fashioned here possess a certain brutal esthetique, but in functional terms they are without equal.’ As if to demonstrate his point, he flexed his own replacement leg.
It was a replacement, rather than simply the old one salvaged, repaired and reattached. Hirz — who had picked up as many pieces of us as she could manage — had never found the other part of Trintignant. Nor had an examination of the area around the Spire — where we had found the pieces of Forqueray — revealed any significant part of the Doctor. The Spire had allowed us to take back Forqueray’s arm after it had been severed, but it appeared to have decided to keep all metallic things for itself.
I stood up from my own couch, testing the way my new leg supported my weight. There was no denying the excellence of Trintignant’s work. The prosthesis had interfaced with my existing nervous system so perfectly that I had already accepted the leg into my body image. When I walked on it I did so with only the tiniest trace of a limp, and that would surely vanish once I had grown accustomed to the replacement.
‘I could take the other one off as well,’ Trintignant piped, rubbing his hands together. ‘Then you would have perfect neural equilibrium… shall I do it?’
‘You want to, don’t you?’
‘I admit I have always been offended by asymmetry.’
I felt my other leg; the flesh and blood one that now felt so vulnerable, so unlikely to last the course.
‘You’ll just have to be patient,’ I said.
‘Well, all things come to he who waits. And how is the arm doing?’
Like Childe, I now boasted one steel gauntlet instead of a hand. I flexed it, hearing the tiny, shrill whine of actuators. When I touched something I felt prickles of sensation; the hand was capable of registering subtle gradations of warmth or coldness. Celestine’s replacement was very similar, although sleeker and somehow more feminine. At least our injuries had demanded as much, I thought; unlike Childe, who had lost only his fingers, but who had appeared to welcome more of the Doctor’s gleaming handiwork than was strictly necessary.
‘It’ll do,’ I said, remembering how much Forqueray had irritated the Doctor with the same remark.
‘Don’t you get it?’ Hirz said. ‘If Trintignant had his way, you’d be like him by now. Christ only knows where he’ll stop.’
Trintignant shrugged. ‘I merely repair what the Spire damages.’
‘Yeah. The two of you make a great team, Doc.’ She looked at him with an expression of pure loathing. ‘Well, sorry, but you’re not getting your hands on me.’
Trintignant appraised her. ‘No great loss, when there is so little raw material with which to work.’
‘Screw you, creep.’
Hirz left the room.
‘Looks like she means it when she says she’s quitting,’ I said, breaking the silence that ensued.
Celestine nodded. ‘I can’t say I entirely blame her, either.’
‘You don’t?’ Childe asked.
‘No. She’s right. This whole thing is in serious danger of turning into some kind of sick exercise in self- mutilation.’ Celestine looked at her own steel hand, not quite masking her own revulsion. ‘What will it take, Childe? What will we turn into by the time we beat this thing?’
He shrugged. ‘Nothing that can’t be reversed.’
‘But maybe by then we won’t want it reversed, will we?’
‘Listen, Celestine.’ Childe propped himself against a bulkhead. ‘What we’re doing here is trying to beat an elemental thing. Reach its summit, if you will. In that respect Blood Spire isn’t very different from a mountain. It punishes us when we make mistakes, but then so do mountains. Occasionally, it kills. More often than not it leaves us only with a reminder of what it can do. Blood Spire snips off a finger or two. A mountain achieves the same effect with frostbite. Where’s the difference?’
‘A mountain doesn’t enjoy doing it, for a start. But the Spire does. It’s alive, Childe, living and breathing.’
‘It’s a machine, that’s all.’
‘But maybe a cleverer one than anything we’ve ever known before. A machine with a taste for blood, too. That’s not a great combination, Childe.’
He sighed. ‘Then you’re giving up as well?’
‘I didn’t say that.’
‘Fine.’
He stepped through the door which Hirz had just used.
‘Where are you going?’ I said.
‘To try and talk some sense into her, that’s all.’
SEVEN
Ten hours later — buzzing with unnatural alertness; the need for sleep a distant, fading memory — we returned to Blood Spire.
‘What did he say to make you come back?’ I said to Hirz, between one of the challenges.
‘What do you think?’
‘Just a wild stab in the dark, but did he by any chance up your cut?’
‘Let’s just say the terms were renegotiated. Call it a performance-related bonus.’
I smiled. ‘Then calling you a mercenary wasn’t so far off the mark, was it?’
‘Sticks and stones may break my bones… sorry. Given the circumstances, that’s not in the best possible good taste, is it?’
‘Never mind.’
We were struggling out of our suits now. Several rooms earlier we had reached a point where it was impossible to squeeze through the door without first disconnecting our airlines and removing our backpacks. We could have done without the packs, of course, but none of us wanted to breathe Spire air until it was absolutely necessary. And we would still need the packs to make our retreat, back through the unpressurised rooms. So we kept hold of them as we wriggled between rooms, fearful of letting go. We had seen the way the Spire harvested first Forqueray’s drone and then Trintignant’s leg, and it was likely it would do the same with our equipment if we left it unattended.
