Marked Read online

  Everything was identified by white cardboard cards written on with a neat French script I couldn’t hope to read. Each card slid neatly into a brass holder on the face of a drawer.

  Two men bent over a chart laid down on one of a pair of long tables that dominated the room. They were so similar looking that I could have taken them to be brothers. Both were on the tall and thin side. Both wore long white lab coats over tweed jackets—though the man on the left wore a brown suit jacket underneath, while the man on the right wore a charcoal gray one. Both wore gold wire-frame glasses, and both had mustaches and goatees that drew their already-thin faces to sharp points on their chins. Both had gone gray, but the man on the left retained a small amount of rust-colored hair.

  They looked up simultaneously at Ivan’s entrance, and Ivan gave them a small bow and introduced me as “Lady Dana Rohan.” Then he said, “I present to you Dr. Durand of the École Polytechnique and Dr. Lefevre of the École Normale Supérieure.”

  Dr. Durand was the grayer of the two; he looked me up and down as if he was inspecting an unexpected shipment of lab animals. He didn’t smile when he said, “Welcome to my laboratory, Lady Rohan.” He then turned to Ivan and said, “May I presume that the Emperor wishes an assessment now, despite whatever other work is pending?”

  “He needs your report before this evening.”

  “Of course, he does.” He turned to the other man and said, “Dr. Lefevre, would you take care of our guest?” He didn’t wait for a response before he bent back over the chart spread on the table before him.

  I glanced at the paper that took all his attention. It was a broad sheet, like a blueprint. In the brief glimpse I couldn’t make out much detail, but I saw large circles dominated the surface, labeled in neat, tightly-spaced French. The circles varied considerably in size, and their borders ranged from thick bold lines to faint dotted lines that were barely there. The circles were connected by a variety of lines, also labeled in neat French. Embedded in the text I could only understand numbers which seemed to be cryptic dates with extra years, 13/5/1906/1877, 7/8/1907/1855.

  After just a glance, the slightly younger Dr. Lefevre said, “Will you come with me, my Lady?”

  Unlike his colleague, Dr. Lefevre could manage a smile and did not seem resentful at having his work interrupted. Ivan stayed in the outer room as Dr. Lefevre led me past the long table and through a door in the back that led to a small antechamber the size of an elevator, with three doors. He turned, cranked open the door to the right, and led me into a tile-covered room.

  He pulled a knife switch on the wall, and a large lamp flickered to life above us, casing a sterile white glow over the room. The place made me uneasy; the bright light and the white tile reminded me too much of an operating theater. Or a morgue.

  “I presume this is your first visit to the Empire, my Lady?”

  “Yes.”

  “Excellent. For all the work we do, our studies are limited by the nature of our subject.”

  I looked around the room, squinting in the intense light. One wall hid behind a large black panel suspended from a track in the ceiling. On the panel was a white grid made of inch-wide squares. In the bright light, the grid almost seemed to hover in midair, leaping from the matte background. On another wall hung a large chart that showed a branching tree that resembled an NCAA bracket that had crossbred with a spiderweb.

  I walked toward the chart to see the detail and asked, “What is it you study?” The title of the chart read, “Descente de la Marque de Chaos.”

  “We map the shifting sands of Chaos and those gifted ones who traverse them.”

  The chart had small illustrations at the end of each branch, and in the swirling abstract patterns I could recognize the kinship with my own Mark. Each branch ended with a small drawing of a symmetrical branching pattern of various sizes. Some labeled petite, some grande, and near the bottom were a collection labeled Grande Marque de l’Empire. Those illustrations were elaborate, intricate, and very unlike my own Mark. The Mark of “l’Empire” showed a trefoil symmetry and spirals that alternated clockwise and counterclockwise. In fact, even the simpler petite Marks illustrated on the chart didn’t share much with my own—or with that of the old man.

  It made me suddenly very angry that I had no name for him. He may have been my family, and I could not even say who he was.

  I turned around to question the doctor about the old man the Emperor had imprisoned and saw Dr. Lefevre adjusting a tripod that supported a large box of a camera. It pointed at the panel with the grid.

  “What are you doing?” I asked.

  “To properly account for you in our studies, we need a reference image of your own Mark.”

  TWENTY-EIGHT

  I FELT MY skin get hot. I didn’t show people the Mark. I’d only ever shown Jacob, and I still felt uneasy about that. This was some strange French guy from an alternate universe. I couldn’t strip in front of him. I shook my head, because embarrassment didn’t allow me to speak.

  “There’s no need for modesty, my Lady, you only need to show the area where your Mark is.”

  “Only that much,” I whispered. “Why?” I asked.

  “The more Marks we catalog, the greater our knowledge. The better our studies.”

  “What can you tell from someone’s Mark?”

  “Many things. The power and control the person has within Chaos, the likelihood of passing the Mark on to children and how powerful those children might be. Family relationships. Where in Chaos the person may have come from—”

  Damn.

  My heart pounded, my skin burned, and the thought of exposing myself made me want to curl up and die. But this was exactly what I had come here for. I came to find out about myself, and how could anyone tell me if I kept hiding like I always had.

  “Mademoiselle?”

  I held up a hand and controlled my breathing. I wasn’t hiding anything, I told myself. These people already knew what I was, what I could do. Exposing my Mark here didn’t mean anything, not like back home where it made me different—an outcast, a freak.

  I couldn’t do this.

  The hell I can’t.

  I couldn’t let the fear rule me. I’d come too far to back away now. I swallowed my embarrassment and said quietly, “Please, tell me what you see.” I shed my jacket and began to unbutton my blouse.

  Dr. Lefevre’s eyes widened and he said, “Please, only disrobe as far as necessary.”

  I walked over toward the grid and faced it as I shed my blouse. I did it quickly, so I wouldn’t second-guess myself.

  I heard a sharp intake of breath from the doctor.

  “Tell me about what you see.”

  “Y-yes, my Lady, but the straps, and the waistband—”

  I sighed inwardly, both my bra and my pants covered parts of the Mark. I wanted to run away and hide in one of those wooden cupboards where no one would see me. I sucked in the emotion. I’d committed myself to this.

  I undid my pants and dropped them so I stood in my panties. Then, with one hand to my chest, I unhooked my bra and shrugged out of the straps. The doctor said something in French that I didn’t really want translated.

  “Can you see it all now?” I snapped. It didn’t help that I was cold on top of everything else.

  “Almost, my Lady.”

  “What?”

  My Mark was even larger than I had thought. It had begun to sneak along the sides of my rib cage, under my arms, and it had descended below the small of my back. For the doctor to get it all on film I had to pull my ponytail, short as it was, over my shoulder, pull the waistband of my panties half down my ass and do a quarter turn and strike a pose like a lewd Statue of Liberty. Then I had to repeat the process with the other arm.

  Through it all, I felt a sickening mix of embarrassment and irritation, my skin flushed and breaking out in gooseflesh at the
same time. Despite clinging to my underwear, my modesty was in tatters. Because of the Mark, I had never so much as tried on a bikini before.

  “Can I get dressed now?” I asked. I pulled up my panties and reattached my bra before he finally said, “Yes.”

  “So?” I asked as I pulled my blouse back on, covering the Mark.

  “Hm?”

  “Tell me about the Mark,” I said, allowing all the irritation I felt into my voice. The embarrassment, I kept to myself. After going through that, putting myself on display on the off chance he could tell me something about myself, I thought I might strangle him if he held out on me.

  “Yes.” He didn’t look at me as he packed up the plates from the camera. “A Grande Marque, the size and detail are exceptional, my Lady. Though I am certain you know that.”

  “What else are you certain I know, Dr. Lefevre?” Once I had dressed myself, I felt the embarrassment fade if not completely vanish. The confidence crept back into my voice, especially since my cop instincts had picked up on his sudden obvious discomfort. It was more than could be explained by near nudity. Especially since I thought the French would be a lot more blasé about that sort of thing; especially a French scientist whose job, apparently, encompassed taking pictures of people’s skin.

  “You are not of the Emperor’s line,” he said quietly. He walked away from the camera and slid the covered negative plates into a cabinet along the wall. “The patterns of your Mark show almost no points of similarity. Any common ancestor must be over six generations gone if one exists at all.” He walked up to the Descente de la Marque chart, and I noticed he still avoided looking in my direction. He reached his hand out and started tracing the lines of descent without actually allowing his fingers to touch the surface of the chart.

  I noticed that his fingers trembled slightly.

  “No,” he said quietly. “You are of no family we have managed to study.”

  “Dr. Lefevre?”

  “Hm?”

  “Would you look at me?”

  He froze, fingers hovering over the portion of the chart with the Grande Marque de l’Empire. He balled his hand into a fist and allowed it to drop to his side as he turned to look at me.

  “Why are you afraid?” I asked.

  “What a silly thing to say.” He broke into an insincere smile and spread his hands. “Why would you say such a thing?”

  I took a couple of steps forward, and I could see the edge of his smile twitch, and his eyes twitched ever so slightly in the direction of the door.

  “Because you’re terrified,” I said.

  He licked his lips and stopped trying to hide his glances toward the door. “You have a powerful Mark, my Lady, as strong as any of the Emperor’s line. I’ve never seen one so large or elaborate. If you aren’t the scion of a great dynasty, you must be the foundation of one yourself. Just your presence in Chaos would be enough to define an Empire.”

  “That scares you?”

  He hesitated too long before saying, “Of course, it does.”

  “No, it doesn’t. What else?” I kept my voice firm and level, just like I was back being a cop, and this guy had been pulled over for a traffic stop. He was hiding something, and I didn’t know if it was a beer bottle in the foot-well or a body in the trunk.

  “I don’t know what you mean.”

  I stared into his eyes and saw real fear there. Something about me had completely unnerved him. “You know exactly what I mean, and you are going to tell me what it is.”

  He closed his eyes and said, “La Marque des Ombres.”

  “English.”

  “The Shadows’ Mark.”

  I opened my mouth, closed it, and just stared at him, dumbfounded. Of all the things he could have said, I don’t think he could have hit me with anything more unexpected. I couldn’t fathom any connection between me, my Mark, and those . . . things. It took me a moment to regain my composure enough to speak, and what came out was little more than a whisper.

  “Explain.”

  “Ombres. Shadows. They exist within the Chaos, preying on Walkers who stray too far. They are barely human, and the Marks they bear are abnormal, asymmetrical, scarred. Over a century, only three bodies have ever been retrieved for study, but they show patterns of descent like all those who are Marked.”

  “I am not one of those Shadows.” For some reason, my voice did not carry the conviction I wish I felt.

  “No.” He agreed with me, and I felt inordinately relieved by that one word.

  “But?”

  “You share many of their characteristic patterns, in fully developed form. The Shadows have irregular and stunted patterns, your Mark is what they might be if they developed normally.”

  “You’re saying I’m related to the Shadows?”

  “What I know about the patterns of inheritance tells me that only a generation separates you. Two at most.”

  I stood very still. The only muscle that moved was behind my jaw. It trembled violently, and I could not will it still. I stood here, in an alien place, a world removed from mine by centuries in a direction I couldn’t name, because I wanted to know who I was, where I came from, what it all meant.

  I refused to accept the notion that somehow I was related to an army of cannibal monsters.

  “I think what you know about the patterns of inheritance is wrong.”

  He frowned, and I think challenging his expertise managed to override his fear. “My Lady, it is not wrong. The best minds of the Empire have studied this subject for nearly a hundred years. Our archives catalog the patterns of thousands of Walkers from a dozen distinct family lines. If you gave me a dozen Marked children, I would be able to identify the parent of each one, and in some cases both. There is no doubt. You share a bloodline with the Shadows.”

  I took a step back.

  “I am sorry, but this is science as pure and exact as geometry. But, perhaps, I should say that the Shadows we’ve seen share a bloodline with you. Your Mark is unblemished and fully developed. The Shadows, unquestionably, have undergone some form of corruption. Perhaps some form of bastardization or miscegenation.”

  I did not like the way this was going. Europe did not have a stellar history when it came to dealing with questions of racial purity, and this guy came from a generation that, in my world, laid the groundwork to put the worst part of that history into practice.

  “Perhaps some sort of infection,” I said quietly.

  “What?”

  “I saw a woman attacked by these Shadows. Within hours after being bitten, she had become one.”

  He stared at me as if I had just explained how squirrels were space aliens bent on world domination.

  “That is impossible,” he said flatly.

  “I saw it. I saw that twisted Mark eat its way into her flesh.”

  “I’m afraid you are mistaken. You do not understand how this works. No one could be ‘infected’ by a Mark, any more than they can be ‘infected’ with blue eyes, or red hair, or negroid features.”

  “What I saw—”

  The fear was gone, trampled by the academic persona who rushed in to explain to the poor confused woman how the world worked. I got the Cliff Notes version of the germ theory of disease and Mendelian genetics and the difference between the two. If I could have gotten away with it, I would have slugged him.

  I wondered if I could have gotten him to listen if I’d been a man.

  In any event, the episode demonstrated to me that, when it came to the nature of the Mark, the scholars of the Empire did not know as much as they thought they did—and it left me wondering how the Mark could behave like an inherited trait for some, and like some sort of disease for others.

  That led to an uncomfortable thought.

  You could pass infections to an unborn child. I knew about HIV and hepatitis, and there were probably many
others I hadn’t heard of. What if the Mark wasn’t genetic, but some sort of disease passed on in the womb? That could explain the different ways it showed up.

  Also, when I thought about it, I could understand the doctor’s too impassioned denial of the possibility. I’m certain that someone actually studying the subject would have had the same idea, but these scientists worked for an Empire that was based on hereditary power and on the Grande Marque de l’Empire.

  Suggesting the Mark wasn’t an inherent symbol of the bloodline, but some sort of sexually-transmitted fetal infection, would be politically dicey to say the least. It could be very easy for the powers that be to see the idea as undermining the power base of the entire political system.

  In any authoritarian regime, the best-case scenario in that situation was loss of position—and I could easily see consequences that could be much worse.

  I was still irritated, but I lost the urge to punch Dr. Lefevre.

  I decided to stop with the science questions and go into the cop questions. As he walked me to another exam room to take blood and take my vital signs, I interrupted his discourse on nineteenth century genetics and disease theory to ask him if he had ever seen anyone else with patterns that tied to the Shadows.

  That got a reaction.

  “What do you mean?” He asked the question in a way so obvious that he might just as well have waved his arms and shouted, “Wait while I stall.”

  “I know about the prisoner who escaped.”

  “Um.” He drew my blood with a glass syringe.

  “Tell me about him.”

  “I can’t, my Lady.”

  “Why not?”

  “I have no direct experience of the man you talk about. Those who did are dead.”

  “But—”

  I was interrupted by Dr. Durand storming into the exam room. “Dr. Lefevre? Is there a reason this is taking so long?”

  I stood up and said, “I’ve been asking him some questions.”

  Dr. Durand ignored me and continued talking to Dr. Lefevre. “We have a report to draft before the end of the day, and I trust you do not want to be cited as the reason for its postponement.”