Cadaver & Queen by Alisa Kwitney

Author:Alisa Kwitney
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harlequin
Published: 2018-01-17T18:03:39+00:00

19

Lizzie had hoped that she would be able to have her first anatomy lesson the same day as the rest of her class, but Victor was more pragmatic, explaining that he needed to plan a little in advance. In the end, it took two weeks of clandestine meetings before they found the right opportunity. Grimbald announced that the cadavers were being brought out of the cold room again, as the class had not made many inroads during their first session. The plan was for Victor to take her to the dissection room right as the rest of the class departed, but before the Bio-Mechanicals came to clear up the room.

“We’ll have about twenty minutes, maybe thirty,” said Victor, “so we had better make the most of it.”

She nodded, aware that over the past fortnight, the student had become the teacher. Victor had been coaching her with anatomy diagrams and growing more and more confident as the material sparked old memories. There was one thing she didn’t understand, though. “So how, precisely, will we get in and out without being seen?”

Victor grinned like a pirate and opened a door in the back of the laboratory. “We travel like Bio-Mechanicals.”

Heart pounding, Lizzie followed Victor out of the laboratory and through a side door in the main building that led to a long, low passageway. She knew that Ingold contained a hidden network of servants’ tunnels, originally built by the abbey’s monks in case of attack and now used by the Bio-Mechanicals to move about the four main buildings, unobtrusively entering common rooms in order to clean them or take away rubbish.

Some of the more daring students had attempted to navigate between the buildings this way, but no one made a habit of it—the tunnels had been scaled to accommodate diminutive medieval monks, and if you ran into a Bio-Mechanical, one of you would have to back up until there was some sort of switchback. In more than one section, the ceiling was so low that Victor had to bow his head to keep from scraping it on the ceiling, but the tunnel widened and sloped upward right before he stopped rather abruptly beside a door. To Lizzie, it looked exactly like all the other doors they had passed.

“This is it,” he said. “But we have to wait. They’re still inside. Look.” He gestured to a decorative metal grille that was set at her eye level in the wooden door. The grille had a vaguely Ottoman design of swirls and curlicues, and allowed a person to stand unobserved while spying on the occupants of the other room. Pressing her face closer to the latticed grille, Lizzie could see that all twenty of her fellow first year students were present, divided into groups of four around five cadavers. Byram and Will had been placed with Outhwaite and Mothersole, and it was impossible to tell which pair was more unhappy with the arrangement. They had all removed their jackets and rolled up their sleeves, and were wearing long white aprons flecked and stained with bits of brownish blood and gore.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.