49. Angélique
49
Angélique
W hen the kiss finally stops, Brice clears his throat.
“The electrician is here. The doctor will be here in a minute, too. I told him I would warn him when the electronic guy would be here so he wouldn’t have to wait.”
We wait for a couple of minutes.
I was slightly buzzed, but I’m all sobered up with the knowledge that people have come to help Léandre. Hopefully.
No. I can’t think like that.
“We’re going to find a solution.”
I only realize those aren’t my words when Elhyor takes my hand and squeezes it a bit.
Since when did he and I become a “we”?
It doesn’t feel wrong, though, and I need all the help I can get.
I squeeze his hand back, and for the first time in forever, I don’t feel so alone anymore.
When he arrives, I recognize the doctor who healed my hand, but I’m surprised by who is next to him.
Didn’t Brice say the electrician was a guy?
Because the small but feisty woman who just arrived is definitely not that. She has brownish skin, with corkscrew red hair that makes her look like she has a halo around her head. Her deep green eyes are currently scrutinizing us, wondering why the fuck she was brought here in the middle of a party, with drunk people all around.
To be fair, not everyone is drunk, though. I’ve seen Elhyor talk with his guys, and I know the team who patrols the grounds has changed twice since we started drinking.
It doesn’t change the fact that this woman’s plush lips are drawn into a severe line at the sight of Notre Dame being turned into a wedding party venue.
Or maybe it’s because it’s Sunday and already late in the afternoon, and she didn’t want to be here.
“Why am I even here?” she asks with what should look like a sneer, but almost looks cute on her, as she crosses her arms over her breast. She’s dressed in some kind of dark red overalls, and they hide nothing of the ample curves that she’s packing under.
“For me.” Léandre raises a hand from where he’s lying on the ground.
I didn’t even see him lay on the ground.
“What is it for?” she asks Elhyor, completely forgoing Léandre and his antics on the ground.
“Someone wants my brain to explode,” Léandre answers with a dark chuckle at the same time Elhyor answers, “He has some sort of electronic device under his skin. We don’t know what it exactly does or how to remove it, if it can be removed.”
Half of what Elhyor said is drowned under Léandre’s chuckles, but the electronic girl seems to understand.
I’m surprised to see her soften a bit at Elhyor’s words.
“That’s why he’s drunk?” she asks, without aiming her question at anyone this time.
“There might be a bit of that and the fact that this one married the devil’s daughter today,” Cassiopé says from where she decided to sit next to Léandre, as she makes an approximate wave in Elhyor’s direction. Then she seems to realize what she just said and brings her hands to her mouth, and despite them, everyone can clearly hear her add, “Oh, shoot, why did I say that? I’m so sorry, Angie.”
She’s even drunker than I thought if she blurted that out.
“You’re all good, Cassie,” I tell her softly, but I still retract my wings. It takes me a few tries, and I probably look like a constipated monkey while I do so, but they’re finally back in.
She still looks a bit ashamed of herself, and I suspect that’s why she stands right after and holds her hand out for Léandre to take, in order to help with the situation the best she can and probably hide that she blushed.
She’s as wobbly on her legs as Léandre, though, and her help isn’t really effective, so I come to her help, and together, we make him sit on a chair that Elhyor just brought to us.
Once he’s sat—and stays where we put him—the doctor approaches him.
Without even needing to be asked, Léandre bends his head to the side and shows the little lump behind his ear.
He gets a pocket scanner from his bag and looks at the device implanted there for a few minutes, zooming on his screen to study it.
“Hmm,” the doctor starts. “From a medical point of view, this thing should be removable. It will sting for sure, but I don’t see what would prevent the extraction, medically speaking. I could be wrong. Those little pieces of technology are above my pay grade.”
I’m now wondering what the electronic fee is if the doctor says that.
He moves away from Léandre and lets the redhead take his place.
She sets her bag next to her and gets a scanner that looks a bit like the one the doctor used, except, when she turns it on, it has a purple halo around it, and when she gets it next to Léandre’s ear, it lights up in every direction. She clicks on a few buttons, zooms in, zooms out, and clicks again.
“We’re ready, Milton,” she mumbles to herself before she softly puts her scanner on the ground.
“Sequence activated, Miss F,” a voice that comes from the scanner says. “Three, two, one, live.”
There’s a ray of light coming from the screen that gets to my chest level, and then the light spreads until it looks like some kind of a mechanical worm in three dimensions. The thing is fat and has small tendrils going out in every direction. I can’t decide if those are legs or antennae, but they’re so small next to the body. What makes them stick out is how bright they are next to the dark shades of the electronic body.
They already look so small on the three dimension model visible as a hologram, that I wonder how someone managed to make those in the first place.
“The tendrils you can see around the bug,” the electronic girl starts—F, if the artificial intelligence inside her tablet is right—showing us on the holo with a laser pointer, “are what keeps it stuck inside. You could remove the skin over, and it’ll still stay stuck inside.” She pauses and then, frowning, she asks her tablet again, “Milton, run protocols for extraction.”
A loading bar appears next to the bug, on the girl’s side, and then disappears just a few seconds later.
“There is a sixty-eight percent chance it could be physically extracted from the body with surgery. There is, however, a ninety-eight percent chance that doing so will discharge the energy from the main body into the tendrils. The holographic rendering of the device only shows what is in the immediate vicinity of the main body.”
“Milton, show the whole device,” F says after cursing to herself.
It takes less than a second, and then the holographic image isn’t just in the middle of our group. The tendrils go almost three meters away from the body; some of them stop when they encounter one of us so everyone starts to move and part into two groups. One group is on the side of the electronics girl—Elhyor, Brice, and I—with tendrils circling around us on each side and up, like some sort of electrical shielding, and the other group—Léandre, Cassiopé, the doctor, and some of the guards who arrived at the sight of the hologram’s lights—looks at us from the other side with a mix of wonder and horror on their faces.
I don’t want to ask, and yet, I need to, because I can’t see how this is going to end well.