Page 11 of Eden and her Mercenary (Changing of the Guards)

Royal

T he last time I broke into a place for a good reason, it was an illegal apocalypse bunker full of poached bear parts and enough ammunition to arm a small coup. That had felt cleaner than this.

In the glow of pre-dawn, Dr. Chen’s hunting-lodge-turned-clinic was a slab of old timber perched above the lake, cedar and birch wound up so tight you’d miss it from the highway.

We parked under a tangle of last year’s Christmas lights and three sun-bleached American flags, because Chen liked reminders that she was still, technically, a citizen of somewhere.

Above the door hung a cartoonish wooden welcome sign: “If You’re Here, You’re Lost. Or You Know the Code. ”

Eden was up, but her face had the hollow edges of deep-bunker sleep as she rolled open the truck door.

Harrison, surprisingly, was already gathering the neural mapper, clutching it like it might leap out of her arms if she didn’t concentrate.

Mack’s hands, steady as a ritual, lifted the sedative cooler and surgical case from his truck bed .

We looked like a hell of a crew, I thought: a mob enforcer, a dog transporter, a disgraced neuroscientist, and a small-town vet all marching before 6 AM into the den of a surgeon who’d once gotten sanctioned for using a 3D printer to replicate a patient’s larynx without telling the hospital. I almost laughed.

Before I could, the front door popped open and Chen leaned out, silver hair bound into a knot at the nape of her neck.

“You’re late,” she said, glancing at her watch, which I noticed she wore upside-down.

Her eyes fell to the neural mapper and then to Harrison. “You brought the witch with you. Good.”

She let us in without another word. The inside was a riot of taxidermy and mid-century Danish furniture—a haphazard chemistry between old world survivalism and Scandinavian minimalism. If Ed Gein and Martha Stewart had ever co-hosted a show, it would look like this.

Chen led us through to the “theatre”—her repurposed den, now lined with LED surgical lamps that splayed light across the huge stone hearth and a slab of stainless steel where one might imagine a bear skin stretched, except it was the place for the patient.

The walls were unevenly painted, the smell of isopropyl and wet dog barely covering the musk of pine resin.

“Where is the subject?” Chen asked, stretching nitrile gloves over her thin fingers. Her voice could have carved glass.

“On the way,” I said. “Leaving a false trail for the Junction cleanup crew.”

“Good. They’re sloppy, but it only takes once.” She waved us to the side and began prepping the table, snapping tools into a neat row. “Harrison, you’ll walk me through the protocol for disabling the anti-tampering device. You’ll do it slowly. If you lie, you’ll watch the dog die.”

Harrison, to her credit, didn’t flinch. She unlatched the hard case and began to assemble the neural mapper, hands moving with the subdued energy of someone resigned to harm reduction.

“It’s a three-step protocol,” she said, “biometric handshake, then ROS scavenger injection, then low-frequency override. You’ll have to—”

“We’ll have to sedate first,” Chen interrupted, handing the vial to Mack, “then excise the tissue en bloc. How long is the kill-switch response?”

“Twenty seconds,” said Harrison.

I watched Eden as she listened, her jaw set but her fingers trembling at her side. I moved over; she gave me a quick look, unsure, and I just put my hand on her shoulder—felt the little quiver there.

We waited in the shadows for the next twenty minutes, Mack quietly prepping syringes while I used the downtime to text Ryker—status on the decoy. His reply was nearly instant: "Split off. Two tails. ETA to you in 3 hrs, will circle property before approach."

I deleted the text and pocketed the phone.

∞∞∞

They arrived in Wren’s SUV with the sort of casual haste that meant nothing had gone wrong, but it still felt like maybe it had.

Wren came in first, hair up in a towel turban like she’d just gotten out of the shower—her way of telling us, I guess, that she was unfazed.

Declan followed, carrying Stella in a blanket like she was an artifact smuggled out of some war zone.

The dog’s breathing was shallow but even, her eyes open and glassy as she took in the light.

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 until she 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.

She stroked Stella’s ear, her voice rasped thin. “Wherever she wants to be.”

It took a half hour for Stella to wake. When she did, her first move was to reach for Eden, weak but determined.

The dog’s head lolled, eyes fogged with pain or sedation or just some deep confusion nobody could ever name.

Eden sat with her, whispering into the battered ear, the same one that had been cut open and sewn up three times by three different people.

She was still whispering as Ryker arrived, windblown and red-eyed, the compact Glock tucked just slightly more visible in his waistband.

“She’s alive?” he asked, and for once there was no joke in it.

“Yeah,” I said, and clapped him hard on the back.

∞∞ ∞

Out front, the four of us—the vet, the scientist, the animal rescuer, the mob brother—stood in a strange, embarrassed clump, like we’d all just walked away from a plane crash and were unsure who to thank for not being dead.

“Where will you go?” I asked Harrison.

She shrugged, the gesture thin as paper. “Somewhere without dogs, maybe.”

“I don’t believe that,” I said. She smiled, but it was a ruined thing.

Eden and Stella sat in the back of the truck, the dog’s head resting in her lap. Wren made sandwiches. Mack found a bottle of Ibuprofen. The sun came up out of a mess of thunderclouds and fog.

Ryker and I loaded up the supplies, checked every angle of the woods for movement. But there was nothing—no SUVs, no distant threats, not even a bird in the trees. I felt something inside me unclench, and it was like letting a broken bone finally knit.

I stood at the edge of the porch, took in the scent of burnt electronics and pine and blood, and for the first time in my life, I didn’t feel like something bad was coming for me. I felt it was already past.

Eden found me there, touched my arm lightly. “ She’ll make it,” she said. “Thank you.”

“You saved her,” I said.

She reached up and laid her hand against my cheek. “No. You did.”