The two men are named Patrick Osei and Carl Reinholt.
Osei is fifty-four years old, missing for eleven months, reported by a shelter coordinator. Reinholt is sixty-one, missing for nine months, reported by a rooming house manager. Both are alive. Both are in Gotham General's care.
I go to the hospital with Renee on the second day, after the doctors say they're stable enough for limited contact.
The neurologist meets us outside the ward. She's direct, the way doctors are direct when they're going to say something difficult and have decided that difficulty is better than softening.
"Both patients have undergone significant surgical intervention," she says. "The nature of the intervention is unlike anything I've seen outside of experimental literature. Extensive modification of peripheral nerve pathways, in both cases. The modifications are technically precise and were performed under what appear to have been adequate anesthetic conditions." She pauses. "Whoever did this knew exactly what they were doing."
"What does the modification do," Renee says.
"We don't fully know yet. We're running assessment protocols. What we can say is that their sensory processing has been substantially altered. Both patients are experiencing significant difficulty interpreting tactile input. Mr. Osei describes the sensation as hearing a voice in another language: he knows something is being communicated but can't translate it." She looks at her notes. "Mr. Reinholt has largely stopped speaking. He responds to visual stimuli normally. Everything else seems to require active effort."
"Is it reversible," I say.
"Unknown. The modifications are extensive. Potentially permanent." She closes the folder. "They were conscious during some of the procedures. Not all of them, but some. That's what Mr. Osei has been able to communicate."
Renee writes it down. I stand beside her and write nothing.
Conscious during some of the procedures.
The cot with the light switch on the outside. The water fixture positioned for someone who might not always be standing upright. The duration implied by eleven months missing.
I think about what the work felt like from Dulmacher's side. The interest I'd read off the secondary room wall. The texture of someone for whom this held its own logic, its own internal satisfaction.
The work had been the modification itself. Not what it produced. The craft of the thing.
"Who's buying it," I say.
Renee looks at me.
"The modification. Nerve pathway alteration to this degree, in living subjects, performed outside the legitimate research network. Someone is funding it." I look at the neurologist. "Is there any legitimate application for this kind of work."
The neurologist is quiet for a moment. "There's theoretical research on sensory pathway modification in the context of neurological disorders. It's highly experimental. No clinical applications have been approved." She pauses. "There's also interest from certain non-medical sectors in the practical applications of altered sensory processing. Primarily in contexts where you'd want a human subject with modified pain response or altered perceptual input." She looks at her notes. "I'm describing the literature. I'm not suggesting that's what this is."
She is suggesting exactly that. She just can't say it plainly.
I write: modified pain response. altered perception. buyer is not medical.
Outside the ward I stand with Renee in the hospital corridor.
"We need to find who's buying," she says.
"And we need to find where Dulmacher is now," I say. "The Tricorner facility has been inactive since the first walk-through. He's moved."
"The historical registration." She'd pulled it two days ago, after I'd told her to check fourteen years back without explaining why I knew to say that. A holding entity registered in Dulmacher's name, dormant for a decade and then quietly reactivated three years ago. The address the entity is registered to: a building at the southern edge of the Narrows, on the border with the East End. Old, multi-use, the kind of building that's been sold four times and rezoned twice and nobody looks at closely.
"I want to run that building," I say.
"I'm already running it," Renee says.
We walk back to the car. Behind us, in the ward, two men who had been modified by someone who found the work worth doing are trying to understand what they're feeling.