"We appreciate everything you've done, we really do. When this is over, when we win this thing, the world will honour you, it will know your name. But for now we really don't have a choice. I'm so sorry."
- Panettierre, Execution
Colonel Alice Panettierre is an army doctor introduced in Execution. She first appears under the guise of wanting to help Alex find Alfred Furnace, but in actuality also wants to recreate and use the nectar to build up her own army.
Appearance[]
Panettierre is described as a woman in her forties, she has short graying blond hair and blue eyes. When first meeting Alex, she is dressed in a doctor's labcoat and wore Lucy's St. Christopher medallion before handing it over to Alex. Later in the book she wears army fatigues.
Personality[]
Upon meeting Alex, Panettierre is very patient and kind to Alex. He describes her voice as being soothing and oddly hypnotic. However, the more that Alex continued unable to give her the answers she wants, her patience wears away quickly and becomes much more cold and aggressive in her questioning. When her true intentions are uncovered, its abundantly clear how much of a sadistic, power hungry butcher that she is. When Alex spares her and escapes, she vows to find him again and relentlessly pursues him and his friends.
Main Story[]
Execution[]
Alice Panettierre is first introduced in Execution when Alex wakes up, after having been shot down and collected from the top of Furnace's tower. She attempts to soothe Alex by giving him the St. Christopher medallion that Lucy originally lent to Alex. She introduces to herself to Alex, explaining that she'd been given orders to capture and bound him in order to stop him from causing damage to others and himself. She goes on to remark how Alex's injuries and health recovered impossibly quickly, and wants to know how it was all possible. Alex tries to explain to Panettierre that the nectar patches him up and that it is all Alfred Furnace's doing, but she dismisses him and insists that he'd have to stay in hospitalised care for his own good.
From that point on, Panettierre perfoms a number of experiments on Alex and the other blacksuits recovered from the prison, taking samples from them, cutting and testing them under the guise that it is all for Alex's "own good" but eerily similar to the wheezer's surgeries below (and wearing gas masks to boot). Panettierre is obsessed with the nectar and it's properties in the ways it heals wounds and can be used as a neurological drug in order to numb emotional transmissions of pain, fear, and reason. She wants to investigate the nectar further and how it turned some kids into blacksuits, some rats, and others into berserkers, and why Alex was the exception to this. She then moves Alex away from the surgery room, and into a combat arena in which she makes Alex fight a rat and a berserker. Alex is too weak to properly fight the two of them, but manages to bat away the rat in a stroke of luck. The rat ends up getting killed by the berserker, who in turn drops the dead rat at Alex's feet as if telling Alex to feed. Alex feeds on the rat and under the nectar's control attempts to kill Panettierre but is sedated before he can do so.