The gray dawn broke over the Sunken Fissure with the dull, metal shriek of the morning outer edge siren.
Arthur didn’t wake to the siren. He was already awake. He sat on an overturned supply crate beside the kerosene stove in Dugout Seven, carefully oiling the brass hinges of his razor-sharp bone hooks. Beside his boots, Grimm was curled into a dense black sphere, his tail wrapped across his scarred nose. Every few seconds, Grimm’s hind leg gave a reflex twitch—the phantom memory of running across open grassland, far from the choking dark rock trenches.
Above them, Pip was perched atop the iron chimney pipe, dozing with one eye cracked open, his crimson feathers puffed against the chill.
A sudden, wet choking sound echoed from the comms trench outside.
Arthur paused his whetstone. The sound was not the hacking cough of a sick infantryman. It was the deep, hollow rattle of a large carnivore struggling to clear fluid from its lung tree.
The heavy canvas flap of the triage entryway was shoved open. Cold, damp air rushed in, carrying a thin, crawling tendril of pale blue vapor that drifted along the floor boards like spilled ink.
Sergeant Corvo hurried inside, his newly cleaned out left arm supported in a clean sling Arthur had fashioned from sterilized calico. Behind him came three infantrymen dragging two trench mastiffs on crude rope leashes. The hounds were massive, heavy-boned animals bred for outer edge sentry duty, their gray coats scarred by wire cuts and…
