The low, high-pressure purr of a high-shifted weight engine disrupted the afternoon quiet of Slum Ward 9.
Arthur stood behind the wooden counter of the clinic medicine room. He wiped a pair of stainless steel stitch metal tongs with an alcohol swab. Outside the narrow street window, muddy wastewater trickled through the cobblestone gutters. Commoner laborers in grease-stained canvas smocks paused their wheelbarrows, staring toward the southern intersection.
A sleek Obsidian-Six executive limousine glided through the coal-dust haze.
The vehicle was six yards of matte-black carbon-composite plating, floating on magnetic-dampened air mid-air that ironed out the sunken ruts of the slum lane. Emblazoned upon its rear passenger door in polished white-gold relief was the twin-helix crest of Apex Biogenics—the premier bio-pharmaceutical trade ring of the Upper Spire.
The limousine pulled to a stop directly before the clinic’s weather-beaten wooden porch.
A chauffeur in pressed gray livery stepped out into the drizzle, unfurling a wide silk umbrella before opening the rear passenger door.
A tall, narrow-shouldered man in a charcoal pinstripe three-piece suit emerged. He wore spire-tailored calfskin dress shoes with thick rubber treads. He stepped with exaggerated care over the rim of an oily puddle. A heavy gold signet ring flashed on his left pinky, bearing the falcon insignia of the House Vance cadet branch. He carried a slim briefcase bound in polished black alligator hide.
“Sweet saints of the frontier,” Toby whispered from the apothecary bench. He grabbed his brass-bound ledger to his chest like an iron shield. “Arthur, that’s an executive trade ring car. The fuel cells alone cost more than our clinic’s quarterly rent. Did Gregory send a death squad with corporate lawyers?”
“Gregory doesn’t have the credit line for Apex Biogenics,” Arthur replied, his voice level as he set the metal tongs into a dry tray. “Keep your ledger closed, Toby.”
The brass bell above the clinic door chimed.
The aroma of cold wintergreen cologne, imported pipe tobacco, and ozone swept into the room, instantly clashing with the resident scents of harsh cleaning acid and boiled bone broth.
The visitor paused on the threshold, his pale gray eyes sweeping the humble medicine room. The scrubbed wooden counters, the jars of preserved tapeworms and sulfur ointments, and the cast-iron stove warming the corner. A faint, condescending smirk curled his thin lips.
“Quaint,” the man said, his voice smooth and melodic. “A touch rustic for someone carrying the Vance surname. But I suppose frontier medicine needs a certain... Limit for grime.”
He walked forward, resting his leather-gloved knuckles on the counter.
“Linus Vance,” he introduced himself, offering neither a hand nor a bow. “Senior Asset Acquisition Broker for Apex Biogenics, Terrestrial Beast Division. And you must be Arthur. The prodigal nephew who preferred studying strays in the cellar to signing Gregory’s deed.”
Arthur didn’t blink. “The clinic is open for consultations, Broker Vance. If you have an injured friend, bring it in. If you’re here to serve another clan eviction notice, save your paper.”
Linus chuckled softly. He clicked the twin clasps of his briefcase. He opened the lid to reveal neat rows of embossed parchment bonds and a slate screen.
“Gregory is a country brute who thinks in terms of bunkhouse rents and overdue tuition,” Linus said dismissively. “Apex Biogenics operates on a grander horizon. We deal in genetic capital. Three days ago, in the Ironfang test arena, your stray mutt engaged Julian’s pureblood Frost Drake. According to the arena sensor tracking data, your beast shattered Glacies’s knee joint cord and collapsed his jaw hinge in less than four seconds.”
Linus slid a black-and-gold corporate slate across the counter:
Beside the slate, Linus laid a stack of crisp, negotiable bearer chits bearing the white-gold seal of the Central Spire Banking Guild.
“Twenty thousand Vanguard credits,” Linus said, his voice dropping into a conspiratorial purr. “More wealth than a commoner tamer sees in three lifetimes. We don’t even need you to surrender the hound permanently. Apex Biogenics merely needs exclusive genetic custody. We’ll collect bi-weekly semen deposits, sixteen core marrow biopsies from the thigh bone and upper arm bone, and full rights to all first-generation and second-generation offspring. The beast remains in our high-thickness research kennels in the Spire.”
Toby let out a strangled squeak, his eyes bugging out at the stack of currency. “Twenty... Twenty thousand...”
Arthur looked at the contract, then up at Linus. His expression was flat, devoid of awe.
“Twenty thousand credits for a hound your academy evaluators stamped as zero-point-zero-one mana flow rate,” Arthur noted quietly. “You must be desperate, Linus.”
Linus’s smile tightened at the edges. “We recognize an anomalous mutation when we see one. That beast possesses uncharacteristic skeletal thickness and an irregular spatial phase. In our breeding labs, paired with our ice-cold brood-bitches, we can isolate the phenotype and scale it across our military shock-lines.”
Arthur reached out, picked up the corporate slate, and tapped the screen with a fingernail.
“Your shock-lines are living garbage, Broker Vance.”
The room went dead still.
Linus stared at Arthur as if the young man had spoken in tongues. “I beg your pardon?”
“You heard me,” Arthur said, his tone matter-of-fact. “Apex Biogenics boasts of producing four-ton apex drakes in six months using sped up gestator tanks and man-made calcium cocktails. You market them to high-born heirs like Julian as unbeatable war machines. But you cut corners on the osteoblast cycle.”
Arthur leaned forward, placing both hands flat on the wooden counter.
“Glacies wasn’t defeated because Grimm was a strange flaw. Glacies was defeated because your lab bio-engineers are unfit. To force an embryo to reach adult mass in twenty-four weeks, you flood its joint padding with man-made growth factors. The bone cortex thickens, but the deep tough gristle never calcifies. In high-load joints like the kneecap and the hock, the tissue remains young and porous.”
Linus’s pale face darkened. “Our breeding formulas are proprietary trade secrets—”
“They’re fault disguised as building,” Arthur interrupted coldly. “Plus, when a Frost Drake discharges its sub-zero breath, the rapid heat contraction shocks the sub-jaw nerve bundle. You failed to properly myelinate the sheath during gestation. Because of that, the animal suffers a forty-split-second synaptic delay in its jaw hinge right away after firing. Grimm didn’t need magic to break Julian’s drake. He simply struck an uncalcified joint cord during an engineered nerve pause.”
Arthur pushed the slate back across the polished counter, stopping it an inch from Linus’s manicured fingers.
“Your drakes develop permanent joint padding black rot by age five. Their joints disintegrate under their own body weight. And you want to introduce a Deep-sea Fenrir’s gravity marrow into your unstable gene pool? You would detonate your brood-bitches’ uteruses before the first trimester completed.”
Linus straightened to his full height, his suave facade cracking to reveal the vicious high-born arrogance beneath. His gray eyes burned with malice.
“You arrogant little gutter rat,” Linus hissed, his knuckles whitening over his leather briefcase. “You think a few crude dissections give you the right to lecture Apex Biogenics? You’re an unlisted orphan living in a rotted slum tenement. The Vance Clan owns your charter debt, and Apex owns the clan’s research credit line. If you refuse this offer, we’ll have the Town Sanitation Board declare your clinic a biohazard zone by nightfall. Your beast will be seized as illegal dangerous salvage. You’ll be in the trench conscription pens before the week is out.”
Arthur didn’t flinch. He picked up his pocket watch, checked the dial, and laid it on the wood.
“You have sixty seconds,” Arthur said softly.
Linus scoffed, sneering down at the watch. “Sixty seconds for what?”
“To get that corporate tin can off my street,” Arthur replied, “before my hound removes its front axle.”
“You wouldn’t dare,” Linus snarled. “That vehicle is armored with tiny composite alloy. Your mangy stray would break his teeth on the bumper.”
Arthur made no reply. He simply tapped the counter once with his forefinger.
From beneath the zinc running table in the shadowed corner of the room, a pair of molten amber eyes opened.
The shadows seemed to peel away from the floorboards. Grimm stepped into the lantern light. The hound stood seventy inches at the shoulder, his black fur bristling with dense, wire-stiff tension. There was no growl, no posturing display of teeth. There was only the terrifying, crushing stillness of an apex hunting beast locking onto target map points.
A faint, twenty-cycle shaking hummed through the floorboards, rattling the medicine vials on the shelves.
Linus took a sudden, reflex step backward, his calf bumping against the doorframe. The color drained from his cheeks as he met Grimm’s unblinking golden stare.
“Fifty seconds,” Arthur said.
Linus snatched his briefcase and the bearer bonds from the counter, nearly tripping over the threshold as he backed out the front door. “You’ll regret this, Arthur! House Vance will crush this cesspool into dust!”
The broker scrambled down the wooden porch steps, barking wild orders at his chauffeur. The driver scrambled behind the wheel, slamming the door as the electric turbine of the limousine whined to life.
Grimm looked up at Arthur.
Arthur nodded toward the street. “Take the steering linkage. Leave the cabin intact.”
Grimm vanished.
A faint pop of displaced air rippled through the doorway.
Across the muddy lane, the limousine began to reverse, its tires churning through the black grit. Suddenly, a pool of ink-black shadow coalesced directly beneath the vehicle’s front mid-air.
Grimm materialized beneath the chassis.
Rising on his rear haunches, the hound clamped his black glass jaws directly across the hardened chrome tie-rod and the high-pressure steering linkage connecting the front wheels.
CRUNCH.
The twenty-four hundred pounds of bite force shattered the chrome-moly steel alloy like dry peanut brittle. High-pressure high-pressure fluid sprayed across the street in a steaming scarlet mist.
Grimm released the mangled metal, spat out a mouthful of shattered alloy shavings, and melted backward into the roadside mud.
The limousine’s front wheels splayed outward in opposite directions with a sickening metal clatter. The vehicle dropped hard onto its front skid plate, grinding into the cobblestones with an ear-splitting screech of tearing steel before stalling fully in the gutter.
Inside the cabin, Linus’s scared face appeared against the heavy glass. It screamed at the driver as the luxury car sat hopelessly beached in sixty gallons of slum runoff.
Grimm trotted back through the clinic door, his dark coat clean except for a streak of black machine grease across his whiskers. He stopped beside Arthur, gave his coat a vigorous shake. Then he sat down on the floorboards with a calm, heavy thud.
Toby poked his head out from behind the apothecary counter. His tortoiseshell glasses slid down the bridge of his nose as he stared out the window at the crippled sixty-thousand-credit limousine.
“Arthur...” Toby squeaked, his voice cracking three octaves. “That was... That was twenty thousand credits.”
“That was twenty thousand credits of debt wrapped in corporate poison,” Arthur said, picking up a clean rag and wiping the grease from Grimm’s black muzzle. “Get your ledger, Toby. We have real work to do.”