The shift from the open sky to the inside of Hangar Bay Nine was like stepping into the belly of a diseased giant beast. Arthur crossed the threshold of the crumpled blast doors. Then, the freezing high-sky wind died, replaced by a wall of thick, humid air that smelled of old formalin, scorched hair, and rotting connective tissue.
High overhead, heavy-duty liquid silver-vapor lamps hummed in rusted cages. He cast a sickly yellow glare across an expanse the size of three football fields. Running along the heavy steel inner walls were three tiers of iron pens and holding cages, stacked like shipping containers. Within them, dark shapes shifted in the shadows—restless, shivering, and with the wet, rhythmic clank of heavy restraining chains.
Arthur lowered his flight goggles. That let them hang around his neck. Then they raised the Monocle Taxonomy Loupe over his right eye. The sight glass whirred softly as its internal micro-lenses tuned to the surrounding lighting.
A low, collective wheeze rose from the stacked cages.
“Look at this,” Arthur murmured, his voice hardening into the flat, dangerous calm he reserved for gross razor-sharp malpractice.
To his left, locked inside an iron crate barely large enough for an ordinary mastiff, lay a quad-spliced dire-hound. Its natural gray fur was patchy and raw with mange. But worse were the backup limbs grafted onto its chest cage. A pair of withered, clawed forelegs taken from a marsh-lizard, sewn into the chest muscle muscles with coarse copper wire. The tissue around…
