The oxygen bell jar had served its purpose. But time was bleeding away on a different clock.
Arthur unlatched the glass dome and lifted it clear of the zinc slab. He set it on the timber side table. The little Scorch-Sparrow sat crouched on its pad of cotton wool, its golden-ringed eyes darting across the high vaulted ceiling of Annex 4. With clean oxygen coursing through its bloodstream, the bird’s vital energy had surged back with a revenge.
The moment Arthur’s fingers approached, the fledgling made its stance clear.
Clack.
The sharp black jaw bone snapped shut a fraction of an inch from Arthur’s thumb. The bird let out a raspy, hissing screech, its wings half-spreading in a furious territorial display. The movement instantly aggravated the shattered left tarsus. The bird wobbled, letting out a sharp peep of agony as the dangling limb dragged against the cotton.
“Easy, firebrand,” Arthur murmured, keeping his hands steady. “You survived the fire smoke. But if we don’t set that foot within the hour, the bone-skin will undergo stringy black rot. You’ll be peg-legged for the rest of your days.”
In his last life as a frontline trauma surgeon, Arthur had treated everything from shredded infantrymen to working military canines and messenger raptors. Avian anatomy was notoriously unforgiving. Mammals possessed diaphragms to pull air into flexible lungs. Birds possessed rigid, non-expanding lungs through which air was pushed by the rhythmic excursion of the chest bone and ribs.
