The death of the Void-Stitched Clone released a foul, oily mist that hissed as it reacted with the clean air of the vault.
Arthur didn’t waste a second.
“Pip, solar sweep,” Arthur commanded, stepping up to the carcass. “Cleanse the aerosolized void spores before they settle into the stonework.”
Pip dropped from the rafters with a sharp, ringing trill. The tiny golden raptor swept across the arena in a broad circular orbit, releasing a curtain of gentle, purifying solar light from the tips of his main feathers. The golden radiance stopped the toxic black vapor on contact. That turned the foul fog into harmless, odorless white steam that drifted up into the ceiling chimney pipes.
Arthur knelt beside the cut chest cavity of the fallen monster.
His hands were steady as he drew his brass cutting-open razor knife and silver-steel bone metal tongs. In the center of the clone’s mangled chest, buried beneath layers of scarred man-made void flesh and rusted through wire stitches, lay the true prize. The reason Osric’s leftovers had sacrificed dozens of chimeric subjects to breach Vault 4.
It was the Gengjin Origin breastbone.
A curved, clean bone thirty inches long, shaped like a stylized crescent moon. Unlike the rest of the clone’s body, which was rotting and degraded, this single bone remained fully uncorrupted. It gleamed with a brilliant, mirror-smooth white-gold luster. It shook with a sound hum that set the silver needles in Arthur’s stitch kit ringing like fine crystal.
