Dane did his best to make it inconvenient for them to tranquilize him, but the back of his cage punched forward and crushed him into immobility against the bars. His body was screaming with pain and yet he still felt the single point of hurt as a thick needle sank into his thigh. Fire spread through his leg and left numbness behind. By the time it climbed up his torso, his consciousness was fading into black.
The black was a void in which he was suspended, but he knew time was passing. It was like he was awake in a dark room, staring into the lightlessness. They were doing things to his body, things he didn’t want done, but he couldn’t wake up. He heard howling and wondered if it was his own voice. The blackness faded into sleep and he dreamed of being in his own bed.
“Time to wake up.” A baton rang off the cage bars, jerking Dane back into consciousness. Waking made him suck in air, and he regretted it immediately. He stank. Jonas stank. Being doused in chemical cleaner hadn’t done much for either of them.
“Am I late for school, Mom?” Moving made his muscles shriek with resentment. His eyes were open, but everything was dim. He hoped it was the lighting and not his brain.
“You have visitors today.” It was the cheerleader again. Women had always been trouble, in Dane’s experience. They had different priorities than men, and their hate lasted for generations as they sculpted their children into weapons. They were dangerous. This one tapped her baton on the bars and smiled sweetly at Dane. “Hungry?”
Starving. The word was enough to make Dane’s stomach rumble, and she laughed, shaking her head so that her hair flicked across her shoulders.
“It’s breakfast time in two minutes.” She slipped the baton between the bars and tapped his cheek with it. “I’ll make sure you have your share.”
As she turned and walked away, the room grew brighter like a sunrise, but the light was watery and artificial. Dane could see better by the moment, and he knelt up, his shoulders against the top of his cage, looking around for the first time. His cage and Jonas’s were the only ones in the immediate vicinity, at one end of the room with technical equipment that he couldn’t identify and rows of desks with computer screens suspended in front of them. That made it harder to see, but if he pressed his face to the bars and looked out on an angle with his one good eye, he could get a sense of the room.
It was immense, like a warehouse. Fans hung from the high ceiling and turned slowly to stir the cold air. There were more cages, row on row, back to back, stacked three high. Dane watched a pair of technicians driving a mobile scaffolding cart into place so that they could see into each level of cages.
Above the hum of the circulating system and the voices of Moore’s people getting to work, he could hear soft sounds, animal sounds. There was the rumble of large doors opening and the hum of a small vehicle coming through, just before it was drowned out in a chorus of howling. None of the people Dane could see turned to look for the source of the noise, but it made the hair on the back of Dane’s neck stand up.
The echo in the room and Dane’s broken senses made it hard for him to understand. Awareness dawned slowly as a large clock over the lab ticked to read six o’clock. Breakfast. Feeding time. The howls—half-human, half-animal—came from the rows of cages. The flatbed cart brought bins of feed, and the technicians got to the business of feeding the animals, directed by the scientists.
“Here we are.” That was his scientist. His. Dane pushed the concept away as hard as he could. She carried two steel trays that seemed heavy, and she looked quite pleased. “You need to start eating well.
None of that kibble for you.”
“McDonalds?” It was hard to stay flippant in the face of the horror that was sinking in.
“I wouldn’t feed my dog that crap,” she said, opening a narrow door at the bottom of Dane’s cage.
“Well, I mean my other dog.”
The opening was too small for Dane to get anything but a hand through. She slid a tray in, forcing him to shuffle back, and locked it in place, then did the same with the second. Raw chicken on one, sprinkled with some sort of blue gritty substance, fruits and vegetables on the other.
“I can’t eat this,” he said. “Not with these teeth.” It was true, and he didn’t want to eat it, either.
“Start on your veggies.” She climbed up a step stool beside him and he could read her nametag. Dr.
Greer Fallon, DVM. A veterinarian. “Dr. Moore will come by to sort you out. She’s been away, or I wouldn’t have left you like this.” She pulled a steel hose down and locked it into place in the side of the cage. Water ran out of it in a steady trickle, disappearing into a drain in the bottom of the cage.
“Here’s that mash, Greer.” A technician came over, lugging a bucket of what looked like oatmeal and raw meat. “How can you stand the smell?”
“That smells yummy.” Greer hopped off the stool. “I stand it because I don’t have human prejudices.
Get me the feeding tube for Jonas and stop whining. I want to be done with this and have him cleaned up before Dr. Moore arrives. Eat up, Dane.” She smacked the front of Dane’s cage with the flat of her hand on the way past.
Dane backed up into a corner, but he realized by the slant and shape of it that he was probably sitting in what was supposed to be his toilet. He’d been in prison and it had never been this bad. He couldn’t stand up, could barely lie down. By the looks of things, they planned to keep him for a very long time.
His stomach growled again. He picked up a piece of apple and sniffed it. He couldn’t tell shit like this.
There wasn’t anything to do, so he started eating. Beside him, he could hear the soft rise and fall of the
veterinarian’s voice as she stuck a tube down Jonas’s throat and started force-feeding him. She sounded like a worried nanny. This was hell.
“Good morning, ladies and gentlemen.” Speak of the devil. Dane dropped the apple and got ready to be as uncooperative as possible.
Moore came into his line of sight from the far side of the lab, followed by an entourage of white-coated minions. She looked sleek and lovely, her ruddy hair and tall black boots gleaming under the white lights. Queen of the damned. She wore her lab coat like royal robes. Behind her, the girl drifted like a ghost, looking drained. In contrast, the weather mage who’d bested Cyrus at Wildwood radiated a light all her own, like the sun was under her skin. It would make her easier to find when he hunted her down.
“Dr. Moore. Thank you for coming.” That was Greer, stepping away from forcing breakfast down Jonas and hurrying to meet her. “Have you received the latest numbers?”
“I have, Dr. Fallon.” Moore gave her a tight smile. “Progress seems to be getting away from us.”
“We’ve reduced the transplant ratios, yes. The manifestation mortalities were rising too quickly.”
Greer clasped her hands behind her back and joined Moore on her slow parade across the room. “The new cell batches are far superior, thanks to our friends here.”
“It’s good to see them both looking well. But you wanted some adjustments?” Moore’s smile was nothing less than demonic as she caught Dane watching her.
“For this one, at least.” Greer stopped at Dane’s cage and patted the bars fondly. “He’s been running a fever. I’m afraid we collared him too early. Also, I’d like to see his teeth returned to a more feral state.
He’ll thrive if I can put him on a raw diet.”
“And the other?” Moore glanced over at Jonas’s limp form.
“He’s in good health, for his condition,” Greer said, frowning. “We’re keeping him sedated, and it’s safer if we tube-feed him. You were correct about his contributions. We should cultivate a hybrid of these two to maintain for long-term supplies. It’s a pity the cell cultures don’t maintain efficiency in a production matrix.”