Six Amber Beads, Eleven Strands had just finished preparing food for the last room of shelter kennels when something in the other room exploded.

"SAINTS BEDAMNED--" A heavy weight crashed to the ground, pursued by a flurry of clanging metal and pounding footsteps, and then slammed quite solidly into the wall between Amber Beads and the kennels room. Amber Beads startled out of their frozen stance at the Ninth Pillar animal shelter's cluttered kitchen counter, nearly dropping an unsealed tin of protein paste as they dashed toward the doorway.

A pungent smell filtered through their loose-fitted mask: garbage, smoke, and bacterial rot. Then their eyes took in the scene of their coworker -- Seven Bells, A Cord -- wrestling for control of a mid-sized burgundy beast wrapped in a wet towel.

The beast (presumably the source of the smell, if not the explosion) let out a low, warbly growl and thrashed in Bells' arms, struggling to free itself. Its thick tail slapped at Bells' legs, trying to throw her off-balance, but she held it fast.

"Well, don't just stand there?! Help me get it back in!"

At this point Amber Beads registered the open cage behind her, its crooked door hanging by a broken hinge, and the blast marks darkening the floor and wall.

"Right, right!" Beads had just enough presence of mind to shut the door between rooms before darting over to the wall of kennels. "What do you need me to-?"

"Open that cage there, first on the left," ordered Bells, sounding only slightly less harried than Beads. "I can't put it back in the old cage like this."

Amber Beads fumbled with the lock for a moment, then swung the cage door wide, clearing room for Bells to shove the increasingly upset beast into the empty kennel, soaking wet towel and all, and slam the door shut behind it. The automated lock clicked, and for a moment, all was quiet.

Then the beast screeched, flailing one limb free to strike the kennel wall, and twisted around to glare at them both with pinned-back feelers and bared teeth.

"Yes, yes, I'm very mean and put you back in the cage for trying to escape," Bells deadpanned. "You tried to explode at me. I don't know what you expected." Belatedly, Beads noted the faint holographic indicator for a mark of communication floating by the animal's head.

The beast growled again, low and murderous.

"It... exploded at you?" Amber Beads repeated. Several scattered pieces of the last minute had just coalesced into a logical sequence of events, and the explosion had finally caught up to them.

Bells nodded, tiredly. "Exploded." She gestured to the broken hinge of the lower cage door, still smoking faintly. "We're probably going to need a better cage."

 

---

 

The Beast came into the shelter like this: Eight Spindles, late in the evening, hauling a reinforced steel kennel-crate half their size out of the back of the shelter's rickety cargo transport.

"We found this one in the residential area out between twelfth pillar and central district," they said, breezily. The kennel's weight tipped the transport at a dangerously steep angle as they unloaded it. "Apparently it killed some kid's pet lizard that got left out on a balcony overnight. Also blew up a capture box, so that's fun."

"Saints below," said Cracked Stone had said, shaking their head. "And they sent it here?"

"It was identified as domestic." Eight Spindles shrugged. "Honestly, I'm surprised we got asked to take it at all. Two Strings said it dragged the lizard corpse six blocks and was eating it when animal control arrived. They had to dart it to get it in the carrier."

Seven Bells grimaced. Like the others, she had heard about the call from city animal control, but not any details. "That poor thing. Did they see it happen, or...?"

Spindles shook his head. "I didn't ask. The kid sounded pretty distraught, though."

"That's understandable," said Bells. "It's not as if they prey on lizards in the wild." A short pause -- her heart sank. "We don't think it's got the burning sickness or anything, do we?"

"I don't think so myself, but it was pretty riled up when we got it. You should have heard it yowling earlier. Two Leaves said there weren't any signs beyond maybe aggression, but if we have probable cause..."

Spindles trailed off, looking over the animal still making valiant (if disoriented) efforts at resistance from the floor of a carefully secured transport kennel. Bells tried to recall the last time she had seen a carrier with its front grille so... reinforced.

The Beast, as they would come to nickname it, was a fair bit larger than the typical pipe-maintenance rat, sporting either a rare deep reddish-brown color morph or a thorough unwashed coating of lizard blood. Possibly both, Bells had thought, noting the rusty streaks on the kennel interior. A scar marred its left eye, stretching up the left feeler and down the side of the neck, and darker patches mottled its side and tail. It wasn't drooling or twitching like a burning-sick animal would, though, and the corners of its good eye looked clear of gunk, if still glazed.

"... can't imagine we're not putting it down anyway," Cracked Stone chimed in. One finger tap-tap-tapped the jaw of their old-fashioned bone mask, as they often did when deep in thought. "Killed and ate a pet, and it seems to have a taste for them. Barring a miracle, it's too dangerous to rehome. And Two Leaves said it... 'blew up', did it?"

"Exploded, yeah," said Spindles. "Still not sure what that was about, but it seemed like it was secreting some kind of... volatile materials, maybe involuntarily, and it made a few small blasts trying to escape and scare people off. It might be a nonstandard genetic variant, maybe something commissioned? Though I can't imagine who would make something like that and give it free run of the city."

Bells watched as the creature tried to prop itself up, reaching for the front grate of the kennel, only to lose balance a few fingers'-widths from the floor and collapse again, limbs splayed out like a beached jetfish. "... Do we think it could have been an industrial design of some kind that got loose, or...?"

"We don't have anything back on that yet," said Spindles. "A notice has been placed, but it's only been a few hours, so..."

"So they handed the little anomaly off to us to handle," Cracked Stone surmised.

"I mean, it's only temporary," hedged Spindles. This was true of any animal brought to the shelter, of course, but: small comforts. "Just the usual seven days."

Cracked Stone very deliberately tilted their mask down at the crate, then back up at Eight Spindles. "Seven days."

Spindles nodded, but Bells could see the edges of his smile straining below his cheap composite mask. "Seven days."

"So there is an owner."

It wasn't a question. Feral fauna on Five Pebbles fell under a one-strike rule, and anything with the raw aggression to maul unprovoked would warrant immediate euthanasia and testing, including laboratory analysis of sampled brain matter. (Bells had handled the latter a few times, though it always made her rather queasy.)

"... It's a little complicated." Spindles reached into his shoulder-bag, rummaging around for something. "You see, when we found the creature, we also found... this." More rummaging, and the mystery item emerged: a blood-flecked citizen ID drone, still glowing and trying to levitate inside a clear plastic biohazard bag.

"Is that...?" Bells asked, almost not wanting to hear the answer. "Do we... think that belongs to its owner?"

Spindles shook their head again. "Hah, no, no, it's weirder than that. Look."

He released his hold on the bag, and with a miffed little twist the drone pulled itself free and hovered down toward the transport kennel, smacking gently against the front grille like a data-wasp meeting a well-cleaned window. The three of them all watched for a moment as it hovered there, and the creature in the kennel made a pathetic rasping sound, pawing in the drone's general direction.

"Is it...?"

"Keyed to the animal, yes," said Spindles. "Or at least, that's what it looks like."

"The animal... has a citizen ID drone," Bells repeated, all but pleading for contradiction. She stared at it for a moment. "... What kind of rich idiot gives their bloodthirsty explosion-pet a drone?!"

"Answered your own question, you did," said Cracked Stone, tap-tap-tapping again.

"It also has a mark of communication," Spindles added, as if amused by their suffering. "So presumably it can hear everything we're saying right now, even if it doesn't comprehend much."

Seven Bells sighed, stifling a groan. "Do we at least know who the owner is?"

"Sadly, no," said Spindles. "There's an inscription that might be a name on the drone? But it's not an actual person's name or anything, and the drone itself only reports ownership under 'Five Pebbles'. Animal control thinks it's either a glitch in the system or some kind of privacy measure, but whoever registered the drone isn't listed, so we're waiting until the official query gets back on details. Which means legally, unless the owner comes forward or something drastic crops up, there's not much we can do about it." They laughed, a little nervously for once. "If nothing else happens, it might even end up going to the sanctuary by Sixth Pillar."

"Worms have mercy on their souls," said Cracked Stone. Seven Bells silently agreed.

 

---

 

To their surprise, the Beast (or "Sofanthiel", from the inscription on the drone, though none of them would come to call it that) did not have an identification chip implanted. Cracked Stone, still fully masked and now smocked and gloved up to the armpits, held the creature steady under a gravity booster as Bells ran a handheld scanner over every inch of its befuddled, squamous little body: nothing, nothing, and nothing.

"I suppose someone didn't care for redundancies," Bells murmured, running the scanner along the spine, head-to-tailtip. The Beast offered her a wet, half-hearted growl. "Yeah, yeah, I know."

This was after giving the thing its bath, a misadventure in itself. The Beast turned out to hate water with a burning passion, which would have strengthened the argument for burning sickness if it hadn't still been willing to drink. The issue seemed to be submersion: the Beast would rather explode than be placed in water, a fact it demonstrated by secreting enough volatiles to pop like a firecracker in Stone's arms and fling itself into the neighboring cabinets to avoid the shallow, soapy tub they'd prepared to wash it in.

The towel used for that particular round of re-capture had been disposed of in its own impromptu "special hazard" bin. There would be several "special hazard" bins over the next several days, and most of them would end up full.

"We really need a better way to neutralize whatever this thing is putting out," said Seven Bells, eyeing the already quarter-full bin. They would probably need to save some of the goop for analysis later, but where or how, she had no idea. Saints knew where they'd be disposing of the stuff, either.

"Oh, absolutely," said Spindles. "The cross-contamination risks are going to be a nightmare. I'm not even sure about showering, honestly -- I'm a little scared of washing this stuff down the drain."

"Sponge baths and cloths for all of you," declared Cracked Stone, turning the Beast over so Bells could get a better appraisal of its underside. "We'll keep the runoff for now. Declare it to city waste management and let them deal with it."

In the end, they had settled on a sponge bath for the Beast as well, with strategic use of topical antiparasitics rather than the usual dunking. The Beast had endured these with no small amount of mournful yowling, but it did at least stop trying to explode. The part where its brief escape attempt had slammed it facefirst into a cupboard door probably helped.

As the one with the most experience handling marked animals, Cracked Stone had taken the lead for this second attempt, speaking slowly and evenly with that deceptive softness they reserved for animal guests: "It's only a bath, I promise, little Beast; nobody's going to hurt you. We're just trying to clean all that blood off of you, see?"

Truth be told, they should have started with that. It seemed whatever the Beast had been darted with hadn't been strong enough to keep it down for long. It hadn't come to its senses yet (the drunken swaying and stumbling showed that much), but it hadn't exactly taken to being picked up and moved without a fight. Being gently wiped down by hand would be closer to how pipe-rats groomed each other, anyway.

Seven Bells made another futile pass along the Beast's belly with the scanner. This time the Beast seemed to lock onto the movement, grasping at Bells' hand with its own oddly long-toed forepaw. A pipe-rat's opposable thumbs were a nuisance of nature as it was, but this one had exceptionally clever little hands, almost scavenger-like. Bells tugged the scanner away, taking its wandering paw in her other hand and moving it aside.

"I don't suppose you have anything helpful to contribute," Bells said to the creature, half-jokingly. It gave her a dazed stare and tried to grab the scanner again, waving its paws at her like a mushroom-sauced pan-handler. "No, you just want the shiny thing, don't you."

That one got a hiss in reply.

After the cleaning -- which had revealed that the Beast was in fact a rare dark red color morph under all that lizard blood -- there had come a cursory medical examination, which the Beast tolerated only slightly better than being bathed. It wasn't too difficult to get the initial DNA sample swab (more difficult to get the swab back out of its mouth, really), but drawing just a few milliliters of blood had taken another ruined towel, the strength of two adults, and the element of surprise.

On being carried over to the examination case for the vitals scanner, the Beast had made a second clumsy attempt to leap out of Cracked Stone's arms, only to overbalance and fall directly onto the scanner bed instead. (Bells took advantage of the moment to close the lid before it could right itself.) Once it realized it had been boxed into yet another small cube for containment, it had growled a few times, then wailed miserably at them again, smacking the sides of the case with its forepaws flat like little hands.

At least it seemed unbothered by the noise of the scanner. Seven Bells thanked the stars for the acquisition of that device two sidereals back, on a lucky grant from the old city council's stray-crackdown campaign -- the less she had to wrestle the Beast, the better.

The Beast's health was... on par with a feral specimen. Questionable teeth, some skin mites that would clear up with treatment, but an impressive amount of muscle on its bones, a good heart, and mostly good organs. It bore no physical injuries other than a small puncture wound on the shoulder (presumably from the dart) and a long graze along the tail that might have been a glancing lizard bite, both already closed up. The scarring on the face was long healed, as expected, with no sign of irritation or infection, although they would want a closer examination of its eye for medical records.

The intensity of scar struck a sour chord in Bells' mind. An animal with a drone couldn't have been stray for long, not if it was this aggressive, but a scar like that implied either a lack of modern medical attention, or a wound far, far worse than it looked.

Moving on, the lungs showed some abnormalities -- possibly minor fluid buildup or some sort of mild internal damage, but it could also just be a fuzzed up scan; they'd have to check that directly. The Beast's good eye had the glaze of nascent cataracts, either from age or trauma, but mild enough that current policy would defer to the owner's choice for treatment. More oddly, the brain was far denser than typical, although placing a mark of communication early in development did sometimes track with that.

And then there were the problem areas.

The Beast's digestive tract was, theoretically, functional. That was the most Bells could say about it.

"Calibration error?" Spindles had asked, eyeing the preliminary analysis for the Beast's apparently quite hazardous digestive tract.

"I think we've found the source of the volatiles," said Bells. "Which is... fascinating, actually. I have no idea how its body is handling that, but I can't imagine it's a natural adaptation. We will probably want a more detailed analysis, but..."

She glanced at the still-wobbly Beast, who should have been asleep or in torpor by now, and almost certainly would not tolerate having gut flora samples taken by hand, assuming they were allowed to do so at all. (If it was an industrial model, the last thing they needed was to run afoul of trade-secret distributions laws...)

"Maybe that can wait a little," agreed Spindles. "Is there anything else that...?" They paused, squinting at the other highlights on the display. "Wait, is it... intact?"

Seven Bells wished it was an error, but no. There on the screen, the readout showed a fully intact... well, a fully intact set of organs that most certainly were not supposed to be intact for a domestic animal registered within city limits, unless the owner had a very particular kind of permit. Worse, she had a sneaking suspicion they'd been used at least once, given the effects of pup-bearing and associated hormones on their biology.

"Might explain the attitude," commented Cracked Stone, which about summed it up.

Spindles sighed. "Until the holding period is up, it's... technically not our problem. If that thing got registered for a drone, the owner probably has the weight to throw around for a permit, and it's not like we were going to leave it unsupervised with the others anyway. We'll just... put it as a note in the file for now."

"And if it doesn't get reclaimed..." Bells gave the kennel a meaningful look, but left the sentence unfinished. First rule of working with a marked animal: there were some things one simply did not discuss aloud in earshot.

"Owner'll have to live with it," said Cracked Stone, with a little hmph. "More power than sense doesn't put 'em above policy."

This seemed to catch the Beast's attention, and it raised its head to stare at them again through the clear wall of the scanner case.

"You probably just want to go home, though, don't you?" Spindles added, with an almost forced cheer. The creature narrowed its eyes, trilled lowly, and made another uncoordinated smack against the containing wall. "Don't you worry, little one. I'm sure we'll find your home soon."

 

---

 

Mercifully, the fact the animal was already owned spared them all from having to worry about certain... procedures... for the time being. This did not, however, spare it from non-negotiable shelter vaccination policies. Without proof of immunity to the burning sickness (or much else, for that matter), shelter policy meant taking no chances.

Far less mercifully for Seven Bells and Cracked Stone, while they got through the business of intake, the inadequate tranquilizer administered by animal control had finally begun to wear off, leaving a Beast increasingly alarmed by its surroundings, eyeing everything with renewed suspicion.

"Hello, little one," said Cracked Stone again, sitting down on the rolling stool by the larger, wall-mounted kennel they'd moved the Beast into. It was just the two of them now, Bells and Stone, with Spindles already handling the next intake in the neighboring room. "I see you're starting to come to your senses. You understand me, don't you?"

The Beast stared blankly, but kept its eyes on them. Listening, then. That was a start. The mark of communication may have complicated matters, but it did put a few new tactics on the table: for one, negotiation.

"Do you know where you are, now? Nod if you do, like this." Cracked Stone demonstrated a little nod for its benefit, and received a still-blank stare in reply. "Right. Do you remember what happened, before you came here?"

The Beast narrowed its eyes, then nodded at the second part. It folded its arms inward and growled quietly.

"Good, good. Hold out your paw for me, will you?" Cracked Stone mimed the gesture for it, extending their own hand a few centimeters short of the kennel bars.

With a moment's hesitation and narrowed eyes, the Beast offered its paw. Cracked Stone took it in theirs like a handshake.

"Do you know what the burning sickness is?" they asked.

The Beast tilted its head in confusion. That would be a no, then.

"Have you ever seen an animal that couldn't stand right? Bit anything that got close, angry enough to fight its own tail? Drooled everywhere and ran from water? That's the burning sickness. It's a very bad thing, and you do not want to catch it."

There was another soft growl from the Beast at that, but after a moment's consideration, it stayed put.

"I'm going to give you something to protect you from it, so you won't get sick, or give any sicknesses to anyone else. You might have done this before, but better safe than sorry."

Another warbling growl, a little sharper this time, and Bells could see the Beast's muscles tense. Its good eye flicked between herself, Cracked Stone, and the table where the medical supplies had been set out.

"It might sting a little, but you'll endure it for me, won't you?"

At this, the Beast recoiled, but Cracked Stone kept a firm grip, keeping it from wiggling away back into the cage. Bells averted her eyes for the next bit, feeling oddly like an intruder, and focused on scanning and logging the label for the now empty vaccine ampoule while the Beast screeched its very specific displeasure.

"There, and we're done," said Cracked Stone, followed by the rattle-whir of the disposal system and the eventual decrescendo of yowling. "You can stop yelling at me now. I'll even give you a treat for putting up with me. Here."

The crackling wrapper of the larva protein stick drew less attention than expected -- most pets would recognize the sound of food, but the Beast only stared at the tube with a vague air of disdain. Then again, maybe it just held a grudge. Pipe-rats certainly had the intelligence for those.

Cracked Stone held out the protein stick and waggled it in front of the bars. The Beast had withdrawn itself fully into the cage as soon as it could escape, but as the smell wafted over, its expression changed. It let out a whiny grumble, wrinkling its nose and stretching its whiskers toward the protein stick, tasting it. There was a long moment's hesitation, and then in one quick motion the whole stick vanished right out of the wrapper.

Food secured, the Beast glared at them both and retreated to the back corner of the cage to sulk, shoulders hunched and arms crossed in an adorably person-like pose. Bells watched out of the corner of her eye as it inspected the protein stick again before taking a single cautious bite.

The rest of the protein stick disappeared in seconds.

So that was a probable yes to the grudge, but the Beast was too hungry to refuse, either. Spindles had said it was eating that poor lizard when animal control arrived. It must have been quite desperate to hunt its own natural predator, however tame and weakened the victim might have been.

"Greedy, are we?" commented Cracked Stone. "You must be hungry, then. That lizard can't have been good for you."

With any other pipe-rat, Bells would have agreed, but given the contents of the Beast's intestinal tract... which reminded her, they would need to do more detailed medical examinations later, if no owner showed up. Not that Bells imagined they wouldn't, if they cared so much to give the damn thing a drone, but with the way this day had been going, they might as well add to the trouble.

With the worst over, the evening continued far more uneventfully. The Beast seemed to have given up on escaping, now content to sit at the back of its temporary holding kennel and direct its silent displeasure at anyone unlucky enough to pass by. The cages next to it had no occupants (and would not, until the place could be cleaned), giving it a wide berth of relative privacy, and for a short time, it seemed there might be no more trouble with it.

Unfortunately, this would not last.

 

---

 

By the time they were asked to move the Beast to an occupied section of cages, there was good news and bad news.

The good news was that Nineteen Threads, Clouded Skies, their more biotechnically-oriented veterinarian on duty, had managed -- through means which Seven Bells would not be questioning -- to acquire a moderately effective dampening agent for the Beast's explosive tendencies, and it was safe enough to use in the short term (though Threads had advised them not to use it too regularly, in case their assessment had been too swift.)

The bad news was that the Beast was aware of this within hours, and positively furious about it. Nineteen Threads had hedged that heightened aggression was not impossible as a side effect, but Seven Bells had been bitten twice since the first dose had worn off. A sort of conscious malice seemed to brood behind the Beast's baleful grey eye, deeper and more spiteful than any pipe-rat ought to be, and Seven Bells did not like it.

(The Beast did not like her, either, though, so perhaps that was only fair turnabout.)

Nonetheless, the churn of turnover never ceased, and despite various misgivings, the Shelter Director had insisted the Beast could not monopolize the quarantine kennels for the entire week if it could be housed elsewhere. Bells had her own opinions on "could be housed elsewhere", but with the crowded state of intake, she had kept them to herself. The Director had been told about the Beast, and had come to a decision. Bells only hoped it would not explode in her face, least of all literally.

"Is it possible it's broody?" asked Six Amber Beads, casting awkward aside glances at the Beast as it prowled in its cage. "Do pipe-rats even get broody?"

"This one is... unaltered, so that's possible," admitted Seven Bells. Nineteen Threads had also handled the blood tests for the Beast, including hormone levels, and declared that it had carried at least one litter, though it hadn't given birth or nursed pups in several sidereal cycles. What exactly had become of those pups, nobody could say -- pipe-rat pups took at least three sidereals to grow fully independent, but they could be weaned as early as their first, so the Beast's offspring could easily have left the nest even without intervention. More intriguing was the question of why it had been allowed to carry or nurse a litter in the first place, rather than extracting eggs for external incubation.

Between that and the Beast's poorly healed eye, the "industrial prototype" theory was looking more dubious by the day.

"Unalt--?" Six Amber Beads squeaked, wide-eyed, and Bells cut them off-- "And that's all we'll be saying about that."

"Right, right," said Amber Beads. "It's... marked, isn't it?"

"Unfortunately."

The Beast growled at them both, as it usually did. After three days in the shelter, it still assumed the standard threat-posturing and hostilities at anyone who got too close, though it had begun taking meals with less complaint. Its favorite food so far was centipede protein cubes, followed closely by the flesh of unwise fingers.

"Hello to you too, Beast," said Bells. Just because the Beast despised her did not mean she had to stoop to its level. "We'll be moving you to a new room today -- I hope you don't mind company."

The Beast's growling slid upwards into a trill, almost curious.

"Yes, yes, you'll have neighbors, hopefully. Can't let you take up this whole room on your own forever." Bells swiped a keyfob pearl over the control switch and undid the latch keeping the cage inside the wall. "Beads, help me keep this from catching, will you?"

"Right, right," said Amber Beads, hurrying over. The cages could be pulled from the wall on sliding tracks, but had a habit of jamming inconveniently on their way out. Another thing a better budget might have fixed, but alas -- there was a reason the shelter ran half on volunteers. At least Beads meant their work earnestly, instead of as a rote gesture of self-betterment like most volunteers their age from the middle-caste houses, trying to impress their peers on a karmic reading. They typically quit after the first week or so, but Bells had certainly worked with worse.

The cage came out smoothly, lucky enough, gravity dampeners minimizing the work as they ferried it out into the hall. Little more than halfway down to the neighboring room, though, the Beast's grumbling became a sudden, sharp squeak, followed by a burst of chirps and trills entirely unlike anything Bells had ever heard from it.

She stuttered mid-step, Amber Beads stumbling against her, and they both stood there for a moment, stopped, staring -- at each other, and then at the kennel itself, perhaps both wondering what in the world had replaced the ill-tempered animal inside. The Beast stopped as well, and threw itself against the side of the cage with redoubled passion, trills rising and falling into wriggling birdsong warbles.

"Has it... ever done this before??" asked Amber Beads, though Bells' shocked expression could hardly have been obscured by her plain rebreather mask.

"No," she said. "No, it hasn't."

The Beast continued its... celebration? Diatribe? Bells struggled to accurately characterize it. Agitated, certainly, but difficult to ascertain about what.

Perhaps it smelled something of interest? Taste for blood aside, the Beast's preferences remained largely opaque to the shelter staff. The noises hardly sounded like excitement over food, though. Aggression seemed even less plausible; if anything, the little monster sounded downright delighted.

Amber Beads looked down at the Beast, shaking their head gently. "I wonder what it is that's got you so worked up?"

Seven Bells tilted her head, something itching at the back of her mind. The Beast's chirps felt... familiar, in a way she could not quite place, except--

Well.

That answered the broody question, perhaps.

"Are you making pup calls?" she asked it aloud, not particularly expecting a response. The Beast chirruped louder, then cut itself off with a gurgling growl and a hiss in Bells' direction.

Any pipe-rat could make those calls, of course, and even properly altered adults could often be coaxed into parenting unrelated pups. But given the implications of the Beast's biological history...

"Have we tried putting it in a room with pups?" asked Beads.

"Not yet," said Bells. "This is the first time we've brought it out of quarantine. It... doesn't seem like it tolerates other animals well, regardless." An unlucky lizard came to mind. Though perhaps, if its new attitude could be leveraged...

They continued into the other room of kennels, where the Beast's pup-calling chirps resumed, if more subdued. Sure enough, a litter of two pipe-rat pups had been placed at the opposite end of the cage wall, both alert and curious as they prodded their feelers at the bars. One chirped back, and the Beast grew louder again, practically mashing itself against the front of the kennel in wriggly parental glee.

"I suppose if the pups improve its attitude, we might benefit from rooming it near them," Bells noted. "Would you like that, little Beast?"

The Beast, it seemed, would like that very much. Perhaps this would not be a disaster, after all. They could place it near the pups -- allow it to socialize with them, even, given good enough behavior? Bells could picture it. For all the trouble it made, the Beast was no doubt as frightened and stressed as any other animal brought to the shelter; giving it a chance to interact with its own kind might do it a world of good.

Maybe, even if it never reached the behavioral standards for adoption, there would still be a chance that...

All at once, the Beast's happy trills stopped short, and Bells' reverie with it.

"Little Beast?" She glanced down at the cage, where the Beast had gone entirely still and tense. A low growl rumbled from its suddenly-stiff body, not unlike the sounds it had made in the clinic attempting to flee a soapy bath.

On the opposite wall, a common brown sifter rattled its spines, eyes boggling and darting around the room -- the Beast seemed to narrow in on it like a laser pointer coming into focus, and it threw itself against the cage bars with a fresh, enthusiastic violence.

"Er--"

The Beast let out a deep, full-throated yowl like a war cry, followed by the tell-tale choking sound of regurgitation. Bells' eyes widened.

"Oh, no you don't--" She yanked the cage backwards, still quick-gliding on low gravity, just as the Beast flung a spitwad of volatile goop through the bars. It splattered on an empty patch of wall mere centimeters from the sifter's cage, hissing and popping; despite the dampening agent, Bells could see the paint beneath beginning to bubble.

Thwarted, the Beast's noises rose to a furious screech. It slammed itself against the inside of the cage hard enough to jostle it, however slightly, and shoved its front paws between the bars as if searching for something else to throw. (The poor sifter, for its part, only rattled harder as it stumbled back in its kennel, looking like its bulging eyes might fully dislodge themselves from its skull.)

"Calm yourself, little Beast," urged Bells, though she already felt herself slipping. How would Cracked Stone have done this? Bells had gone through the orientation training, but marked animals were still so rare in the shelter -- she was stepping out onto water where ground should be. "It's alright. That sifter is in a cage, you don't have to be near it--"

More yowling and screeching, and another solid thump against the bars. The Beast was having absolutely none of that.

"Come on now," by all the Saints below, I'm trying to help you, "leave it alone. Do you hear me?" She pulled the cage along, away from the sifter's cage -- perhaps if they moved it so it no longer had a direct line of sight? Probably not. Pipe-rats had a regrettably clear sense of object permanence, and more importantly, of smell. "If you can't behave, you can't stay in this room, do you hear me?"

The Beast wailed and made another swipe at the sifter's cage. In the next cage over, a pygmy lizard hissed back and flashed its warning spots, eyes rolling nervously, while a nest of glow-mice on the opposite wall squeaked and fought for hiding space under their kennel blanket.

"Look, you want to be in the room with those pups, right? You cannot attack the other animals if you want to stay with them."

Another sharp yowl, and the Beast's teeth closed on air with a dangerous snap. Bells winced, involuntarily, touching a fresh scar on her thumb that the clinic's regenerator had only just managed to mend.

"No, no biting," said Bells. The Beast ignored her, now trying to get its formidable jaws around the bars of the cage itself. Bells steeled herself, clearing her throat, channeling the slight rush of an executive decision. "Quiet down, or we're moving back to the other room, alright?"

This did not change the Beast's mood or opinions on the situation in the slightest.

"I thought we were supposed to move it out of the quarantine so the new intakes could go there?" said Amber Beads.

Bells pulled the cage back further toward the door, watching the Beast's paws swipe wildly at nothing. "... I'm starting to think they can wait a little longer."

Really, they should have reinforced the Beast's containment with a proper hazard barrier and not just stronger bars, but the prospect of keeping an animal in a small, functionally watertight container of accumulating hazardous waste raised as many problems as it solved. They still hadn't worked out a disposal arrangement with the city, and Bells expected that would be a headache in its own right. For a creature that would be leaving one way or another by the week's end, keeping it quarantined would actually be more efficient.

Without further comment, Bells began steering the cage back toward the door, ignoring the Beast's objections. At some point, the tirade paused for another unpleasant choking sound, and Amber Beads yelped as a second spitwad struck the tiled floor of the hallway, which Bells then had to maneuver the cage around to avoid the repulsion systems running over it.

They would have to clean that up -- the one in the kennels, too, before it oozed onto anything more sensitive than the wall. Bells frowned under her mask, stepping carefully over the still smoking gob of sludge. "Doesn't tolerate other animals well", indeed.

(When Cracked Stone heard about this incident, they laughed for a solid half minute, opened a private broadcast line to the Director, and only had to say, "I told you so.")

 

---

 

Escape attempt number three looked and sounded a great deal like escape attempt number two, by Cracked Stone's observations. The dampeners slowed the Beast down, but it had pulled off the same trick with the hinges and the volatile goop it coughed up from its horrible guts (plus or minus some additional corrosion), and this time the wretched thing got all the way out into the hallway to cause trouble.

Faced with an unfamiliar room, it didn't hesitate, driven by either panic or sheer bloody-mindedness to pick a direction and bolt. Luckily for nearly everyone else involved, the Beast picked the direction that did not lead directly to an exit door, and came bursting into the Shelter Director's tiny excuse for an office instead.

This was, as one might expect, less lucky for the Director.

At least this time around, most of the staff had been briefed on the wet towel routine. Water alone didn't nullify the Beast's explosive runoff, but it dampened the worst of the blasts when the chemical agents didn't, and the fire blanket stored out in the hall emergency kit was enough to smother the rest (and offered some spare protection from the sharp-jawed ball of rage that was the Beast.)

"Those lackwits in the city monitoring department had better have answers soon," was most of what the Director had to say, righting a fallen floor lamp as Eight Spindles and Amber Beads helped sift through the mess on the closet-turned-office floor. The primary screen of the workstation sat on its side, still projecting a fizzling screen on the scorch-marked wall.

In the background, the Beast howled and pop-pop-pop-ped like a firework, and someone swore loudly.

The sooner they heard back, the better. If this affair successfully lasted the full seven days without grievous injury, Cracked Stone Amid Bent Trees would eat their own mask.

"You're more patient than I am," they said to the Director, watching Amber Beads -- bless their heart -- get down on all fours and root around under the desk to help pick up loose pearls. Cracked Stone's own old joints wouldn't abide the same, that was for sure. "If it were me, I'd have told them there was a mixup in the paperwork and sent that thing down the rainbow river by now. Though, I suppose it's still not too late..."

"Oh, believe me," said the Director. "I'm getting close."

 

---

 

"Funny enough, I think I will actually be sad to see that thing go," said Bells, apropos of just about nothing. Her meal break had aligned with Eight Spindles', putting them both in the breakroom to while away their designated fifteen minutes at the same small table.

"I'm not," said Spindles, unrepentant. "It's aggressive, horribly socialized, and a walking chemical hazard. Sending it to a sanctuary would be crueler for everyone involved."

"I know, I know." Bells sighed, poking at her wax-paper bowl of vegetal mush. (It was supposed to be reconstituted stalkfrond stew, but most city rations seemed better for warding off the fourth urge than providing sustenance.) "I suppose I just wish it could have had better options. It's a charismatic little thing, isn't it?"

Spindles laughed. "I suppose baleful little beast is a personality, of sorts. It takes intelligence to be that malicious."

Bells laughed as well, echoing him, but quickly trailed off into contemplation, still staring into her mush-stew. "It does, doesn't it?"

"If you're asking me, I don't like that, either," confided Spindles, opening a cabinet to pull out a package of paper cups. He selected two, stacked them on the counter, and put the rest away, placing his doubled cup under the breakroom's notoriously unreliable hot water dispenser. "It feels too smart for a pipe-rat -- I mean, it acts more like a sifter, if a sifter was incredibly antisocial and knew it could blow up people it didn't like. Even if it didn't literally secrete explosives, I don't think it would have ever been safe for adoption." He paused before flicking the dispenser switch. "Is there something bothering you? I know it's unfortunate how that case has gone, but..."

"It's nothing, really," said Bells. "I'm just being sentimental. We won't be seeing much of it after tomorrow, after all."

The Beast's seven days were up, and the procedure had been scheduled for the following morning. It would be quick and painless, as always, and Seven Bells would be called on to handle the testing of neural tissue post-mortem, assuming Nineteen Threads didn't have a sudden change of rest-day plans.

She almost wished they would. It wouldn't really help, but it was a nice thought, wasn't it? That if she hadn't seen it, sliced it out with a laser scalpel and held the results in her own two hands, it hadn't happened?

Realistically, this was the kindest thing that could be done. Like Spindles had said -- like Cracked Stone had said, seeing the obvious, a week ago -- a creature like the Beast was plainly unfit for rehoming. It was foul-tempered and reactive, clearly not fond of people, prone to biting, and oozed liquid explosives on everything it touched. No shelter or sanctuary could ever be reasonably expected to care for it, present establishment included. Even the Sixth Pillar sanctuary, infamously ever-welcoming, would hardly deserve that.

The hot water dispenser wheezed and gurgled, then spat a stream of probably-lukewarm water into Spindles' cup. Spindles and Bells both watched it in silence until it finished.

"... I do pity it, if that helps," said Spindles. "Whatever made it the way it is... honestly, at this point I don't know if my money would be on industrial prototype or some kind of black market commission for a combat organism. If it was industrial, at least, the behavior would be a flaw, but..."

Bells grimaced, turning over the spoon in her hands, still hovering over her full bowl of terrible stew. "... But to have been made that way deliberately..." she picked up.

"Hah, I know, now I'm being sentimental." Spindles plunked a stale-smelling teabag in his cup, sitting down at the table across from her. "I just think it's cruel to make it something that we're only going to have to put down, you know? If it was just purposed for the chemicals it produces, I could blame it more for being such a little monster."

"As do I," said Bells. "... It's unfair, but I suppose we have to live with it, don't we?"

"... We do, yeah. And it is."

Another quiet moment passed, and then the breakroom door chirped brightly, announcing someone unlocking it from the outside. The lock bar clanked somewhere inside the wall, and the low whir of the opening mechanism harmonized unpleasantly with the breakroom's various appliances.

Spindles took a long sip of their brewing herbal tea, while Bells glanced over to see who had arrived. She was fairly sure no other staff had a break at this time, but perhaps Six Amber Beads was calling in their volunteer shift early?

The door slid open, revealing the figure on the other side, and all sound fell to silence.

 

---

 

The Last Citizen of the West Twin, the Artificer, maker-of-clever-things, tasted nacre and steel at the back of her throat as she coughed up a pearl and spat it into her hands. Unreadable patterns glinted in the low light of her prison as she wiped away the deep red film of fire-spit, turning it over and examining it closely.

There seemed little remarkable about the pearl itself -- no particular color, only a plain off-white sheen like half the pearls that floated in the chamber of Five Pebbles (many more, since she had begun bringing it her trophies of war.) A thick golden ring hung from a slim strand of metal beads anchored neatly to its center, perhaps to make it easier for its owners to carry. The shape called to mind the pearl-skeins hung by the Scavengers at their lairs. The Artificer bared a fang at it and hissed lowly in disgust.

A worthless trinket to her, under any other circumstances. If her guess was right, though, it would be vital to her plan.

Experimentally, she reached through the wire lattice of the latest open-air shelter the Old Ones had trapped her in. On the outside, a small boxy device sat vigil on the wall, with a lone blinking light as red as her drone's watchful eye. The Artificer squeezed her arm through the wire-frame up to her shoulder, as far as she could reach, then felt around for a shallow socket at the front of the device and shoved the pearl at it.

It fit the socket perfectly. Something chirped, and the light turned green and unwavering as a soft clunk sounded from an unseen mechanism in the wall.

The next step was even simpler, so simple it was a wonder the Old Ones never thought to hide it from her. Reaching through the frame again, she gripped at the extraneous vertical bar of the shelter's door, pushed it together from both ends, and twisted. As expected, the once-unyielding steel gave way, and the door swung free with only a faint, half-hearted squeak of protest.

That was it. The door was open. Had she really been trapped by something so easy this whole time? (Should she feel insulted that, for the last several cycles, it had worked?)

It didn't matter. There was no time to waste. Any minute, another of her captors might come wandering in with more animals or chores or prodding. With no further hesitation, she leapt from the shelter's threshold and scampered across the floor to the exit, snatching up a loose length of steel from the corner as a fresh spear. Whatever the Old Ones kept poisoning her with watered her fire-spit down into something thin and smouldering -- she would need all the firepower she could get.

She pressed the pearl to an identical device on the outer door next, listening for that same soft clunk, and its light shifted too from flickering red to solid green. The door itself parted cleanly down the middle, sides receding into the walls, and with her key and weapon to hand, the Artificer was free.

... Again.

She would not fail this time. She had been unlucky before, picking the wrong paths and finding only dead ends -- this time, she would be swift, and know her path. She would not hold back against the Rain Gods' creators, either; not that she had before, but she would not make the same mistakes of underestimating them.

There were pups in this terrible place. Children -- orphans, true, rescued from the rains and predators -- but not to be returned to an adult who might become their Mother? Kept as pets, like a lantern-mouse or a cicada, locked away in some Old One's den for the rest of their lives, never to know the taste of fresh prey, the thrill of their first hunt?

They were gone, now, and she could not save them. Of course she could not. When could she ever?

The Artificer hissed again, curling her lip and tasting the air. There was no scent or sound of incoming Old Ones. The passage was clear. She darted out, turned sharply to the right (left, she now knew, would take her back to the horrible examination room, or to another wall of cages), hurried past the small treasury full of pearls, and dashed for the door.

With a key, no exit would hide from her this time.

 

---

 

Bells and Spindles stared at the Beast.

The Beast, standing on its hind legs and carrying what might have been the broken latch-bar of a kennel door, stared back.

Something about the way the Beast held itself made Bells' breath catch and her stomach lurch. Wrong, screamed her little reptilian hind-brain, more frightened than the Beast had any right to make her, wrong, wrong, wrong.

A bared fang. The Beast's stance shifted, appraising, readying. Dangling from its other paw, Bells caught the dull gleam of a pearl keyfob with a snapped-off chain.

Pipe-rats stood on their hind legs to keep watch for predators, Bells told herself, not sure what she was trying to deny, or perhaps too afraid to touch it directly. They had clever paws, opposable thumbs, and mimicked the body language of organisms they were socialized with. They carried objects, sometimes, and could be taught to retrieve them or use them in crude ways, collecting bugs from holes with sticks or levering open sealed waste receptacles.

The latch-bar sat in the Beast's paw like a warrior's spear, too smooth, too controlled, as it sized them up with its purposeful one-eyed glare. Eight Spindles' comment about combat organisms came to mind. Sifters could be taught to hold a blade, however clumsily; they could learn to hunt with them or swing at an enemy in a pit. Most grew too violent to rehome, and had to be euthanized before they could spread the skill to their feral cousins, of course -- too dangerous, even in their primitive state, to risk scavenger troops that grasped the concept of weapons.

Seven Bells had seen one such specimen in footage from a training module on exotic emergencies. The sifter had been plainly terrified, boggling and splaying its spines as veterinary staff drove it into a corner with improvised shields and tranquilized it from a safe distance. The scalpel it had thrown was still visible, lodged in the neighboring counter, streaked with blood.

The Beast's grip on the latch-bar did not look like that sifter's. It looked better.

For a long moment, neither party dared to move. The breakroom was silent but for the groan of the dying refrigeration unit and the endless hum of Five Pebbles beneath their feet.

Then the Beast erupted into motion, nearly too fast to see -- a whistle, a twang, a crack, and the latch-bar embedded itself in the wall, just above the rehydrolizer unit. Two centimeters of skew to the left, and it would have clipped the side of Bells' head, or worse. She had long enough to think this -- or worse -- before the Beast dashed away, Spindles swore, and suddenly worse took the form of a sharp crackle and a blinding light, and then an endless dark field of stars.

When Seven Bells next opened her eyes, it was to a raging headache and a wide-eyed, frantic Spindles. The former beat at her head like a festival drum, while the latter crouched over her, babbling something too quick and distant to understand. The air reeked of smoke and enzymes, and as Bells drew in another stale breath she became aware of the hard tile beneath her, something warm pooling around her mask. She wheezed, reaching a hand toward her ringing ears.

"Did... Spindles, did it just...?"

"It threw the bar --" said Spindles, hands still waving dizzyingly-- "like a spear, yes, I know -- it must have had some of the volatiles on it, they triggered after the impact and you got knocked aside -- it's alright, though. I've got the aid kit, Stone's coming in a moment and we're going to get you to medical--"

"Where...?" Bells croaked out, fighting down a sudden wave of nausea. "Where did it go?"

Spindles stopped short and glanced over his shoulder, toward the door. An alarm wailed; further away, something else exploded. "I think that's... a little above our pay grade right now."

 

---

 

In the end, they never did find the Beast. It seemed to have escaped city limits entirely; when no new reports arose of an unusually large and vicious exploding pipe-rat, it only took three weeks for their liaison with the city to throw up her hands in defeat and tell them that wherever the Beast has gotten to now, it was well past being their problem.

Seven Bells knew she shouldn't feel too bad for the little menace, after everything it had done, but she couldn't help imagining it hiding somewhere outside the city, among the feral creatures that sheltered in the decaying, depopulated surface settlements. Perhaps it found a way back to its mysterious owner -- or perhaps its owner was Five Pebbles itself, all along. Or perhaps it simply went on living its horrible little life in the dwindling wilderness, exploding at feral lizards and eating pupa-flies to its heart's content.

Realistically, of course, it was dead -- probably killed by the frequent surface floods, or a mechanical accident somewhere in the innards of the superstructure. But she still dreamed.

Somewhere out there was a Beast like no other of its kind; too clever and too capable of hatred. Somewhere out there lurked a creature who could wield a length of latch-bar as a spear, and slather that spear in its own hazardous slime like a cave-dweller learning to harness fire.

When Seven Bells had to replace her citizen identification drone four years later (after an unfortunate incident with a poorly-timed automated door), she couldn't help finding the new model's shape familiar, though she could no longer remember why.

Inspired by the inscription on the Beast's drone years ago, she nicknamed it: Sofanthiel.

 

---

 

"And just where have you been hiding?" demanded Five Pebbles, dimming his chamber to a low red light he most certainly did not use for dramatic effect. His citizen stared back at him with its singular filmy eye, utterly unimpressed. "I do not say this because I particularly wished to know, mind you. I only cannot understand how you vanished so completely despite being followed by a full-time personal surveillance device."

His citizen, as usual, did not provide any answers. It continued to stare at him, until he decided he had better things to do with his time and looked away.

"You could have at least found some way to communicate to me if you planned on disappearing for an extended period of time, so I would know your absence was not a sign of my own senses beginning to fail me."

And here he'd been worrying it was the rot already catching up to him. How lucky of him, that he could say his nervous systems were still largely intact after all.

"You regret nothing, I presume."

His citizen only chirped at him, then bent double and began to cough. Five Pebbles felt his puppet tense and retract away slightly as-- yes, there it was. The little ruffian had regurgitated up another pearl. Perhaps this one would have something of historical interest on it, at least, to make up for the foul slime smeared all over it.

"... are you trying to bribe me into forgiving you?"

As if replying, his citizen wiped the pearl off on its own still-filthy hands, dislodging a wet clump of something that only landed on Five Pebbles' floor instead. It tossed the pearl up into the air, where he caught it in a whorl of microgravity and drew it close to his puppet's built-in reader.

Up close, Five Pebbles noted the gold-tinted chain still attached to the pearl, with a broken loop at the end likely made to hook onto a key-ring or garment. Perhaps decorative -- the pearl itself had the dull white luster of a cheap, disposable model. He scanned the pearl for a few nanoseconds, processing the minuscule amount of data it contained.

"This pearl contains a passcode and cryptographic signature, and little else. Most likely a doorkey of some kind. I don't suppose you would grasp the concept."

He paused, noting the signature's certification data. Property of... Ninth Pillar Animal Shelter? He supposed his citizen must have wandered into some building he was not currently permitted to view the interior of. That might account for its disappearance, at least partly.

"Did you find this while you were out earlier?" The little ruffian nodded and shrugged -- he could not recall when it had acquired the gesture, though it must have been from him, at some point. Uncanny little imitators, these creatures. Perhaps Moon would have found it charming, but Pebbles could only perceive it as unnatural. "Hm. Its contents are not of much value to me, so you may keep it, but I will not complain if you leave it here instead."

His citizen nodded, again, and trilled softly. Then it leapt forward with a sharp crackle, latching onto his puppet arm (he had told it countless times to refrain from climbing that, and without fail, it still ignored him--) and shimmied up to his puppet. When it reached him, it did not stop, instead using his limbs as footholds as it scrambled up onto his head, then crackled again and flung itself up to the access passage on the ceiling, catching on the lip of the exit and pulling itself up and out of sight.

Impatient, ridiculous thing. He would have reactivated the antigravity in a moment anyway.

"Of course. Come back anytime," he said to the empty room. The sarcasm was equally lost on it. As he hung in place, feeling the little ruffian propel itself along his internal corridors, his attention returned to the newest pearl in his chamber collection.

The ruffian's explosive spittle has mostly rubbed off of it, though he could feel the glob still sitting on the floor, unpleasantly warm and moist on his tiles. Underneath it, though was a stain of...

"... !?"

His city should have been long emptied by now of scavengers to bleed on their precious pearls -- more alarming, his chemical sensors read the substance as something impossible: the blood of one of his creators' kind. As if one were still alive to leave bloodstains not decayed to abiotic rust! Perhaps his nervous systems were growing faulty, after all.

He rotated the pearl in the air, staring at the dark brown specks caught in the chain-links. Perhaps it was some artifact of his citizen's digestive processes, the composition of which merely resembled his creators' blood? Or perhaps there was some worse, more disgusting reason his citizen's location had been beyond his reach of observation.

... On second thought, perhaps he did not want to know.