The Battle Begins (6 page)

10

“T
HERE'S A GOOD DOG,” A MAN'S VOICE SAID AS HE BENT
Castor's ears back and forced a collar over his head. Never in all of his days did Castor imagine he'd be seen in a collar, but he was still too weak to fight it.

In fact, he didn't dare move much. With unfamiliar body parts protruding in weird places, it was all Castor could do to stand steady on the table.

The man leaned over him and smiled. As he listened to Castor's heartbeat and checked his ears and shined
a flashlight in his eyes, Castor studied him. It was the first human Castor had seen without a mask. Up close, the man's skin looked as pink and soft as a new puppy's; it made him seem young, but from the sparse hairs of tawny fur stubbling the bottom of his face along his chin and cheeks, Castor decided he must be a full-grown human. He wore glass circles on either side of his nose, and when he bent forward, Castor saw his own scared eyes reflected in them.

As the man gathered up Castor's body into his arms, the bandages on his back pulled and stretched, feathers crunched, and Castor whimpered. The man set him down, and Castor heard the snap of a metal clip connecting with his collar. “It's okay, boy,” the man soothed.

It wasn't okay, though, and the man's gentle tone felt almost cruel after what Castor had been through. Castor bayed louder in distress.

It wasn't just the way his head swam with the medicine. It wasn't just that his footpads were especially tender or that his shoulders ached or that his usually strong stomach was clenched against waves of nausea. It wasn't even the collar strangling his throat. It was something far more basic: Castor didn't feel like himself anymore.

How could he? Just look what they'd done to him.

Look at these wings!

“All right, let's go,” the man commanded, giving the leash a short tug.

With the first step Castor took, his legs slipped and sprawled in four directions and his snout slammed hard against the floor. He didn't know how to walk with these new long talons sprouting out of his toes or how to balance the heaviness of the feathered appendages that now weighed down his back.

Sighing, the man helped Castor back up and opened the door, pulling Castor behind him.

In the hallway, instead of the wide, gray sky Castor was used to seeing above him, a low ceiling pressed down, lit by long tubes of light, and cold air made the skin on his tummy pimple with bumps. He was being led somewhere new. Castor considered making a break for it. He could bite the man, or bolt through his legs. He could just run away, the metal leash clattering behind him!

But each way he looked, there were white walls, boxing everything in, and locked doors that led to who knew where. Then there was the humiliating cone around his head, and the collar around his neck that said he belonged to someone. Even if he knew how to escape, even if he could actually make this foreign body of his run all the way back to his territory and his pack, Castor
wasn't sure they would accept him anymore.

He couldn't go home, not until he figured out how to return to how he was. So instead, he followed the man's jingling keys and the squeak of his rubber shoes and started the long, awkward march to wherever it was he was supposed to live now.

The place was a fortress. The man led him through a series of heavy, glass doors—Castor lost count of how many—and each time, Castor felt a small twitch of a charge inside his neck collar, and from somewhere he couldn't see, a woman said, “Processing.” Castor was certain he'd never find his way out again. The only thing to do was go forward.

Finally, they passed through the last door into a large, square room. There were clear doors all around the space, and each one led to a smaller room you could see inside. The ceiling was much higher than in the hallways—as tall as some of the buildings in Lion's Head—and Castor could see each floor leading up to it had the same layout, with the glass doors running along the outside walls. Behind each one of those glass doors, on every floor, was a captured animal.

Creatures with spots, and scales, and stingers peered down from the upper levels as the man led Castor across the length of the ground floor. Their eyes were
haunted, their postures cowed, but they looked whole and unchanged—not a mash-up of parts, like Castor. They weren't making any sounds, but he could smell their fear. It hung in the air and stuck in his nose.

What was this place?

“Come on, boy.”

Castor hadn't realized he'd stopped until the man tugged harder on the metal chain, bunching the skin at his throat. His tail disappeared between his legs, but he made himself move forward. They walked along one wall, and Castor peered into the rooms as they passed, but they were all empty. He was the only animal on this floor.

Finally, the man stopped in front of an empty cell at the end. When the glass door slid open, Castor didn't even have it in him to put up a fight. He stepped inside.

The man followed, sliding the glass door shut behind him. Then he knelt down next to Castor and unclipped the leash from his throat. He wound it up and clipped it to his belt, and then he carefully removed Castor's plastic cone. “You should be okay without this now,” he said. “Just don't lick, okay, boy?”

Castor stared at the floor, shaking all over as he waited for the human to leave. The man stayed in his crouched position, though, hesitating.

“Maybe this doesn't need to be quite so tight,” he
said, testing the collar. He chewed the skin of his lips.

No, it doesn't!
Castor whined, pleading with his eyes.

The man looked back at him with something like pity and started to reach for the buckle on the collar.

“What's going on in there?” another voice snapped. Through the glass, Castor saw a man rushing down the hall toward them.

“N-n-nothing,” the man next to Castor stammered as he scrambled to his feet.

“Peter! You're not supposed to be in the cells!” The other man stopped outside Castor's little room and rapped on the glass urgently. Castor noticed he had one of those paper masks dangling from his neck.

And a familiar blue-and-yellow bird bobbing on his shoulder.

Castor wasn't one to hold a grudge, but when Perry fixed him with his white, unblinking traitor's stare and said, “Help! Help!” in a perfect imitation of a dog's howl, Castor couldn't help but grumble a little.

“It's fine,” the man called Peter insisted. He grabbed the leash and opened the door, quickly stepping through. “It's not fine!” the man with the blue mask scolded as he yanked the door closed behind Peter. He was older, Castor saw—he had the gray-and-white streaks around his temples that you saw in dogs that were past their
prime. “Listen to him—he's growling!”

Both men peered through the glass at Castor, whose hackles were still up. He couldn't help it—he was anxious and scared, and the yelling wasn't helping.

“He's just freaked out about that stupid, squawking parrot,” Peter muttered.

“Freak out!” Perry crowed for emphasis. “Freak!” he repeated, looking right at Castor.

Castor barked at the bird, and the older man glared at Peter pointedly. “You think I need a lawsuit on my hands? These creatures are designed to fight. Have you forgotten about the damage the Invincible did in the last match?”

The Invincible . . .
Castor thought, his head still groggy. Where had he heard that name before?

“I know, Bruce.” Peter sighed. His forehead was getting shiny. “The dog was just scared, and I—”

“He's not a dog!” the older man's shrill voice rose. “Just like you're not a handler. You're a medic, and I told your mother I didn't think you were even ready for that much responsibility. I stuck my neck out for you, Peter.” He pointed a finger in warning. “Now get the cell locked up before that monster kills us both.”

Monster?
Castor looked at them. Was that what he was now?

Peter was fumbling for the keys in his pocket. His eyes met Castor's through the glass, and Castor stared back defiantly, daring him to do what was right.

But despite his apologetic look, the man still slid the key into the lock. He was no different from the rest of the humans, after all.

Long after he'd stopped hearing the jingle of keys and the squeak of sneakers, the click of the dead bolt echoed inside Castor's eardrums, along with Perry's mocking cry: “Freak! Freak! Freak!”

11

C
ASTOR HAD NO IDEA HOW LONG HE'D BEEN IN THE CELL.
Time was funny here; instead of the sun's slow progress, there were artificial lights that crackled brightly no matter the time of day.

He'd passed out for a while when he was still medicated, but once the sedative wore off, he woke full of nervous energy. Castor wasn't used to being cooped up. He paced the room, not that there was any point—the rough concrete floor snagged his talons with every
step, and there was absolutely nowhere to go. The cell was a small cube of space, with the thick glass door he'd entered through and three gray walls pressing in on him. The back wall looked slightly different from the others, with four square doors set into it.

Castor was definitely curious about those doors, since they seemed like his best chance of getting out of here. But none of them budged when he pushed his weight against them, so after a few hours spent futilely scratching at their edges, he lost interest.

The only other features in his new home were a straw-covered grate that he absolutely refused to go to the bathroom on, and a sorry-looking blue cushion. No food that he could smell. And no water.

Castor turned his attention to the space outside his cell, but what he saw through the glass wasn't much more exciting. All around him were empty rooms and eerie silence. He could no longer see the upper floors, but he remembered the animals he'd seen on his way in.

“Hey!” he called out to them. “Can anybody hear me?”

Castor waited, but the only reply was the echo of his own bark. The smell was still there, though—the stench of fear hung thick in the air.

Defeated, Castor plopped back down on the bed and
groaned—it was so limp that he could feel his bones pressing into the concrete. He tried to fall back asleep, but it was tough without the hum of the city or the warmth of his pack. Between the pain and the fear and the artificial light, there was no way he was going to get any rest.

Castor tried to roll over to get more comfortable, but the protrusion of his new wings made lying on his back even more awkward. But looking up for that brief moment, he saw it.

Near the ceiling of his cell, there was a wooden perch that jutted out of the wall. And on that perch, at least fifteen feet off the ground, sat a water dish.

What was it doing up there?

Castor scrambled to his feet, his eyes locked on the dish. He licked his parched lips and walked in a few circles, puzzling out how he could reach it. He stood on his hind legs and leaned against the wall. He even tried to jump a few times. Then, he had a revelation:
You're a mutant now, Castor! You can fly!

But of course he couldn't fly. Simply having feathers didn't make you a bird, and after a few painful, frantic flaps of his wings, it was pretty clear they were more for decoration. It was just another one of the humans' cruel tricks. He'd never be able to reach that water. Ignoring
the useless cushion this time, Castor sprawled out on the cold floor and heaved a great sigh.

“Gibbing up tho thoon?” a saliva-soaked voice asked.

Castor looked up. His cell was in a corner, and from this angle, he could see the first three rooms along the perpendicular wall, but he hadn't seen anyone in them. And he hadn't realized anyone could see him.

He stood up and peered through the glass into the cell closest to his, just around the corner. The room looked identical to his own, but from this angle, the back corner of it was concealed in darkness.

“Hello?” he barked. “Who's there?”

“Me!”
Two glowing, yellow eyes snapped open in the darkness, and when the beast stepped forward into the light, Castor instinctually stepped back, despite the glass that separated them.

She was monstrous. Even standing on all fours, his neighbor was almost as tall as the humans, with a hulking body that seemed to fill up her whole cell.

“Looks like water juth ithn't your thing, huh, Cathtor?” Her eyes turned to slits as she smiled, and two thick, white tusks of bone curved down over her lips.

Castor flattened his ears, suspicious. “How do you know my name?”

“You don't recognithe me?” she asked. She paraded
back and forth behind the glass, amused. He didn't recognize that furry, brown face, not at all, but Castor's eyes lit on the long, switching tail. It was orange. And though her speech was made clumsy by those new tusks, Castor realized he recognized the velvety voice, too—a threatening purr. Castor's eyes widened. “You're . . .”

“Enza.”

The alpha female from that first day. The large, striped cat. Castor could hardly believe it.

“You look so . . . different,” Castor marveled.

She stalked the cell like a tiger would, and those golden eyes with their diamond-shaped pupils were definitely feline. But her stripes were gone, and her fur was now a coarse medium brown that barely verged on orange near her hindquarters.

“What'th that thuppothed to mean?” Enza's bear face hissed.

“Nothing,” Castor said quickly. “I just meant your fangs.”

Enza rolled her shoulders back and pressed her felted pink tongue against her incisors. “Saber teeth,” she corrected, and didn't even stumble on the
s
. Castor wondered how many times she'd practiced saying it to herself. “Aren't they perfect? One chomp and I could thkewer a mongrel like you. The only thing more pitiful
than a dog is a bird. Especially a bird who can't fly.”

Castor looked down at the concrete floor. She was right. She was a ridiculous cat with a lisp, but she was still better than he was. Castor was an omega now, the lowest of the low. He couldn't even manage to get food or water for himself, and he would probably be stuck in this cell for the rest of his life.

Hearing a faint clanging, he and Enza both fell silent. Castor recognized the jingling keys and the squeak of sneakers, and he peered eagerly through the glass door. The man was coming back. Castor remembered his guilty expression. Maybe he had decided to set him free!

But the footfalls were the wrong rhythm, and the smell was strange and clean, and the human who arrived in front of them was a short woman with stringy hair and a hard little line for a mouth.

“Slop!” she announced brightly.

Castor cocked his head at her, and across the hall, Enza glowered. Neither had the slightest idea what “slop” meant.

Then, abruptly, Castor heard a loud, grinding sound. He froze, the hackles on his back rising defensively. It sounded like a Crusher Slusher was right in his room!

He shut his eyes tight, convinced he was about to become squashed doggy. But then he heard snorting.

“You thoulda theen your fayth!” Enza scoffed at him. “It's justh a door, you big baby.”

When he turned, Castor saw she was right. One of the square doors in the back of his room, the second from the left, was wide-open.

At first, Castor was ecstatic. The one thing in the world he'd wanted was a way out of his prison, and now here was an easy escape, just waiting for him!

But when the grinding sound started up again and a door in Enza's own cell opened, Castor saw the shadow pass across her face—the unease beneath her teasing—and he saw his hope for what it was: naïve. The door was open because the humans wanted it open, and wherever it led was where the humans wanted them to go—nowhere good.

“Slop!” the guard repeated, huffing with impatience, and Castor decided that maybe he wasn't quite so curious about what that word meant anymore. Maybe, he decided, this cold, barren cell suited him just fine.

As usual, though, he didn't get to decide.

The guard took a small gold object out of her pocket. She put it to her lips, puffed out her cheeks, and blew.

“Make it stop!” he howled, pawing at his ears. Though it only lasted a second, the sound was so sharp, so piercing that it sounded like the end of the world.

After the musical torture, he looked over at Enza for sympathy, only to find that her cell was empty. The giant tiger-bear was gone.

“Slop!” the guard said again.

“No,” Castor whimpered. She held up the whistle and started to bring it to her lips once more. “I'm going!” he barked, and bounded across his cell in two quick steps.

He stood at the dark void of the open door and, trembling, Castor tucked his new, tender wings close and stepped across the threshold.