Ted Kosmatka - The Games

Silas opened the outer door of the nursery with his left hand, being careful not to spill the brimming bowl in his right. When he heard the latch click behind him, he opened the inner door and stepped into the nursery chamber. The scent of disinfectant and wet cardboard assailed his nostrils.

The little creature squealed with delight. Silas quickly found it clamoring at his feet for its dinner. Long, thin arms fluttered about his torso, reaching up at the bowl.

“Hold your horses,” he said, trying not to stumble over it as he crossed the room. He placed the bowl on the floor in the center of the chamber and watched with satisfaction as the creature dug in ferociously. He made a mental note to increase the feeding again. The thing ate like an elephant.

He smiled, marveling at its vigor. Thin, stumpy wings positioned high on its wide back bobbed rhythmically with the pleasure of eating. Its large gray eyes maintained a position just above the bowl’s rim, alternately looking down at the food, then up at Silas. Silas liked that. It would be easier to train the gladiator if it associated humans with the arrival of food. Tay Sawyer, the resident animal trainer, had made a point of stressing that.

When the creature finished the bowl, it sat back and licked its chops, snaking a thick tongue around the outside of its short black muzzle. Gray eyes looked into Silas’s brown.

As they stared at each other, Silas wondered what might be going on in its head. What kind of mind worked behind those eyes?

Silas stood and crossed the room. When he stooped to pick up the bowl, the creature made a noise. A strange sound Silas hadn’t heard before. He hesitated. This was new behavior. The creature’s ears flattened to its skull, and its back arched. Not catlike. Nothing like that. Instead, it reared up like some angry black baboon—but like something else, too. Something not at all like a baboon. Something Silas couldn’t place.

The thing moved forward, guarding the bowl.

“Back off,” Silas snapped. “Back!”

He clapped his hands, and the creature slunk backward a few feet.

It was still young, he reminded himself. Despite its size. Barely out of infancy. At this age, animals as predatory as genus Panthera were still docile cubs that could be petted and played with.

“Come on, back up!”

But the creature didn’t move, only hunched down lower to the floor. Silas whispered, “What a strange thing you are.”

He slapped his foot on the ground to drive the creature away from the food dish, but it stood its ground, staring up at him.

“I need the bowl,” Silas said, by way of exasperated negotiation.

The creature hissed in response—a sound something between a cat’s hiss and a hyena’s cackle.

“Enough is enough.” Silas bent to pick up the bowl, reaching past the creature.

He wasn’t, at first, sure what happened.

Pain.

Like being kicked in the hand. A jolt.

And the creature spun away, a dark streak.

Silas flinched, blood spattering the floor. First in fat drops like rain, then in a gush.

Silas clutched his other hand to the wound, squeezing down on the pain, an instinctual response.

“What did you do?” Disbelief pouring out of him like all the blood.

He backed up, blood splattering the tile while he reached for the door. He hit the door-open button as the creature eyed him from a crouch, gray eyes slitted. Its muzzle slid away from its teeth as its face contorted in rage.

Silas took a step back through the opening door, and the creature bolted, crossing the room in springing strides. Silas jerked himself backward, slipping on his own blood, falling through the open doorway. He hit the ground on his shoulder and kicked at the door, trying to shut it. The creature launched itself forward and slammed into the bloody glass a moment after the door clicked shut.

There was a meaty thump, and the gladiator dropped to the ground.

Silas rolled away from the door. Away from the staring, slitted eyes on the other side of the glass.

He pulled himself to his feet, grabbing at the edge of the lab bench to steady himself. Only then did Silas look at the wound.

Only then did he see the missing finger.

On his right hand, his pinkie finger terminated just above the second knuckle.

HOSPITALS. SILAS had always hated them.

The surgery took a little more than an hour.

“We need to shorten the bone,” the doctor had said.

To Silas, this seemed counterintuitive, but a series of nurses assured him it was necessary so that skin could be pulled over the wound.

“It’s too bad you couldn’t find the finger,” one of them said.

“Oh, I know where it is.”

A finger. Not a pound of flesh, exactly. But it was something. It felt like payment.

They pumped him full of IV antibiotics. Then tetanus shots. Rabies shots were suggested when it was learned an animal bite was involved.

Silas explained to the new doctor at shift change that the animal in question wasn’t going to be available for brain tissue dissection. “Honestly, it’s worth more than I am. They might want to dissect my brain to make sure I didn’t give it something.”

The next morning, the calls started at nine A.M. The visits soon after that. Tay, the trainer, showed up, accompanied by several members of the team. After the condolences, “It’s time to shift gears on this,” he said.

Silas agreed.

“Past time,” Tay said. “We’ve officially transited the natal phase of the program. The training phase begins tomorrow.”

“I’m really sorry about this,” Tay said. “If I had any idea that it might be so aggressive so young …”

Silas shrugged as best he could while sitting in the hospital bed. “You did say it was a good thing that the gladiator associated humans with the arrival of food.”

Tay cringed.

Silas smiled. “Things happen.”

“You say that now. We’ll see if you’re casual when the drugs wear off.”

When Tay left, Silas made several calls to Benjamin, who was already on his way and had to reroute back to the lab. He showed up at the hospital a few hours later, arms laden.

Benjamin laid the requested papers on Silas’s hospital bed and collapsed into a nearby chair.

“That bad?” Silas asked, reading Ben’s expression.

“A bust,” Benjamin said.

“Complete?”

“Not a single match.”

“Damn.” Silas leafed quickly through the pile of papers that represented nearly two weeks’ work for his head cytologist. The DNA fingerprinting hadn’t turned up a single template match to any of the known existing orders of animals.

“Are you okay?” Ben asked. “You in a lot of pain?”

“Let’s not worry about me at the moment. Let’s worry about the project.”

“Well, I’m out of ideas,” Benjamin said.

Silas leaned back in his bed. He was out of ideas, too. He laced his remaining fingers behind his head and casually considered his friend. His hand throbbed.

Ben was one of those rare individuals, usually of Scandinavian extraction, afflicted with skin so profoundly devoid of melanin that the underlying blood vessels provided a kind of emotional broadcast system. When he was embarrassed, he flushed red to the ears. When angry, deep red ovals would form in the hollows of his cheeks. If he was merely overheated, a rosy glow would reach across his face to his forehead. It was a communication system both completely alien and completely fascinating to Silas.

As he looked at the younger man’s mottled pink face, Silas assessed that there was now a new emotion to be cataloged: frustration. “I think we’ll have to take a different angle on this. We’ve been trying to learn about Felix from the inside out. Now let’s try the opposite.”