And so on. After about ten minutes of questioning, the little man told Manny to stand up and follow him into an examination room. His tone was cordial, even warm. But Manny tasted doom behind it. He smelled death in this place, and his soul cried out against heading further into its bowels. But there was nothing to do but follow. Alexander’s men left after dropping him off, but there were plenty of guards in the front room. Two of them followed Manny and the young man back through the double doors and into the heart of the facility.

They walked through what had once been an open-floor office. There were a few overturned desks and chairs but mostly the place was barren and half-cannibalized for scrap. It was badly lit and derelict.

“What are we doing here?” Manny asked. Isaac put a hand on his shoulder and smiled.

“We’re doing God’s work,” he said. “The same as everywhere in this blessed Kingdom.”

“I know that,” Manny said in a slow, careful tone, “but I don’t understand why I was pulled out of training. Or why I was removed from my unit. What is this place?”

Isaac didn’t answer. Instead he walked Manny to a door in the back of the empty office and opened it to reveal a small, well-lit white room with a bench, a weight scale, and a computer terminal built into the wall above a rolling cabinet. Isaac weighed him, marked down his height and then pulled a strange measuring device out of the cabinet. It looked like a cross between a protractor and a pin vice.

“This is a craniometer,” Isaac explained once he saw the confusion on Manny’s face. “It’s for measuring the size of your skull.”

Isaac set right to work. He fit the strange device around Manny’s head and tightened it until the vice grip bit into Manny’s scalp. Isaac jotted down some more numbers on his note pad and removed the craniometer. He looked pleased. That alone was enough to turn Manny’s stomach.

“Can you please tell me what this is all about?”

Isaac’s eyes darted up from his paper for just a moment. He gave Manny an insincere, distracted smile.

“Everything will be explained soon enough, young man. Right now it should be enough to know you’re doing the Lord’s work.”

Manny was very, very tired of that response.

Isaac finished his notes and led Manny out a back door in the room and into what Manny had to assume was the final step in their journey. The scent of blood in the air was too heavy for anything else to be the case. Manny felt the hair stand up on the back of his neck. His shoulders went tense, and a moment later he felt the strong hands of his guards on either bicep.