“Fair enough, Lin. I take your point. I should’ve scouted it out first, gone through someone who knows the area or whatever . . .”

Yes, and you’ve blown that now. You can’t, it’s too late . . .

“Yes, quite, thanks ever so for pointing that out . . .” He scowled. “Godspit fuck damn! I ballsed it up, didn’t I?”

Lin said nothing.

They did not speak much as they returned through Spatters. They were watched from bottle-glass windows and open doors as they came back the way they’d come.

As they retraced their paths over the foul pit of nightsoil and rot, Lin glanced back at the tumbledown towers. She saw the flat roof where they had stood.

Isaac and she were being followed by a small swirling mass of garuda youth, sullenly trailing them in the sky. Isaac turned and his face lightened briefly, but the garuda did not come close enough to talk. They gesticulated rudely from on high.

Lin and Isaac walked back up Vaudois Hill towards the city.

“Lin,” Isaac said after minutes of silence. His voice was melancholy. “Back there you said if you’d been garuda you’d have listened to him, right? Well, you’re not garuda, but you are khepri . . . When you were ready to leave Kinken, there must’ve been plenty of people telling you to stick to your own, that humans couldn’t be trusted, and whatnot . . . And the thing is, Lin, you didn’t listen to them, did you?”

Lin thought quietly for a long time, but she did not answer.

Chapter 14

CHAPTER FOURTEEN

“Come on old thing, old plum, old bugger. Eat something, for Jabber’s sake . . .”

The caterpillar lay listlessly on its side. Its flaccid skin rippled occasionally, and it waved its head, looking for food. Isaac clucked over it, murmured at it, prodded it with a stick. It wiggled uncomfortably, then subsided.

Isaac straightened up and tossed the little stick to one side.

“I despair of you, then,” he announced to the air. “You can’t say I haven’t tried.”

He walked away from the little box with its mouldering piles of foodstuffs.

Cages were still piled high on the warehouse’s raised walkway; the discordant symphony of squawks and hisses and avian screams still sounded; but the store of creatures was much depleted. Many of the pens and hutches lay open and empty. Less than half of the original store remained.

Isaac had lost some of his experimental subjects to disease; some to fights, both in- and inter-species; and some to his own research. A few stiff little bodies were nailed in various poses to boards around the walkway. A vast number of illustrations were plastered to his walls. His initial sketches of wings and flight had multiplied by a massive factor.