And over there, the nearest skull with any skin left to remark … its eyes were sunken and a gritty gold crust spilled from its nostrils and ears. Big, gruesome sores ate the flesh around its mouth. Rector had once had a sore like that. He’d occasionally picked a similar grit out of his own ears, and he’d sneezed it out of his nose once or twice.

The sap craving twitched between his ears and in his lungs, just like old times, but just for an instant before it was quashed by a wave of nausea. For that same instant, he thought of the Station, and about the men who considered him one of their own in some vague, proprietary way.

Then the nausea washed that away, too. Was this all they expected of him?

Houjin, always bravest—the simple result of having lived there the longest, or so Rector guessed—sidled forward and jabbed at the pile with his weapon. Just like the lone, stray hand, the corpse fragments settled and flattened, but did not squirm or show any hint of continued animation. “Look at the breaks,” he said, now using the rod to point. “They’re torn. All of them. Not cut, not hacked.”

“They were ripped apart,” Zeke said, with no small measure of awe.

“But what could do something like that?” Huey asked. “And some of these men … they weren’t gone yet when the thing took them. Look, that one still had a mask on. I think he’s one of Yaozu’s men. And there’s a hand over there that hardly looks rotty at all. Some of these fellows are fresh.”

Rector gulped. “Four of the Station men got tore up. Maybe more. What could tear forty rotters and a bunch of men to bits?”

Angeline turned pointedly to Rector and said, “I can’t say for sure, but I have an idea.”

“Ma’am?” Rector asked, guiltily confident that he was being accused of something.

“What you saw, when you first came into the city—you said it was a monster?”

“It was a monster. It chased me. It stalked me,” he said, and it sounded like an echo. He remembered saying it once before, and he shivered, despite his best efforts.

“It was big, and it had long arms,” she reminded him.

“That’s right.” He nodded violently.

Houjin backed him up. “I saw it, too. Whatever was after him, he’s right. It was really big.”

“Let me ask you this,” Angeline proposed to the pair of them. “Do you think it might’ve been covered in hair?”

“Hair?” Rector frowned and cocked his head. “I don’t know … I guess it might’ve been?”