The entryway distended as the muscular sphincter opened. Ay parted a final curtain of skin with his hand, slithering inside with his legless armoured body.

  Sharp, cool evening air mixed with the warm and humid miasma within. Looking around, Ay’s massive beaked head slowly turned. Then, the hunter crossed the chamber, fingering the rags he wore about his chest, then the belts and pouches he kept close. Finally, he stopped at a large whittled-bone table.

  “What have you brought for me?” Croaked a voice from above.

  Ay didn’t look up to see where the voice had come from. Instead, the hunter’s beaks parted with a crack, splitting to expose a smaller fleshy head within, two fat eyes blinking away rivulets of oily saliva. His top jaw folded over to his back. With no nose or mouth to speak of, what now passed as Ay’s head rolled, stretching his neck as it split open to take a deep breath.

  Taking his time, the scavenger removed a single severed claw from a pocket in his rags. He thumbed its tip, running skin over its print, before setting it down. Next, he held up a fistful of tumour — raw biomass — before throwing that onto the table as well.

  “The rest they stole is outside?”

  Ay nodded from the shoulders as the ten-limbed grafter clambered down the wall, pincered legs bringing it to the table where he overlooked the recovered treasure.

  “Excellent. No one takes from me, scabber,” the grafter boasted before snickering. Then, appraising the meat closely, feathery antennae waving, he muttered.

  “No rot. Still fresh enough.”

  The hunter stood straighter, serpentine body coiling as he balanced upright on the shelled floor. He was easily the larger of the two, the most dangerous, yet he held no command here. So he patiently waited. In response, the grafter stood a little taller, straightening its many knees as he sensed Ay looming.

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  “Hmm? Oh.” The grafter looked up from his prize. “Yes. Of course.”

  A dozen alien sensory organs opened and waved from the stump between its arms.

  “You’re sure about your payment?” The grafter asked. “A voice?”

  The hunter nodded with no hesitation.

  “It’ll be dangerous, hmm? You’ve had so many, many augmentations already. Don’t want you turning, hmm? Going feral.”

  Ay whistled a sigh before removing a leathery flask from under his rags. He put it down on the table with a heavy thump. Even prizes had a price here.

  “Gel? Yes. Well, this will help, won’t it?” The grafter snickered from its chest, snatching the flask with a pincer.

  Of course, it wouldn’t help — at least not with the risk of aug-madness. It was valuable, though, which was all that mattered.

  “Come on then. This way.”

  The grafter turned and teetered along upon its sharp legs, scratching its way across the chamber and into an adjacent passage. The hunter followed, sliding smoothly, propelled by the twisting of his snake-like form. He easily kept pace, passing under electric lights — artefacts of another age, stapled across the ceiling and the walls. A groaning generator powered them, its grunts audible through the thin walls.

  Ay followed the grafter through the twists and turns of his sanctum, his altar of worship to the plastic and mutable, until they reached a final grim chamber.

  “Make yourself comfortable,” the grafter offered, glancing at the filthy surgery tools left out in the open. A thin bacterial film grew over the trays and in the corners of the room, where blood had long ago spilt and still clung on.

  “I’ll see to the mess outside first.”

  Ay wasn’t one to give away an ounce of fear, not even with the taste of blood in the air, left alone in this den of horrors as his host crept off. Yet, making himself comfortable wasn’t possible. The orange glow of the sodium lamps in the hall washed over the grafter’s surgery table, with its ancient tools and metal machines, and cast sharp, alien angles in the darkness. So, instead, Ay closed his beak tight, turned his body around on the floor for good balance, and removed his ragged clothes in stubborn defiance of everything that could go wrong.