Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

He came back on Sunday, after Cassia’s session, and found the card updated to sixty-two days overdue. Then he asked the technician if he could examine unit eleven properly.

She said he could look at it for as long as he liked as long as he did not open the unit, which told him something about how much anyone expected to sell it.

He spent an hour and ten minutes on it.

Don’t decide first and then justify it. Do it the other way.

He ran the vitality read eleven times over the hour and watched the number, and it did not move at that resolution, which meant nothing except that the decline was slow enough to be invisible across seventy minutes.

He ran the thermal profile. Constant. Thirty-six point four degrees, held to a tenth, exactly as a good incubator should.

He ran the metabolic read, and that was where it started coming together.

The embryo was producing heat unevenly. Not much of it, because there was not much of anything, but the distribution was wrong for a sparrow. There was a concentration through the chest and along the wing roots that was consistently warmer than the rest, and it stayed warm, and it had nowhere to go.

Jin sat on the floor of the clearance room with his back against the counter and thought about it.

[Ashwing Sparrow — physiology notes, public register]

[Fire-aspected. Wind-aspected. Dual-pathway respiratory adaptation.]

Two pathways. That was on the public register, freely available, and it was three lines long because an Ashwing Sparrow was a common Iron-quality bird that nobody wrote papers about.

Fire and wind. It’s making heat in the chest, and the incubator’s passive ventilation isn’t moving it through the pathway.

He worked through it slowly and made himself find the holes.

A constant incubator gave an embryo a stable environment, which was correct for almost everything. Stability was the entire point. You did not want a developing beast experiencing weather.

But something with a fire pathway needed a stimulus to fire it, and something with a wind pathway needed directed movement to circulate what the fire pathway made. A perfectly steady thirty-six point four degrees had kept this embryo alive far past its expected hatching window, yet gave it no changing trigger to begin terminal maturation, because terminal maturation was a process the fire pathway was supposed to drive.

The small amount of heat it generated on its own had been concentrating in the chest throughout the prolonged stall. Ordinary background ventilation refreshed the incubator, but without a directed airflow cycle through the wind pathway, that heat had nowhere useful to go. That was probably why the vitality curve was going down instead of sideways.

So it needs a cycle. Heat to stimulate, then directed air to circulate and cool. Then again. And the ratio matters, because too much heat without enough airflow is how it’s been slowly cooking itself.

He checked his own reasoning against the obvious objection.

If it were this simple, they’d have done it.

The answer to that took him about a minute and was not comfortable.

Nobody would do it, because nobody had a reason to. An Ashwing Sparrow was a common bird. Verrow’s ran hundreds of eggs through standard incubation and the standard worked on almost all of them, and when one stalled, the correct professional conclusion was that this particular egg was defective.

They had already written it down from roughly seventy-five thousand Credits to an asking price of ten thousand. Designing a custom alternating heat-and-air program would consume technician hours and incubation space on a theory a specialist would first have to invent, all for an egg their own equipment said was almost certain to die.

They had not made an error. They had made a business decision, and it was the right one for them.

And I’ve got a talent that reads structural completion, and about ten hours a week, and nothing better to do with either.

He also made himself say the other half out loud, quietly, in an empty room.

"It might be wrong."

Appraisal told him the structures were complete and maturation had not begun. It gave him a mechanism that fit the physiology and the thermal readings. It did not tell him the stall was reversible, because there was no reading in the world for this thing can still be saved.

I have a diagnosis I believe. That’s all I have.

Ilse Brannoch was a spare, grey-haired woman in her sixties who ran Verrow’s and who did not sit down when Jin asked about unit eleven.

"You want the sparrow."

"Yes."

"Why?"

"Because I think it’s stalled rather than failed," Jin said. "That’s the whole reason. I’m not going to tell you more than that."

Brannoch considered him.

"You’re a Meridian student."

"Fourth Class. C-Rank Data Appraisal."

"Then you already know that egg is sixty-two days overdue and losing vitality, and that overdue eggs which lose vitality do not generally come back." She said it without any edge at all. "I’ll tell you what I tell everyone who gets an idea in that room. Whatever you think you’ve spotted, four technicians here have looked at that egg with better equipment than your talent, and they concluded it wasn’t going to hatch."

"I know."

"It may cost you more to treat than to buy. People forget that. Ten thousand for the egg. Equipment and a specialist consultation start at eleven hundred, and if it needs continued intervention, treatment can pass the purchase price before it dies anyway in week two."

"I know that too."

"And if it dies, or if it simply never hatches, there is no refund. As-is means as-is. I will not make an exception, and I will put that in front of you in writing and make you sign it." Brannoch folded her arms. "I’m not trying to talk you out of it. I’m making sure that if you go ahead, you do it with your eyes open, because I’ve had two people cry in that room this year."

Jin nodded slowly.

"Then I’d like to talk about the price."

"Ten thousand. It’s on the card."

"For an egg your own assessment says has a negligible chance of hatching."

"For a legally registered Ashwing Sparrow egg in a functioning incubator. A healthy one sells for seventy-five thousand."

"This isn’t a healthy one." Jin glanced toward the clearance-room door. "It’s sixty-two days overdue, its vitality is at eleven percent, and you’re paying to keep it in a unit while the number goes down."

Brannoch watched him for a moment. "Make an offer."

"Three thousand. As-is. No treatment support, no return, and no complaint if it dies."

"Six."

"I have two thousand one hundred and eighty Credits. I can put eighteen hundred down and secure the rest against my academy support."

"That’s financing," Brannoch said. "It isn’t an argument for cutting seven thousand off the price."

"The argument is that if I leave, you still have an egg your own technicians expect to die. Tomorrow its vitality will be lower. At three thousand, you clear the unit and recover something. At ten, you keep incubating it until it becomes disposal."

Brannoch’s mouth tightened slightly. "Four thousand."

"Three. I sign the waiver you want and take it tomorrow."

She studied him long enough that Jin wondered whether he had pushed one line too far. Then she nodded once.

"Three, provided Meridian confirms the support and nobody else co-signs."

"Fine."

Brannoch went to get a slate.

The terms she came back with were not generous and were entirely fair, which Jin had expected from a woman who would not sell him a story.

[VERROW HATCHERY — CLEARANCE SALE, DEFERRED PAYMENT]

[Item: Ashwing Sparrow egg, unit 11. As-is, no viability guarantee, no refund.]

[Price: 3,000 Cr]

[Deposit: 1,800 Cr, payable on transfer]

[Balance: 1,200 Cr, recovered by automatic deduction against declared flexible academy support]

[Protected allocations excluded from deduction: registered beast feed support]

[Purchaser to sign viability waiver.]

"Your feed allocation is protected," Brannoch said, tapping that line. "That’s not me being kind, that’s academy regulation and I’d lose my licence for touching it. I’ve seen what happens when a student starves one beast for another and I won’t be part of it."

"Good."

"Nobody co-signs this. Not your family, not a dealer, not an instructor. It’s your debt and it comes out of your support whether the egg lives or dies."

"Understood."

"Take the night."

He took the night.

He sat on the floor of his room with Glitch’s chin on his ankle and did the arithmetic on the slate, properly, with the pessimistic numbers rather than the ones he wanted.

Eighteen hundred out of savings left him three hundred and eighty. Twelve hundred in deductions across the coming weeks meant his flexible support went almost entirely to Verrow’s, which meant no equipment upgrades, no discretionary anything, and any treatment costs coming out of the Kass income at four hundred-odd Credits a batch.

If it died in a week, he was out eighteen hundred Credits and still paying twelve hundred more for an empty incubator.

If it never hatched at all, the same, more slowly.

And if I’m right.

He turned that over and refused to let it be an argument. Being right about the mechanism did not mean the thing would live. The prolonged stall had let heat concentrate in the chest without the directed circulation it needed, and eleven percent vitality was eleven percent whatever the reason for it.

So it’s not a good investment. It’s a gamble on a diagnosis I can’t verify, for a common Iron-quality bird.

He looked at the ceiling.

The problem was that he had stood in a cold room and read a report that said every organ was built and the last step had never started, and he had known, immediately and without wanting to, what that meant.

Something in there was finished. It was complete. It had done all of the work and was sitting in the dark waiting for a signal that the machine keeping it alive was never going to send, and it was going to keep waiting until it stopped.

Nobody’s coming for it. Everyone who looked at it was right, and it’s still going to die of being correctly assessed.

Glitch shifted against his ankle.

"I’m going to do something financially stupid," Jin told him.

Glitch conveyed a general willingness to be involved.

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