Beast Taming: My Beasts Grind, Die, and Respawn

The neonatal beast unit was on the second floor of the medical wing and it was the cleanest room Jin had been in since arriving in this world.

Eleven incubation units along one wall, most of them occupied. Stable heat control, regulated airflow, emergency oxygen lines, feeding equipment on a rail, and two technicians who did nothing all shift except walk the row and check readings.

Everything he had spent two weeks building out of a ration tin lid, done properly, by people who did it every day.

He put Flicker in unit four at 07:40.

She weighed almost nothing. He had known that and it was different to carry her twenty meters across a corridor in cupped hands, feeling the whole of her fit inside them with room left over, breathing.

[Flicker — vitality 35%]

[Cannot stand. Cannot regulate internal temperature. Independent respiration — stable.]

She knew where he was. That was the thing that had been happening since 0530 and had not stopped. She could not lift her head reliably, but when he spoke, the small grey shape shifted toward the sound, and the contract carried something back that was not a thought and was unmistakably recognition.

Glitch was worse than useless for the first ten minutes.

He had walked the entire way from the dormitory at Jin’s heel with his eyes on Jin’s hands. Once they were in the unit, he took up a position beside incubator four and set himself, and when the first technician came down the row he tracked her the entire length of it with his head lowered.

"He won’t—" said the technician.

"He won’t," Jin said. "He’s just going to look at you like that."

"Right." She checked the readings from about a meter further away than she needed to. "Is that a Grey Rock Lizard?"

"Yes."

"They’re not usually—"

"No," Jin agreed.

The attending specialist was called Verrick, and he ran the necessary diagnostics competently and quickly, and then stopped talking for about ninety seconds while he read them.

Jin watched his face and knew exactly what was coming, because he had seen the same expression on the officer who examined Glitch during registration.

"How long was she overdue?"

"Sixty-five days at hatching."

"And she hatched unassisted."

"She did all of it herself. It took about six hours."

Verrick pulled up the respiratory readings and turned the display slightly toward Jin, which Jin appreciated and did not enjoy.

"Her air sacs are wrong," he said.

"Wrong how?"

"Wrong in the sense of not being what the reference says." Verrick traced a branching structure with a stylus. "An Ashwing Sparrow has a straightforward avian arrangement. Nine chambers, simple flow path. This is — I count fourteen, and the flow’s recursive through at least two of them, and I do not know what that’s for."

He moved to the next panel.

"And she’s producing heat. A lot of it, for something that can’t stand up. Her chest temperature was two degrees above her body temperature when she came in, and she has no capacity whatsoever to shed it, which is currently my biggest clinical concern."

Yes, Jin thought. I’ve been managing that for a fortnight with a piece of cardboard.

"The musculature’s the part I keep going back to," Verrick said. "It’s underdeveloped, which is expected — she’s a hatchling and she nearly died. But the attachment geometry isn’t. The way the pectoral group’s anchored, the way the leg tendons insert. That’s an arrangement for extreme acceleration. On a bird that currently cannot lift its own wing."

He set the stylus down.

"And the last thing, which is the thing I actually want to talk about. A developmental collapse this severe doesn’t recover. When maturation stalls terminally, the tissue degrades, and by the time you’re sixty days overdue you have an embryo that is structurally finished in the sense of being finished. That’s the phrase we use."

"But?"

"But something in her started repairing before she hatched." Verrick looked at him. "Which is medically interesting to the point of being a problem for me, because I don’t have an explanation and I’m not comfortable treating something I don’t understand."

The request came ten minutes later and it was entirely professional.

"I’d like to run expanded imaging. Full skeletal and soft-tissue, not just the clinical set. I’d like to retain blood and a small tissue sample. I’d like a genetic panel and a lineage comparison against the Ashwing reference stock, and I’d like your permission for Meridian to use her case in research."

"That’s five things."

"It’s five things and I’d take any of them." Verrick did not push. "You’d be doing the species a favour. If there’s a variant lineage in Ashwing stock that produces this, nobody’s documented it, and there are hatcheries writing off eggs every year that might be recoverable."

Jin thought about a cold room at Verrow’s with eleven units in it, and nine of them beyond help.

And that’s the annoying part. That’s a genuinely good argument.

"Can I see the consent agreement?"

"Of course."

"The full one. Every section."

Verrick raised an eyebrow slightly and had it brought over.

It ran to nine pages and Jin read all of it, sitting on a stool beside incubator four, while a technician went past three times and Glitch did not once stop watching her.

Sections one through four were the treatment authorizations and were fine.

Section five was where it started.

5.3 — Diagnostic imaging retained by the unit may be reviewed for clinical education purposes.

Which meant every scan they took went into a teaching library indefinitely.

6.1 — Biological samples retained under this authorization become the property of Meridian Academy for the duration of storage.

Which meant a blood sample was not a blood sample. It was a permanent line item somebody could run a new test against in four years when Flicker’s file had a different shape.

7.2 — Anonymized case data may be shared with affiliated research bodies.

7.4 — Anonymization applies to the registered owner. Specimen identifiers are retained.

Jin read 7.4 twice and then laughed, once, without much humour in it.

Anonymous for me. Not for her.

"Something funny?"

"Seven point four cancels seven point two."

Verrick came and looked at it, and his mouth tightened.

"That’s standard language."

"I’m sure it is." Jin turned the page. "I’ve read dungeon contracts with fewer traps in them than this. At least a dungeon puts the pit in front of you."

He went through the remaining sections and then went back to the front and did what the form allowed, which was to select authorizations individually rather than accepting the bundle.

[TREATMENT AUTHORIZATION — SELECTED]

[Approved: diagnostics clinically necessary for immediate care]

[Approved: essential clinical records]

[Approved: continuous monitoring — respiration, thermal, pulse, nutrition, physical recovery]

[Approved: emergency intervention]

[Declined: retention of biological samples]

[Declined: non-essential genetic or lineage analysis]

[Declined: experimental or investigational procedures]

[Declined: research disclosure to affiliated bodies]

[Declined: post-treatment reuse of medical data]

He signed it and handed it back.

Verrick read the selections and was visibly disappointed and did not argue.

"That’s your right."

"I know."

"For what it’s worth, I’m not trying to take anything from you. I want to know what she is because I want to treat her properly, and every one of those refusals makes my job slightly harder."

"I know that too," said Jin, and meant it. "You can have anything you need to keep her alive. That’s not a negotiation. You just can’t have anything else."

Verrick nodded slowly, and put the form in the file, and moved on, which was the professional thing to do.

"Then here’s your prognosis, and it’s honest. She’s stable. She is also in a forty-eight-hour window where hatchlings this weak sometimes stop being stable very quickly, and the specific thing I’m watching for is her own heat production interfering with her breathing while she’s exhausted. If that happens we can manage it. If it happens twice, it becomes a serious problem."

"Understood."

"Where will you be?"

"Wilderness assessment. Thirty hours."

"Then leave your tag with the desk and go," said Verrick. "She’s better off here than with you, and I suspect you already know that, and I suspect you also hate it."

[If you’re loving the story, show support in whatever way you can; if you have bought privilege, thank you so much; if you haven’t, please do that; it would help me a lot]

Visit and read more novel to help us update chapter quickly. Thank you so much!