Something he never would find now. It was all over.
If he had ever made a true friend or two among his kind, perhaps they would have come to rescue him from this, he suddenly thought with a sharp pang of regret.
Or, perhaps, they wouldn’t. Maybe, beneath those veneers of honour and selflessness some of his kind seemed to enjoy parading about, perhaps they were just as shallow and self-centred as he was. He certainly wouldn’t risk his neck to save someone else, so why would anyone else do such a thing for him?
No, this was it. He had played the game for a long time; for centuries he had thrown the dice, had played the cards, and somehow, somehow he had always managed to come out on top. Sometimes just by the skin of his teeth, but he had not yet lost.
Not until now. The thing was, in this game you only got to lose one time – that was it. In the casino of life, there was no exit. Once your fortune had been squandered, you may as well lay down, curl up and wait for death on the game floor.
Abou was jarred from these dark thoughts by a lock turning in the door. He looked up and watched as two doctors in scrubs and surgical masks entered the room.
‘Please, come with us,’ one of them, a bulky Chinese man, said.
It was an order, not a request.
Abou could shift into his rhino form right now and kill them within seconds if he so wished, but what would the point be? There were soldiers waiting outside to pump him full of bullets if he tried anything like that. Still, wouldn’t that be a better way to go out than being the subject of some sort of twisted medical experiment? He knew that someone like William, Zakaria or Njinga would fight until their last breath in this sort of situation. They would not have even allowed themselves to be taken alive in the first place.
But I am not them. I’m not a Rebel warrior. I’m a self-centred coward. I must accept this … and all of the consequences that will arise from it too.
He stood up, brushed off the front of his medical gown, and padded meekly along behind the doctors as they led him out of the room.
***
Mr Ma and Mr Wang were positioned above the operating theatre, watching intently as the surgeon used his mechanical bone-saw to remove a section of Aboubakar’s cranium. Mr Ma kept his eyes locked on the surgeon’s hands as he took off the top of the beastwalker’s skull and gestured to Mr Wang in sign language as he observed the procedure, spellbound.
‘Yes sir, it is remarkable indeed,’ Mr Wang commented, ‘and I can understand just how eager you are to delve into the secrets of that five-hundred-year-old brain down there.’
Mr Ma, with his gaze still focused on the surgeon as he went about his work below them, replied with a few more gesticulations.
‘Certainly sir,’ Mr Wang answered. ‘I’ll call Ms Fang up here at once.’
Mr Wang stepped away from the ledge into the darkness that surrounded the circular viewing area and made a quick call to Ms Fang, who was working in another area of the building. A few minutes later she arrived, slightly flustered and out of breath; it was almost embarrassingly apparent how eager she was to ingratiate herself to Mr Ma. The old man was still staring at the ongoing surgery when she arrived, and although she greeted him with a bright, chirpy smile he did not bother to acknowledge her presence. Instead, he fired off some rapid sign language gestures to Mr Wang, who then turned to talk to her.
‘Ms Fang, Mr Ma wants to know just how soon after the chip is installed we will be able to look inside the subject’s mind?’
Ms Fang breathed in slowly as she prepared to answer; it was obvious that she wanted to give an answer that would please Mr Ma, whose impatience in terms of this matter was plain to see, but at the same time she realised she had to stick with the cold, hard facts of the situation.
‘Well, it is, er, difficult to say, sir,’ she responded uneasily. ‘Especially seeing as the mind we’re going into is so vastly different from any mind we’ve worked with up until this point. That’s why we decided to go the surgical route instead of simply giving him the silver pill with the nanobots. There are millions of neural—’
Mr Ma turned and looked away from the operating table for the first time since the procedure had started, and he held up a hand to silence her while harpooning his eyes into hers with a hellishly intense gaze. He kept his eyes fixed to hers with his jagged steel barbs and gestured slowly in sign language as she squirmed and perspired.
‘Mr Ma doesn’t care about the details,’ Mr Wang said, the tone of his voice even and gentle, yet carrying the subtle threat of a panther’s low growl. ‘He just wants to know when. When will he be able to get inside the subject’s mind?’
Ms Fang swallowed slowly and pulled a tissue from her lab coat pocket to dab at the beads of perspiration on her forehead before answering.
‘I cannot say for sure, sir. We have ramped up testing and development, but we may be, well … months … years … from that kind of breakthrough.’
Mr Ma’s wrinkles morphed, like a flipbook animation of a line drawing, into an expression of tempestuous wrath. His skeletal hands curled into balled fists at his sides and he opened his mouth. A deep, raspy hiss clawed its way up his throat and crawled out from between
