Book One – Chapter 19

The exchange was seamless. As Deltington withdrew the pipette, Bubs had already put his new tray with the twig and the other treated pieces down. And then he did something Yu could only call wrong. He slid the it into the open gash. The long brown twig. The pipette left and the thing went in. Guided by Bubs’ fingers and a pair of tweezers, it disappeared beneath the skin, completely swallowed. It was not something from the leg. Bubs had not taken it out of the leg. Yet he put it in. A foreign thing that did not come from the human’s body, slick with all sorts of tinctures. He pressed that inside the leg, and then meddled with it, and then he left it there.

Once the long twig sat where it should, Bubs reached for one of the shorter pieces, a stout pin, and pushed that one in as well. He drove it through the flesh, like pressing a needle into a rotten fruit. He inserted it at a shallow angle so that it crossed the first rod. The end protruded just below the knee, between the metal struts that held the leg in its cage.

Yu’s feathers prickled.

He made an educated guess and decided none of these things were actual sticks. He also guessed that there was a strategy behind what Bubs was doing, or at least he really wanted to believe that he was not just spiking the human at random. Yu could not see into the depth of the leg as Bubs now oh fuck no slid in a third pin, yet from the way he angled and adjusted it, Yu reasoned that the pieces fit into each other. You could probably even insert the smaller needles through the holes he had seen in the rod-that-was-definitely-not-a-twig and all of the wider pins. From how he probed around for the proper position, it seemed like Bubs was trying to push in the pin just right. It was as if he were building a new skeleton inside the old.