Nio's rat-traps are like her – small, wrought-up, and ready to snap. You tell her firmly to take some rest before setting off to place them around the Bastion. It's a Sisyphean task – no wild place can be rid completely of wild things. You need to save the least worst one for later, anyway.

Turns out Coerna is exceedingly easy to get things out of, once you've figured out how. One drunken “sure, hah, take 'em – just remember to bring 'em back!” later and you've secured a pair of medical-grade latex gloves. Contrary to scientific advice and general common sense, you consider whether it's worth keeping instead of tossing them once you're done. Supplies are in short supply nowadays, and not everyone is like Coerna.

The midnight wind howls – the chain-link fence of the perimeter can only block so much of the world out. Your hair stands on end as you walk the distance between the centre and your and Devin's meeting point. He's a few minutes late, but he does have the box. He hands it gingerly over, and you feel goosebumps erupt on your arms. The specimen is yours now.

You watch it, grotesque under the soft silver moon. It has lost all fat and most colour – it is hard to believe it was ever alive. The joints are discoloured, scabbed drily over, while the rest of the skin is washed out as though from bleach. Where it was wrenched from a body, a torn shirt-sleeve flaps aimlessly about the brittle ball-end of a shoulder-joint. It glistens wetly with the residue of recently-punctured bursae.

Nio's rat-traps are imperfect. Whereas a rat-trap in the old world would have killed mercifully, snapping a small neck without so much as a notice, this one digs its bottle-cap teeth into the soft neck of the squirrel, mangling it. Its squeal rings out like a whistle in the otherwise silent night. The sounds of the hunted are not strange to the Bastion, but you must be quick – the light is fading from the animal's eyes, and the night patrol might be out here.

You do it before you can hesitate – you puncture one creature, and then you puncture another with the same needle. The squirrel's little body can take no more pressure and you feel it writhe its last before the sudden burst of its heart takes it to death. Still, it jitters, and you watch it, mesmerised, waiting for the transformation, before realising that its jolts are merely the aftershocks of life, its nerves still burning with that final lightning-stroke of desire to stay alive.

It goes limp in your hands. Coerna's gloves are coated in fur and filth.

{[]}