Cole stopped what he was doing and looked toward the bars on the right side of his cage. The voice he’d heard had the texture of meat hooks being dragged over a parched desert floor. “What makes you think that?” he asked.
When the voice came again, it was closer to the side of his cell. “Because I can smell it.”
Something poked around the edge of his bars at about the height of a guard’s shoulder. It was the approximate size and shape of a fist, covered in light yellow and tan scales. Cole had seen the creature in the neighboring cell a few times by now and guessed he was one of the lizard men Ned had discovered in the Florida swamps. The Skinners had salvaged some pretty impressive parts from their kind, but he doubted that fact would go over too well with the inmate next door.
“Since you can poke your nose out that far,” Cole said, “why don’t you do me a favor and see about picking the lock on my door?”
His request was answered by a strong snuff that caused the flaps on the lizard man’s nose to retract. “You brought something back with you.”
While he could accept another species’ strong sense of smell, that statement threw him for a loop. Waylon’s drilling session had lasted just under three hours, and he had somehow stayed awake for all of it. When he was brought back to his cell afterward, the only thing he cared about was that they wouldn’t search him before forcing him into his cage. He was covered in blood and could barely move, but felt lucky when the guards stuffed him through the doggie door, uncuffed him through the bars, and walked away. Ever since then, he’d been digging into his hand without giving anyone reason to think he might be doing anything more than fussing with one of his many wounds. The thing he’d found wedged in his hand was a sliver the size of a chipped Popsicle stick. After a few hours of poking and prodding, the sliver had finally started coming out.
Across the corridor, Lambert stood up and approached the bars of his cell. “What did you bring back with you?”
Cole did his best to silence the other prisoner with a stern, insistent glare. Although the tattooed inmate was willing to humor him, the lizard man next door wasn’t so accommodating.
“It’s part of a Skinner weapon,” the yellowed snout declared. It opened slightly, allowing a slick tongue to graze along the edge of the closest iron bar. It wasn’t as wide as a human tongue, but longer and creased down the middle. “I can smell that too.”
“Where you from, my man?” Lambert asked.
Cole got back to his work, more anxious than ever to get the object he’d worked so hard to smuggle into his cell. “Judging by that tongue, my guess is the Everglades or Detroit Rock City.”
“Why do you suddenly care about that?” the lizard man asked.
“Because,” Lambert cut in, “you ain’t said a single word since I been here. I was starting to think you reptile people couldn’t even talk.”
The snout pulled away from Cole’s bars so it could stretch a few inches into the corridor. “Why would we talk to such ignorant murderers like you?” he snapped, flashing a single row of identical, rounded teeth that were all just under an inch long and spaced as evenly as points on a saw blade.
“Ignorant?” Lambert said. “Maybe it’d be best if you went back to shutting the fuck up.”
After a few more presses of his thumb and forefinger against either side of his tender scar, Cole coaxed the splinter out from the spot where it had been stubbornly wedged. It hurt like hell but was now close to coming out. Rather than tease it anymore, he pressed his thumb hard against the bottom portion of the wound and didn’t let up until the wooden sliver poked out. “Squam,” he sighed while gently pulling the sliver out.
Another huffing breath came from outside the cell.
“Huh?” Lambert said while maintaining a defensive stance, with both hands gripping the bars in front of him.
Despite the fact that the wound on his palm was bleeding more than ever, the intense pain of having the sharp piece of wood lodged in there was gone. It was a blissful tradeoff. “Not reptile people,” he said. “Squam . . .” What did Ned call them? Holding up the sliver as if the