The entryway distended as the muscular sphincter opened. Ay parted a final curtain of skin with a hand, slithering inside, his armoured body legless. Sharp, cool evening air mixed with the warm and humid miasma within. Looking around, Ay’s massive beaked head slowly turned. Then, the scavenger crossed the chamber, fingering the rags he wore about his chest, the belts and pouches he kept close. It was at a large, whittled bone table that he stopped.

“What have you brought for me?” Croaked a voice from above.

Ay didn’t look up to see where the voice had come from on the ceiling. Then, his beaks parted with a crack, splitting to expose two fat eyes and a smaller, fleshy head within. His top jaw folded over to his back. With no nose or mouth to speak of, what now passed as Ay’s head rolled, stretching his neck as it split open to take a deep breath.

Taking his time, the scavenger removed a single severed claw from a pocket in his rags. Before putting it down, he thumbed its top, running skin over its print. Next, he tossed down a fistful of tumour, raw biomass.

“The rest he stole is outside?”

Ay nodded from the shoulders as the ten-limbed Grafter clambered down the wall, pincered legs bringing it to the table where it looked over the treasures it was delivered.

“Excellent. No one takes from me, Scabber,” It boasted, then snickered. Then, appraising the tumour closely, feathery antennae waving, it muttered, “No rot. Still fresh enough.”

The scavenger stood a little straighter, flexible lower body oscillating then coiling as he balanced upright on the shelled floor. He was easily the larger of the two, the more potent in form, yet he held no command here.

“Hmm? Oh. Yes. Of course.” Djey the Grafter stood a little taller, straightening its many knees. A dozen alien sensory organs opened and waved from the stump between its arms. “You’re sure about your payment? A voice?”

The scavenger nodded with no hesitation.

“It’ll be dangerous, hmm? You’ve had so many, many augmentations already. Don’t want you turning, hmm? Going feral.”

Ay let out a whistling sigh before removing a leathery skin from under his rags. He put the flask down on the table with a heavy thump. Even prizes had a price here.

“Gel? Yes. Well, this will help, won’t it?” The Grafter snickered again from its chest, snatching the package with a pincer. It wouldn’t help - at least not with the risk of aug-madness. “Come on then. This way.”

Djey turned and teetered along upon its sharp legs, scratching its way across the chamber and into an adjacent passage. The scavenger followed, sliding smoothly, propelled by the twisting of his snake-like form. He kept pace as best as he could, passing under electric lights - artefacts of another age, stapled across the ceiling and the walls. Ay followed Djey through the twists and turns of his sanctum, his altar of worship to the plastic and mutable, until they reached a final grim chamber.

“Make yourself comfortable. I’ll see to the mess outside first.”

That wasn’t possible. The orange glow of the sodium lamps in the hall washed over the Grafter’s surgery table, with its ancient tools and metal machines, and cast sharp, alien angles in the darkness. Ay wasn’t one to give away an ounce of fear, not even with the taste of blood in the air, left alone in this den of horrors as his host crept off. So instead, he closed his beak tight, turned his body around on the floor for good balance, and removed his clothes in defiance of everything that could go wrong.