Strange liquids bubbled and frothed, delicate machines pumped and wheezed as gloved fingers danced over the still body. Straw blond hair spread back and her chest laid open for the surgeon's work. Eyes closed and deathly pale as if she was playing the corpse. Strange fleshy organs coloured in sickly purples, reds and blacks are withdrawn from glass jars and inserted into the fragile body.

Through a set of sealed doors that leave the theatre and down a polished corridor a young man paces nervously. Haggard and tired beyond belief, while sitting in the one of the chairs that line the wall is an older man with a bleak expression on his hard face.

An inhuman shriek.

The young man startles and starts to move for the door but the older man says something that makes him stop just at the door. Later he will wish he'd not listened.

A woman puts a gentle hand on his shoulder and reassures him of the importance of this sacrifice. He believes it is a sacrifice to cure the Plague.

He is wrong.

And then he learned the truth.

Stupid…

Blind…

Idiot…

She betrayed you.

How could you let her?

She promised you a new life, a new start.

She lied to you. She lied and you believed her.

He confronted her with the evidence. The office was cool and filled with light that streamed through tall open windows. The white curtains drifted in the gentle breeze as the sound of half a dozen bird songs fluttered from the outside.

He didn't bother to knock and he had crossed the room to her ancient wooden desk before she'd even looked up. He tossed a brown folder bound in crimson ribbon and stamped with angry red letters that read TOP SECERT in front of her.

A pot of tea rattled with the force of impact.

It was no mistake, he was angry. He was furious.

With a slowness he knew was deliberate she removed her glasses and looked up at him clasping her hands under her chin.

"Alek what can I do for you this fine afternoon," her voice as calm and friendly yet that smile seemed to hide ill intent.

"You can start by damn well explaining what the hell that means," his tone boarded on shouting as he pointed an accusing finger at the document.

She looked at the folder not even bothering to feign surprise or shock or even to berate him for having such sensitive material. He wished she'd react in some way just to let him at least retaliate and let this anger loose. But she didn't, she just picked it up and began leafing through it nodding her agreement at certain intervals.

"A good report, I know I can always rely on Jansen to get the right details down in clean and precise way. I mean you seemed to have had no trouble with the language involved," she said her attempt at provoking him blatantly obvious. He would not let her rile him further with such simple insults.

"You gave us a place. What happened to make you betray us like this?" he asked so shocked and hurt to be bordering on tears.

She held his gaze, "The plague happened, Alek. And with it all the rules changed. Geneva is a smoking ruin and now with the world in such upheaval as the developed world dies we had the excuse to finally be able to create the perfect human. This goes way beyond our friendship, this is my life's work. Deryn just happen to tick all the right genetic boxes," she said in a voice layered in passion and righteous belief. You could almost hear the orchestra rise up behind her words as she spoke of the dreams she held.

Alek didn't care for her anymore. She had dismissed Deryn, his dazzling, brave and golden hearted Deryn, as merely another one of her fabricants made to be experimented on and tortured to simply answer the question: what if?

"What have you done to her," she asked his voice barely audible.

"As I said we made her better."

"And what does that mean exactly?"

Barlow smiled again and outside the birds stopped their song, "I mean we made her better, stronger, faster. We gave here everything two hundred thousand years of evolution could not. We found our eve, saw the best god could do and improved on everything," she said.

Alek looked at her, he stared into her eyes and instead of finding the insanity he had hoped to find he came across something far more dangerous. Someone so sane that it was a madness to itself, a sanity that held knowledge way above the ken of man and instead of breaking her it had only strengthened her beliefs.

"What happened to you, Nora?" he asked. She blinked and gave an odd expression, she had not expected this question.

"What do you mean what happened to me?" she asked confused.

"You were kind once," he said with such a sadness, "what will happen to her now?"

Barlow stared at him. He thought her kind just because she had given him a tiny cramped apartment and a job that barely kept the heating on in winter. She didn't understand that he only needed his friends and his lover to keep him righted to the earth. She had needed Deryn's skills what purpose did she have for a prince who had forsaken his throne, "She will be put to good use and serve the empire as all agents of the Zoo are swore to."

"So she will be your weapon, a blade in the night to keep Britain's power," he said his anger building.

"If that is what is required of her then yes,"

"I won't let you," he says and there is a strange fire in his voice that tells of a conviction that would never break.

"I like to see you try and stop me," she said in quiet threatening voice.

And then the spell broke and he turned and left without another word.

It took forty eight hours for Volger to prepare. The old count had simply nodded when Alek had asked him to help rescues Deryn from the depths of the Zoo's vaults. Few words had passed between them aside from their scheming but then again the two had shared so much that words were unnecessary.

Volger had taken the news of Austria's devastation badly and now was troubled by broken sleep and painful memories as he realised his home was gone. As for Alek he had tried to care but in the end all he could think of was Deryn's screams and then he felt terrible for the millions of what used to be his citizens who had died. But then he reasoned he would have joined them in death had he not rejected the throne. And in the end they were dust and Deryn still lived.

Neither said it, but they both knew this would be the last time they saw each other.

"Thankyou…for everything," Alek had said quietly as they crouched in the dark before their diverging paths.

"They would be so proud of you, Alek. And I am so grateful for being given this chance to see you grow. Now go save her and live a life that you deserve,' he placed a hand on Alek's shoulder, "I expect great things of you boy," he muttered with a small smile and with that the count vanished into the velvet night.

The corridors where dark and empty at this time of night. Her room was deep down in the cold labyrinth where the tall halls where illuminated with the flickering light of argon lanterns. Small stone cells lined the corridors sealed by thick steel doors. Yet they paled in comparison to the heavy iron door that guarded the cell at the end of the corridor. It was ancient and the multitude of gouges, blast marks and dents told Alek of the beasts it had kept contained.

The house of monsters.

He retrieved a wad of organic explosive and with three successive blasts the door fell with a heavy clang. Above came the rolling thunder clap as the Zoo's private hangars erupted in fire. Alek tried not to think of the living airships that would now be nothing but charred carcasses.

He moved through the threshold as motes of dust cascaded from the high ceiling.

Her body was clothed in the thick clothe of a straight jacket and her limbs tangled and shackled in thick chains that wrapped her body and kept her restrained to the far wall.

Her bare legs and arms where chaffed and red raw where she'd pulled and tested the chains strength and surrounding her scrunched form where long gouges in the stone floor where her fingers had dragged at the ground

Her dirty mop of hair was cast over her face which dangled drown in front of her face. The room stank of blood and filth.

There was a growl, "you shouldn't have come," her voice was raspy and tinged with animal grunts but he could also hear the sounds of worry in her voice.

"I couldn't leave you here, I can't leave you, Deryn," he moved to her upholstering his pack and retrieving the bolt cutters and began working on the chains. Slow work, but he managed to cut through the old metal one link at a time.

"Idiot, they'll kill you for this," she muttered with exhaustion thick in her voice.

"Your one to talk, from what I've heard of the beatings they given you," he said it in a half-hearted way, but in truth he wished with every fibre in his being to hunt down those who would beat a girl.

She turned her face to him and behind her mask of hair he saw a wicked grin and bright blue eyes, "You should've seen the other guy," she whispered with swagger that only she could muster.

The last chain fell away and there was a brief moment before she lunged him pushing his body to the cold stone floor and embraced him in a tight hug. They lay like that for a while and then gingerly she dropped into a long kiss. And despite the cold Alek felt a sweat brewing.

The sound of boots echoing on tiled floors disturbed them. The jailors were coming. Deryn looked down at him and winked before she stretched her arms and neck until they cracked and then in a blur of motion she launched up into the dark rafters. The guards arrived a second later as Alek drew himself up onto his knees. They pointed their rifles at him. He tentatively raised his hands, "I don't suppose you'd consider surrendering?" he asked politely.

The four guards looked at each other. Behind their gasmasks they seemed to reach a conclusion. They raised their rifles and as one they moved past the threshold of the hall and into the dim abyss of the cell. A black shape dropped amongst them and with a swipe of one clawed hand severed a head. A moment passed and the thing launched at the guard while the others began to bring their weapons to bear. It grabbed the second man and hauled him around holding him tight with strong arms and its jaw engulfing his neck. It dragged him into the others line of fire as they pulled on triggers. The guard's body trembled with the bullet impacts and was then thrown at one of his remaining comrades while the attacker blurred forward and with two successive japs with her clawed fingers disembowelled another guard.

The one reaming soldier managed to dump the body and roll out of reach just as a deadly swipe nearly took off his face. He brought up the rifle and shot Deryn square in the chest. The bullet ripped right through her chest cavity creating an orange-sized exit hole in her back. She howled and staggered and looked like she would fall but then her legs tensed and she held.

"Been a while since I last smelt fresh blood," she muttered as she gazed hungrily at the last warden who now lay on floor staring up at her with raw terror scrawling across his face, "that wouldn't have hurt normally, but as you can probably tell I'm a bit famished," she was practically drooling as she closed in on him, clawed hands stretched out.

Alek was going to intervene, he told himself. But the truth was he was just as frozen with fear as the man who was about to be devoured. He would have stopped her, he told himself over and over. So why didn't he? And he found he never had an answer. Fear is a powerful weapon and within Deryn's black eyes there was a reservoir of fear that spilled out and trapped all who stared. Her face was drawn back to show her hunger was absolute and without end.

She had the mercy to snap her prey's neck first though.