The Games Read Online Free PDF

large glass chamber boxed in the center of the room.
    “How’s it doing?” Silas asked the redhead.
    “Just fine,” Keith answered. “Been sleeping like a baby for an hour now. Come to show off your little creation?”
    “Not mine,” Silas said. “This is Chandler’s handiwork.”
    They peered in. The crib was large, and behind the chromed bars, a loosely swaddled shape twisted and bobbed within a cocoon of pink blankets.
    “Looks like it’s awake now,” Silas said.
    “Probably hungry again,” Keith replied. “You wouldn’t believe how much it loves to eat.”
    Silas checked the paper printout of the infant’s eating habits, then turned back to Baskov. “The chamber is a walk-in incubator. The system has autonomic control of everything from temperature to humidity to oxygen-sat levels.”
    Baskov nodded, shifting his weight for a clearer view.
    “Want to get a closer look?” Silas asked.
    “Of course.”
    They donned sterile masks and gowns, and stretched latex gloves over their hands. “Just a temporary precaution,” Silas said.
    “For us, or it?”
    “It.”
    Baskov nodded. “Why are we calling it an ‘it,’ anyway? It’s male, right?”
    “No, female by the external genitalia. Or lack thereof.”
    With a soft hiss, the door to the inner chamber opened and they stepped through. The air was warmer, wetter. Silas could feel the heat of the lights on the bridge of his nose above the mask. He bent and reached his hands through the bars and into the crib. Baskov hovered just to his side. The covers peeled back from the writhing form.
    Silas heard a sudden intake of air near his shoulder.
    “My God” was all Baskov could manage.
    The newborn was on its back, four stocky limbs pedaling the air. Once again, Silas struggled to wrap his mind around what he was seeing. There was nothing to compare it to, so his brain had to work from scratch, filling in all the pieces, seeing everything at once.
    The newborn was hairless, and most of its skin was a deep, obsidian black, slightly reflective in the warm glare of the heat lamps, as though covered with a shiny coat of gloss. Only its hands and forearms were different. It was roughly the size of a three-year-old human toddler. Wide shoulders tapered into long, thick arms that now bunched and stretched toward the bars. Below the elbow, the skin color shifted todeep red. Its blood-colored hands clenched in the air, the needle tips of talons just beginning to erupt from the ends of the long, hooked fingers. The rear legs were raptor monstrosities, jointed in some complicated way, with splayed feet that corded with muscle and sinew just below the surface of its skin.
    Two enormous gray eyes shone out of the brilliant blackness of its face and raked across the two men looking down. Silas could almost feel the weight of the alien gaze. The lower jaw was enormously wide and jutting, built for power. A grossly bossed cranial vault spread wide over the pulled-out face, capped by two soft semicircular flaps of ear cartilage.
    It opened its mouth, mewling the same strange cry that Silas had heard the night before. Even the inside of its mouth was midnight black.
    “This is beyond …” Baskov began.
    “Yes, that’s a perfect way to describe it.”
    Baskov began to reach a gloved hand toward the newborn but then apparently thought better of it. “This is beyond the reach of what I thought we were able to do,” he finished.
    “It is. We cannot do this,” Silas said.
    The two men locked eyes.
    “How?” Baskov asked.
    “You’re asking the wrong guy, remember? I’m the builder, not the designer.”
    “Does it seem to be put together well? Are those legs supposed to look like that?”
    “Well, everything is symmetrical on the exterior, so that’s a good sign. But you haven’t seen the really interesting thing yet.” Silas leaned through the bars and grabbed the newborn under the upper arms. It struggled, but he was able to flip it over onto its