“The creators had defined between three hundred and five hundred dog breeds, counting merely the ones that survived until the day of creation. We do not know how many of them comprise part of this sea. I hypothesize that, given the sea began from simple clumps of Retriever puppies coming together, the formation of layers is a continuous process, and new ones get added from the center as the youngest layer accrues a critical amount, be it mass or thickness. As such, more and more breeds must be added over time, until the maturation of the phenomenon is complete.”

  —A recording from Doratev, or a Poodlite tablet engraved by Seloma.

  Downhill rolled a bouncy Pomeranian: Dirofil cursed out loud. He’d rather climb than use his wings, but the mountain of lapdogs provided a hostile surface for his feet and hands to find purchase onto. Wreathed in his cape in a sorry attempt to fend off the dread that loomed over him, he couldn’t spread his wings without letting go of his only piece of clothing. And he didn’t feel like unhanding the familiar, metallic links, like allowing it to dang lifelessly from his shoulders. His was a cape that provided no warmth: had it done so, he would have disembarrassed himself from it long ago. Theirs was a windless world, the only howls those of the animals or of the voiceboxes. Yet in his mind he held the image of a snowstorm, as white as the helixes shining overhead, bringing desolation over a peak of stone. He yearned for the supposedly cruel cold such a happening would bring. Wished to figure out the object of his search away from the ship’s cool air. The image of a bottle exposed to the elements crossed his mind, and he wondered why no condensation happened anywhere on the ship. Perhaps the humid air was expelled with the warmth, or maybe water ran through the tubes.

  He stopped ascending, a finger digging in his flesh to massage a cornea as he ruminated. Maybe thoughtenergy was somehow used to cool down the water inside. That would have taken care of the heat. But the problem of water remained. Why use the distiller if the ship itself had a system perfectly able to condense water?

  Maybe they hadn’t. Maybe they had lied to him, kept him in obscurity out of fear. Morbilliv wasn’t an idiot, he knew that he would use any means at his disposal to get rid of Lyssav. To tell Dirofil the plumbing of the ship carried water would have to set a bullseye upon them as soon and the elder sister arrived on board.

  His reverie got nipped at the bud when a maladroit step landed him on a loose Pomeranian. The dog rolled under his metatarsals and bounced downhill, but not without setting off a chain reaction in the process. Dirofil cursed again as the avalanche of fluffy dogs swallowed him whole and dragged him down. It was a small setback, but small setbacks, like Pomeranians, tended to pile up over him.

  Unlike a drowning man he emerged calm but vexed from the collapsed rubble. His three hands acted swiftly, dusting the hairs off his cape and wings. He didn’t even know what material he could extract from Pomeranians, and disposed of no time to sit down and experiment.

  Cape tugged out of the way, he extended his wings and basked in the light of the helixes. The hybrid bones, part biological and part metallic, rubbed against both mucilage and a tissue that had once been flesh.

  He loathed it. The feeling of muscles pulling from the bones, of the rarefied skin taking in the light of the dogs. It was meant to take a warped psyche to despise the tools of one’s own freedom, but he couldn’t help himself. The wings, so sought and cherished by his rational side, tainted him, and there spanned no moment where the thought of ripping them from his back didn’t cross his mind. But that didn’t change things: the situation wouldn’t turn less demanding all of a sudden just to satisfy his weird caprices. The wings needed to beat. And beat they did. He shot forwards and upwards, following the incline of the Pomeranian mountain until he crested it, landing and digging his cruel talons among the dogs of the summit. Up there flakes of Borzoi hair swam in the air like indolent fairies, shining lint that tried to a ride an absent breeze. And beyond the faux snow a landscape as alien as any other found in the sea got revealed. A dense mist composed chiefly by Shar-Pei, most meat-mouthed, hid the vast majority of the features of the terrain below, a simmering desert dotted by the blue of their tongues.

  At his feet a sharp cliff offered a less than friendly fall, wrinkled creatures of closed eyes —and how many! — rooted to the walls, their mouths closed too, or perhaps permanently sewn and lined by exaggeratedly thick eyelashes. Dirofil could detect a dash of Saint Bernard on the snoozing monsters, despite their size being several times that of their original breed: the characteristic patterns of the coat and general body structure had been preserved, the only major changes being an even more exaggerate excess of skin, and a proliferation of eyes that followed patterns reminiscent to the ambulacra of echinoderms: five equidistant lines, each composed of pairs of eyes. Their legs dug into the fabric of the Pomeranian mountain, and a stray eye or two could be seen over the exposed thighs and brachia, somehow looking both out of place and perfectly sprinkled onto the bizarre creatures.

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  But the sea allotted no time to admire its wonders, for a symphony of tiny barks soon arose from the Shar-Pei cloud. It was a sound Dirofil had come to know very intimately., and it filled him with an overwhelming fatigue.

  “Chihuahuas here too. Chihuahuas everywhere,” He blurted out, and then refreshed his sound armor. “At least I’ll have spare teeth for repairs. Come, come out and die.”

  He was surrounded, the little scaled vermin appearing from under the yawning Shar-Pei. A dozen mouth full of teeth jumping to the closest non-pomeranian point, a semicircle of hatred closing in on him.

  The tail creeped up and to the side of Dirofil’s head, ready for him to react. His upper limbs spread to the sides, the elbows the tips of obtuse-angled Vs. His lower left hand took another position, that of a predatory cobra, ready to bite onto its prey.

  Spittle scattered from the slobbering jaws of his attackers as they remained as all bark and no bite. The reluctance to advance came across as odd: Dirofil expected no common sense from the common pests. Then what was holding them back?

  They refused to lunge, to negotiate the gap between the first row of Shar-Pei and the mound of Pomeranians. And he knew the fall was likely not the cause of their caution. He peeked over the precipice once more, and his gaze hung on one of the mutated Saint Bernards. Maybe they were the factor preventing the advance of the Chihuahuas. More than met the eyes he had spawned with. He forwarded his cursed hand and opened the one eye from which nothing could hide.

  The outlines of the sleeping creatures matched their apparent form, and nothing odder than their appearance could be determined on a quick glance. He could barely afford such cursory peeks, because nobody knew the form the Reaper could take in this new layer.

  As a side benefit of the glance, he gleaned that the visible Chihuahuas were only a part of a much larger pack hiding behind the Shar-Pei, an unsurprising discovery.

  In a burst of energy, he took air, and like an eagle he swooped down the nearest Chiranha, coiling his tail around the midsection of the squirming creature before kicking off the Shar-Pei to land back onto the mountain of Dwarf Spitz, his precious load trying to nibble at a tail it couldn’t reach.

  He constricted the struggling prisoner just a little, trying to calm it down by forcing the air out its lungs. That tide, Dirofil felt a little bit Doratev.

  Dirofil held the heavy-breathing Chihuahua in front of his face and spoke to it:

  “Now I’ll see what your kind fears. Cooperate, it’s in your worst interest.”

  The picture of Leptos calling him “Kind one” popped unbidden in his mind. For a moment his tail trembled. For a spell his body told him to let go. But then he remembered that Kindness was self-explanatory: it was only owed to those he considered of his own kind. To Thinkers, not to the hunters of Thinkers. And while he chose to spare mutants he had no need to kill, Chihuahuas were enough of a nuisance to justify a little hatred.

  And besides, this one was for “science”.

  He deliberately lowered the creature into the chasm, meeting the terror in the eyes of the desperate, kicking animal with a coldness that few ever saw in the Fourth’s face.

  The distress in the actions of the creature readily revealed what Dirofil suspected: the snoozing Saint Bernards struck unparalleled fear into the hearts of the little shits. Why? Well, he was on the brink of finding out. Aligning the Chi with the nearest rooted monster, he let go with a sudden relaxation and retreat of his tail. For fractions of a second, the dog freefell, and, as soon as the paws of the chi found purchase on the nearly vertical surface, it was mere centimeters away from the rousing Bernard. Immediately threads of dense rheum shot from the commissures of the eyelashed “mouth”, sticking to the Chi, preventing it from climbing back to safety. The desperate dog clawed and bit at them, only ensnaring itself further, a cocoon of phlegm stuck to the wall of Pomeranians.

  The wails were as horrible as the sight unfurling before the Fourth Imagined. Because the eyelids opened, and below revealed not eyes, but more lids. And the lids under them opened, repeating the story, a seemingly endless succession of eyelids like Russian dolls, yawning to create a veritable maw, with the deepest lids stretching out, extending like a modular proboscis from the so-called mouth. Like a feeding snake the lids swallowed the fidgeting cocoon of mucus, dragging it deep into the body as it retracted and the parody of eyes closed once more. The cries intensified, something noticeable despite them being muffled by the tissues of the predator. Then came the cracks, the distressing snaps of bones being ground to splinters by means unseen. The squelches that gave place to silence. And then, as the rows of side-lids opened up much like the mouth had done, the excretion of a dark spray.

  Dirofil stood there, marveled at the sight before him. It was, in a very literal sense, a dog-eat-dog world. And despite his best efforts, he had to admit it: it couldn’t be more beautiful.