Tilting his head, he traced the vertical lines of metal from the grubby concrete floor, all the way up to where they disappeared into the gloom above them. Mr. Hamilton had said the cages extended up the full height of the building. Ori had no reason to doubt Mr. Hamilton’s word, but the space behind the bars still appeared claustrophobically small. Ori took a deep breath and tried to consider the cage as dispassionately as possible. Dust lingered on every surface. Cobwebs didn’t just fill the corners of the cage, they stretched out toward the centre of the space too. Ori did his best, but it wasn’t easy to focus on those details when every part of his psyche wanted to recoil in disgust. He was just as horrified by the view into the cage as he would have been if he were a prisoner staring out in the opposite direction. “As you can see, sire,” Mr. Hamilton said, from somewhere further down the gang-way that ran between two rows of similar cages.
