Very carefully, Grainger leaned over the operating table, digging both hands into the mutant's chest cavity.
'As I remove another section from just below the sternum,' she said, tugging at a stubborn strip of sinewy flesh, 'you can see an additional protective shield, a lightweight yet durable metal plate, covering the major organs.'
'I don't understand,' said Carrington, looking particularly haggard and drawn under the theatre's bright overhead lighting. 'Why would the creature have something like that inserted under the ribcage?'
Grainger placed a small piece of bone into a metal dish on a table to her right, peeled her blood-smeared surgical gloves off, balled them up and deposited them into the nearest waste receptacle.
'Like the second mouth–which is organic as opposed to surgically rendered–I can only assume that the child had been genetically engineered for a particular purpose, in this case, military activities of some kind.'
