The care ledger claimed my retired K9 had been fed steak for six months, but the dog sleeping on my floor weighed thirty pounds and ate leaves.

The inside of the main building smelled of bleach, wet concrete, and ammonia so thick it burned the back of my throat.

There were no windows. A single row of dim fluorescent tubes buzzed overhead, casting a sickly yellow light over long rows of narrow wire cages set directly onto the damp floor.

Inside those cages were dogs.

Dozens of them.

German Shepherds with hips so weak they couldn't stand, Belgian Malinois with bare patches of skin where their fur had rotted from lying in their own waste, and old Labradors with clouded gray eyes who simply lay on the bare wire floors, too exhausted to raise their heads when the door swung open.

Every single cage had a brass tag wired to the front mesh.

Every tag bore an Army or Marine Corps service serial number.

MWD K901 - Max.

MWD K988 - Bruno.

MWD K912 - Sasha.

These weren't stray animals. These were the working dogs of the 75th Ranger Regiment, the 10th Mountain Division, and the Marine Expeditionary Units. The dogs that had cleared roads in Fallujah, Kandahar, and Mosul.

They hadn't been placed in loving homes. They had been kept in a dark warehouse on minimal rations so Northbridge could collect twenty-four hundred dollars a month per head while paying one college kid fifty bucks a day to throw dry kibble into their cages through the wire.

Earl walked down the center aisle, his tire iron hanging uselessly at his side, his face completely pale.

"My God..." the old man whispered, his voice cracking. "My God, what did they do to them?"

Rocky walked slowly beside me, his tail held low, stepping up to each cage one by one. He didn't bark. He reached his nose out through the wire mesh, touching noses with a blind German Shepherd whose ribs showed through his coat like the slats of a broken barrel.

The second worker—a younger guy holding a clipboard—came running out of the back office, stopping short when he saw us standing in the main aisle.

"Who the hell are you?" the kid yelled, his voice squeaking with panic. "You can't be in here! This is private medical research!"

I walked up to him, grabbed the clipboard out of his hands, and looked at the top sheet.

It was a disposal schedule.

Subject K901: Scheduled for medical termination - 09/30.