New Decameron Forty-Eight: Nisi Shawl (Patreon)

White Dawn

by Nisi Shawl

Jerry smelled angry. “Most Philadelphians are human. Don’t you think we’ve made enough accommodations for animals in this block?”

Betty was wondering should they accept Baby Boo’s proposal, and she knew what Jerry meant about accommodations, sort of. The only reason Matty was even at this meeting was the new way into the garden at the block’s center; before, none of the houses around it had had floors that could hold up an elephant.

Still. “That ain’t fair,” Betty said through the box on her collar. “Matty herself done most of the work knockin down the old buildin we picked to get rid of, an it was fallin apart anyway.” And Matty had done all the hauling and tamping to make the ground safe, and as much of the construction of the barn replacing the old building as she could.

“Anyways, Baby Boo ain’t askin for some kinda special treatment for Dawn. She be a member of the pack--the block--” Best to use human terms. “--same like the rest of us. Like the rest a you.”

Jerry shook his head. Betty knew that meant no. “That’s not the way it works, Betty.” Sounding as if she was the pack’s omega instead of him. “You belong to Walter and Amy. You’re their dog. Baby Boo belongs to Gray Hawk. He’s her cat.”

Matty swished her trunk like when flies bothered her. “And me?  Who do I ‘belong’ to?”

Baby Boo lowered his eyelids without shutting them. His halo-shaped antenna was as crooked as ever. His voice came out of the box on his red harness. “I have always belonged exclusively to myself. Always.  Well before I could talk to tell anyone.”

Walter leaned forward. Betty realized it was so he could see around Amy, his littermate from their old pack. Seeing who you talked to mattered a lot to humans. “So since Dawn’s ‘owner’ wants to join her sweetheart’s block instead of ours we’re going to reject--”

“We haven’t voted yet.” Gray Hawk’s shoulders hunched over. “I was hoping we could reach consensus. We’ve only been meeting for a quarter hour.” Of course the group would do what she decided. Gray Hawk was their alpha--but maybe that was because she wanted everyone to agree on what was right.

“Could we try it one way? Then another?” Deucie, Gray Hawk’s mate, was a member of the “black” superpack, like Betty’s first humans, the Fraziers. Gray Hawk, Betty had recently learned, was “red.” Betty knew she was a beagle, but she still didn’t understand which race she was. It didn’t seem to have much to do with how you looked, though Baby Boo insisted he was black and white, like his fur.

Sometimes packs were mixed up like Gray Hawk’s, and sometimes they were just one “race.” The important thing about being in a pack was getting along. And when the meeting finished it was Jerry who volunteered to tell Dawn she’d be coming back to stay with them for a while after she and Rose, her human, moved into Shauneille’s block.

Dinnertime was coming. Matty usually ate grass and weeds and trees. Walter had set up a trade for her to clear a vacant lot three streets away. The elephant pulled gently at Betty’s ears a while, then left to eat. Betty sat up from where she’d flopped down, stretched her spine, and followed the scent of spicy muffins into the block’s baking house. Dawn was there, perched on a chair back. She was an albino, which meant whiter than she should be, and also she was a “Congo Grey.” Very confusing. If Gray Hawk was red, was Dawn White?  The scratching of her claws on wood sounded nice with the scraping noise Rose made scooping the last batter out of the metal bowl.

“Kin I lick it?” Betty asked.

“Sure,” Rose said, “but Dawn gets the spoon.” Her bracelet rang like a bell and she bent to open a door in the stove’s bottom.

Betty sniffed the hot, overwhelming goodness wafting out of the oven. To trick the human about what her mind was on she gazed up at the bird. Then she really did think about her. Dawn was a friend of Matty’s from the Pittsburgh Zoo. Matty’s friend. Hers, too, Betty had decided, but she wondered sometimes how an unmodded parrot could be smart enough for a packmate. “She ast for it?”

Rose held the wooden mixing spoon out to Dawn. “In her way.”

“Mine. Yummyummy. Mineminemine,” the parrot muttered. One foot clung to the chair while the other grasped the spoon’s handle. A long tongue curled out to lap away the batter.

Deep in her delicious bowl, Betty almost missed Baby Boo’s arrival. The cat’s scent flowed in from the kitchen window so strongly she finally realized he must be crouched right on its sill.  

“Hey,” she said, without stopping to look up.

“Eh-eh-keh-keh-keh-ih-ih-ih!” That wasn’t Baby Boo’s box! Why would he use his natural voice--had someone stolen his antenna again? More anti-mod lynchers? But the cat’s lopsided halo was in place--or as close to being in place as it usually got, and the box hung where it should.

Baby Boo’s sharp nose, ragged ears, and big eyes all pointed toward Dawn. The parrot flew to the washtub by the water pump and dropped the spoon in with a soft ploop. Betty checked, and sure enough, Baby Boo’s head had swiveled to follow her.

“Ek-kih-kih-kih-kih-ek-ek-ek--”

“What you doon?” Betty asked.

The cat started, rising up on his front paws. “Doing? None of your concern, whatever it is!” Before Betty could apologize--though she wasn’t certain what she was supposed to be sorry for--Baby Boo turned and let himself drop out the window’s other side.

“I used to have a cat who did that when she saw crows she couldn’t get to.” Rose sounded worried.

“Why?”

“Why did she make that noise? If I knew, I’d tell you. It’s called chattering.”

“No, I mean why she couldn’t get to them crows.”

“Oh, I never let her out. The way some people treat cats--even the unmodded ones? It’s terrible! Almost as bad as what they’d do to me if they found out I used to be a man. You wouldn’t believe the things....”

Betty was sure she would. Baby Boo used to have a whole tail. If Betty hadn’t rescued him he’d be dead.

She kept hold of that idea as she pushed aside the doorflap to the garden. Baby Boo had climbed on top of his favorite wheelbarrow bottom. He was crouched like he might be about to jump down, though, and his tail stub lashed steadily with a swish quiet as breath.

“Listen, I ain’t tryin to meddle where I got no business--” Betty began.

“Quiet! I need to tell you something. I have to figure out how.”

Betty sat down to wait. She knew it could be hard sometimes to get the right words for what you felt. The muffin aroma freshened up--another batch done. Dinner soon. A leaf fell off the nut tree growing over their heads, brushed along the barrow’s bottom, and landed on the grass. Then another. Then another.

“You hungry?” Betty finally asked.

“I don’t think so. I think I’m in love.” That stated, the cat settled down, tucking his paws underneath himself.

“In love? In love of who?”

“Dawn, of course. Don’t laugh! Is a cat in love with a bird any funnier than you and that elephant?”

“I ain’t said nothin!”

“Sorry. Just--” Baby snorted. “I’m just having difficulty admitting it.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s hopeless.” The cat flopped on his side and extended his forepaws. He let his head sink to rest on them. “Because we’ve been altered so we’re not even attracted to the animals we should be mating with, and now this!”

“‘Altered’? You means modded?”

“I mean altered. Desexed. Ever wonder why you’re not more interested in other dogs? Probably happened before you were modded. Your precious Fraziers did it to you.”

“But--”

“Come and get it!” Amy shouted from the baking house. She propped the door from the garden open with one arm and flapped a grease-and-onion-juice-covered towel with the other.

Betty trotted in to eat. Baby Boo stayed where he was.

#

The nights had been turning colder again, lately; Matty’s barn felt nice and warm. Elephants slept standing up. Gray Hawk had built Betty a bed on a shelf where Matty could reach to pet her with her trunk.

Circling around three times before she lay down, Betty heard the crackle and crunch of dried plants under her thick blanket. Summer’s flowers were dying, but their scents were going to live.

“I love you, Matty.” Betty licked the end of the elephant’s nose. A little bitter, a little salt.

“And I love you.” Matty’s voice box hung on a braid of silk; her antenna lay on her back, looking like a magic carpet. “You’re a wonderful dog, Betty. No one else is so kind and so brave.”

“But I ain’t a elephant, and you is.” She had been thinking it and now she said it. “I ain’t your mate. Is I.”

“Honey.” The trunk curled around Betty, hugging her. “You think you have to carry this burden? No. I won’t let you. We are mates. We are.”

“But we cain’t have no puppies, nor no--what you call em? Calves?”

“True.”

Was that Matty’s sadness Betty smelled? Her own? “I ain’t your size,” she went on. “And I got nothin to put in you like a elephant man do.” The way Matty’s dead mate from the Pittsburgh Zoo must have done...though Betty didn’t want to bring him up and make the smell sadder the way it got when she remembered about then.

Having somebody you love die or get hurt could make you hurt, too. It was dangerous.

“You have ideas.”

“I got ideas? What you mean?”

“You put ideas in me. I like that.”

“Ideas?” Betty stood up in bed and circled around a couple more times. She lay back down again. “What ideas you talkin about?”

“Ideas for ways to make humans in other packs act better toward animals. Ideas for work I can do to help the Collective. Ideas for keeping Pittsburgh from buying Philadelphia and kicking us all out of here if we don’t do what they say.” Matty pulled Betty’s left ear, then her right, then ran her trunk down Betty’s spine and tugged gently at the tip of her tail. “You’re full of good ideas--and some bad ones,” she added honestly. “But mostly things I wish I had thought of. But that I probably never would.”

“Really? You sayin I’m smart?” No one else ever had.

“I am!”

Betty fell asleep happy. She woke up with a new idea.

#

Once Betty was able to get Matty to stop sleeping and really listen to the idea, she cautiously approved of it. Morning sun streamed through the door Betty had shoved open, rewarming the elephant’s pungent nighttime dung. “Yes, but we’d better find out if it would work. Hmmm. Maybe even before we ask Dawn if she wants us to do it.”

“Nobody didn’t ast me.”

“All the more reason.”

Breakfast was pancakes and syrup. Rose came out into the garden for a little afterwards, but she brought Dawn. Matty said it would be better to wait to say anything.

Walter rolled the wheelbarrow over to the barn and inside. Betty followed him. He began shoveling up the week’s dung, odor upon delightful odor wafting free on the cool, crisp air.

“You think Jerry be less against Dawn joinin if she was modded?” she asked.

“Maybe.” Walter buried the shovel’s blade back in the soft pile. Shunk. “But she isn’t. Can’t be.” He lifted it up full. “Brain’s too little. Too smooth.” Tilted the shovel to empty it. Thunk. “You know that--it’s just the same as for rabbits.” Shunk.

Betty remembered hearing that and being glad she could keep hunting them. She also remembered wondering if what she heard was right. Thunk. “I know what you an the Collective tole me. But who tole them? Who tole you?”

Shunk. Walter held onto the shovel but left it standing in the dung. He was still a moment. “I don’t know about the Collective. I guess I first found out on my set-up? Yeah. I looked at the wiki on modding when Dad mentioned we were doing you.” He lifted another shovelful over the wheelbarrow. Thunk.

“And who tole the set-up?”

“Who told the set-up what?” Baby Boo had walked in without Betty smelling him.

“I’m tryin to fine out could Dawn get modded.”

“Why? She can talk already. Almost as good as I can.”

“They sayin her brain too small. Can’t make her smart the way they spozed to.”

“Nonsense.” Baby Boo thrashed his stub. “Ridiculous! If intelligence had anything to do with how big your brain is you’d be more intelligent than me!”

“There’s a set-up at the Collective’s headquarters,” said Walter. “See what you can find on it. I’ll go with you and run the controls if you need.”

“Thank you.” Betty was glad he wanted to help, but what good was a set-up search going to do?

#

Matty was too wide to fit the staircase. She waited outside in the street while Walter, Baby Boo, and Betty climbed up to the Collective’s rooms on the old college’s second story. She would be all right. Any anti-mod people that went past by accident would feel too frightened to attack someone so big.

Walter sat in front of a big screen tank. Baby Boo sat on his shoulder at first, but Walter asked him to get on the table instead. “I can’t see anything from here,” the cat objected. He jumped down into Walter’s lap.

Seeing was what this set-up mostly let you do, but Betty cared more about hearing. She stayed on the floor and asked Walter to turn on its speech.

The set-up had a calm way of talking. “Modding began as a trend among well-to-do pet-owners in the early Twenty-First--”

“We know that!” Baby Boo interrupted. “Scroll deeper, please.”

Walter acted like he was pushing a knob inside the tank. “Doctor Rue Pelasgitteridiae perfected the most commonly used neural mesh patterns, keying growth templates to analogues of human speech zones, and matching glial interfacing protocols by the simple expedient of making the animals’ own genetic programming responsible.”

“Wait!” Betty put both paws on Walter’s pants leg. “Kin you make it wait up a moment?”

“That was a little rich for the blood. Okay--” he pushed an imaginary button. The set-up stopped mid-sentence. “There. Let me know when to start again, or if you want to go back to an easier level?”

“Naw. That ain’t the thing. I heered somethin important--There a way to have it say all them same words?”

The second time, Baby Boo noticed too. “‘Most commonly used’ means not the only ones! Betty, you’re a genius! A genius among dogs!”

What they needed for Dawn was the opposite, the least commonly used patterns. Ones that didn’t depend on wrinkly brains like humans had. After searching another hour they didn’t learn anything about those kinds of neural meshes except they existed.

And then they were out of power. They had to shut the set-up down.

“We got to let the battery charge up a day,” said Dantay. He had come in while they were wasting energy. “Sun’s gonna shine all tomorrow.”

“That’s fine,” Baby Boo said, but he didn’t smell as if it was what he really meant. He rode home on Matty’s back. Even with Walter along he seemed nervous. Betty walked in front. Everyone they met was friendly; a goatkeeper gave Matty a bucket of milk that nobody had wanted to trade for, for nothing.

Gray Hawk had a fire going in her house. She opened the garden door and Matty stood outside with her face in the flickering warmth. Betty sat further in, but still where Matty’s trunk could reach her. Baby Boo curled up on the rug. Everyone shared the goat milk.

“You have a problem, right?” That was why you went to your alpha--to get help with problems. “What is it? What did you find out about modding Dawn?” Gray Hawk knew everything important her pack did.

“Didn’t find out enough,” said Baby Boo. “Maybe we should give up. She’s all right anyway, except some people seem to think modding is the only way to make you real.”

Matty said, “Basically, we think it’s possible, but not using standard methods.”

“So what do you want? How do I help?” Gray Hawk asked. 

“We wants you to come with us tomorrow to the Collective to use their set-up, cuz Walter sayin he too busy. An we might need to write a letter to see if this one doctor wanna help, which you would have the best idea how to say what we means.”

“Sorry. I can’t; I have to leave tomorrow for Toronto for the Gathering.” The Gathering of the Tribes. “It’s in a week, and I can’t afford a plane ticket.”

Humans kept track of that sort of stuff: how long things took, how fast they could go. How much things cost in money when you sometimes had to use it.

The other outside door opened; it was Deucie, done with teaching at the school. She finished the milk in Gray Hawk’s cup while listening to the problem. “I’ll go,” she said.

And maybe that was better, after all. Deucie wrote two letters: one she sent by the set-up, and one she printed out and gave to Dantay to put in the mail.

They never got a letter answering back either way. But right after Dawn and Rose moved out, Amy brought home a package from Dr. Pelasgitteridiae addressed to Matty.

#

“Are you going to open it?” Baby Boo extended his claws. “Or do you want me to?”

“No, no.” Matty shook her huge head. “I think we ought to wait till Dawn comes back.”

“But Amy said that’s your name on the outside. It’s your package, not Dawn’s.” The halo rocked forward as Baby Boo twitched his ears.

“And it’s from Dr. Pelasgitteridiae, so it’s something to do with modding. Modding Dawn.”

Betty knew how stubborn Matty could be. “Why don’t we go visit her ourselves an bring it along? Open it with her right there?”

Amy accompanied them. It was a long walk to Shauneille’s block, all the way on the other side of the Collective’s headquarters. Betty wished it was nearer the rabbits at the zoo. She would probably never be able to hunt them again if this worked.

The door to the main house opened before they were half up the block. “Hey,” said a whispery voice. “Come on in. Except--”

“It’s all right,” said Matty.

“No it ain’t,” said Betty. “You got no way she kin walk inside? Or a alley or sumpn?”

“If you go back up to Brown Street, turn right--I’ll meet you there.” The whispery woman started shutting the door again.

Baby Boo jumped off Matty’s back and went over to the door. “I’ll come with you.”

“Sure. Rose vouched for you all. Anybody else?”

Amy stayed with Betty and Matty. They walked back past the windows with glass in them, which didn’t let out any smells, and the others with just bars or wires, which smelled pretty interesting. Humans, of course, and the normal cooking and cleaning scents: apples and flour and vinegar and soap and so on. But then there were less familiar things: paint and glue--this pack must be making something to trade? Also, chickens (and their dung), which Jerry said at every meeting that the pack should raise. Betty thought they might taste nice. How smart were they, though?

The three of them turned the corner, and in a couple more houses came to a fence of metal boards. Matty and Amy knocked on it.

“Hold on.” The whisper was loud, yet still soft and cloudy at its edges.

“You know that elephant could simply break this thing down if she wanted to, don’t you?” said Baby Boo on the far side.

The gate swung in and they entered a garden where someone had been digging up potatoes. The fresh dirt was nice in her nose. There were also scents of bird droppings and stale bread and vegetable peels, and the clucking sounds of the chicken flock--and here came Rose, with Dawn sitting on her arm. “I see you’ve met Shauneille,” she said.

The whispery woman nodded. “Not formally, but yes.” She shut the gate. “I was on watch and Rose was keeping me company, or you would have had more trouble getting in here.

“This cat person says you received something in the mail--”

“For us? For me?” Rose asked.

“Not exactly.” Matty placed the package carefully on the short, damp grass. “I am the one the package is addressed to, but it’s--” The elephant stopped for a moment. “I guess I should tell you we’ve been trying to find out how Dawn could get modded. If she wanted to.”

“How--Dawn? But birds can’t--Can they?”

“Dawn, what you think? You wanna have you a mod?” asked Betty.

“Sweet deal! Sweet!” The parrot whistled and repeated herself.

“It’s not a scam, is it?”

“We don’t believe so,” Matty said. “We asked for help from the doctor who invented what most of us use. Unless someone else found out and sent this, I don’t see how--”

“You won’t see anything if you don’t open it.” Baby Boo had a point. Shauneille dug a folding knife out of her back pocket and started cutting. But even after the package’s string was off the box was held shut by tape, and after she sliced that apart Matty pulled another box from inside it. And a piece of paper with writing on it none of the animals could read.

All the humans could. Amy picked it up first. “To be administered over a period of sixteen days,” she said. “That’s not very long.”

“We wrote that she could talk already. Maybe there’s less changes to make in her brain. What else does it say?” Baby Boo leapt up on a pile of bricks and stood on his hind legs. He batted at the paper Amy held with his front paw. “How often to give it every day?”

“No.” Amy turned the paper over, but there was nothing on the back.

“I assume that’s the same as any birdfeed, morning and evening.” Shauneille was cutting open the second box. “But instructions would only take up one or two lines, and I see four or five fine print paragraphs on there. What are they?”

“Legal disclaimers. We’re not supposed to sue this woman if anything goes wrong with Dawn.”

If anything goes wrong. “Like what?” Betty asked.

Dawn flew off of Rose’s arm and perched on a branch above Shauneille’s shoulder. She leaned over the open box, which smelled sharp and dry and oily all at the same time. She cocked her head at it. “Good to eat?” she asked.

“Caint we test it first?”

“On what? On the chickens? Uninformed consent. It would be unfair.” Matty stamped her right foot. “No.”

“But how informed is Dawn? How informed were we?” Baby Boo dropped to all fours and wrapped his tail around his body. “We could just pretend we’re modding her. We don’t have to really do anything, do we? We only want to persuade Jerry--”

“Not just him,” Amy said. She stopped a lot between her words. “I wasn’t so sure myself about the implications of accepting an animal as a block member. We aren’t all vegetarians.”

“I agree there are going to be some ramifications,” Rose said. “‘It isn't etiquette to cut anyone you've been introduced to,’ as Lewis Carroll pointed out. None of us are ready to eat someone we can talk with.”

“Dawn already talks. As I said. And nobody’s planning to eat her.” Every part of Baby Boo was turned toward Dawn’s tree. His mouth opened and the creaky chattering sound came out, but only for a moment before he shut it again. “Not even me.”

Dawn flew down and landed on the edge of the feed box. “Dawn better do it. Dawn better do it now.”

“Ain’t you scared?” Betty would be.

Dawn bobbed up and down. “Dawn scared of poison. Dawn scared of bad guys too. Dawn has to do it. Bad guys. Bad guys. Dawn has to do it now.” One bob, two bobs. Her beak touched the feed. Dug a hole and stirred it up. The oily seedy scent spread anew all through the air.

Baby Boo jumped off the bricks and “At least let us try to find out more--”

Rose bent to hold her hand up in his way. “Dawn. What bad guys? What are you talking about? We left the bad guys behind us, in Wilmington.”

“Dawn better do it. Bad guys coming. Bad guys coming. Dawn has to do it now.”

Rose argued with her bird. Dawn kept insisting that “bad guys” were a threat.

“You can’t unteach a parrot to say something,” Rose complained. Where she came from, people wanted to kill her for not being a man anymore, she explained. Dawn was trained to listen for killers, warn if they were sneaking in. Then she and Rose had escaped their home and traveled to a safe place: here. In time, according to her human, Dawn would worry less. She’d forget to watch out for the bad guys, and relax.

In time. But not today. Not now. Today she seemed to want to start her modding.

Amy read the disclaimers out loud. There was nothing specific on the feed’s dangers. Rose didn’t want to give it to her, but Shauneille and Matty really thought she should. Betty wasn’t sure. But it seemed like Dawn was.

She ate a handful of the feed. She lapped some water from the chicken’s trough. And nothing happened, of course.

Not then.

#

The agreement that had come out of the meeting of Gray Hawk’s block was that Dawn would first go along with Rose to live in Shauneille’s block for two weeks, and then return to Gray Hawk’s for two more. After that it would be time for another meeting and Baby Boo could ask again for the parrot to be admitted. Dawn’s treatment had only gone on eleven days when Rose accompanied her back to Gray Hawk’s, then left her and the mod feed in Betty and Matty’s care, and the perch she slept on.

Baby Boo began sleeping in the barn then, too. Well, not exactly sleeping. He took naps. But also he went hunting. Betty was worried, because she remembered how he’d gotten caught one time outside the block and almost murdered. If he got hurt again how would she stand it?

Also, would Baby Boo lose his control and eat Dawn? The parrot didn’t seem to mind him paying a lot of attention to her. She would shift around in front of him wherever she was perched, but not as if she was nervous. And all her movements brought her nearer to the cat. She flew toward him. Nearer and nearer. Never away.

Betty believed she understood. She knew she wanted to keep getting nearer and nearer to Matty. Even though they couldn’t always be in the same place. They weren’t always now. They hadn’t always been.

The first night Dawn stayed with them Betty had a dream where she was in Matty’s old zoo when the bad stuff happened. Smells of burning and the horrible sounds of howling screams kept her running, running to find what would make it stop. Nothing did. At last she woke up, wedged hard against the barn’s wall, curled up tight and whimpering.

The elephant’s eyes were shut, her trunk neatly doubled. Betty wished she could jump as good as Baby Boo; she would get on Matty’s high, wide head and turn in circles till she found a new position in which to rest. Just to be that much nearer.

But she didn’t have to. Matty opened her eyes. “You were crying,” she told Betty. “I couldn’t sleep. Is something wrong?”

So Betty described her nightmare. “That what it was like for you?”

“Yes. And once in a while it still is.” Matty rocked a little, side to side. “Other nights I make a difference. Other nights I set them free. Other nights there’s be a happy ending. It never lasts for long, though. I wake up the next day and everything’s the same and they’re all dead.”

“Don’t it make you wanna--” Betty didn’t know what she was trying to say. “Don’t it make you wish you never be sad again?”

“Bad stuff happens.”

But not to them. Not then. Betty rolled so her belly invited Matty’s trunk to cuddle her. She laid one foreleg over its supple length and dozed off with her muzzle on its soft, thick warmth.

During the second night, the second time Betty woke up, Baby Boo and Dawn were both gone. Not good. Was this what she’d dreaded? No feathers, though. No sign of a fight.

Betty followed the cat’s scent. It was easy. Sometimes Baby Boo walked on things higher than the ground, but only for short distances. Besides, she knew now his favorite ways to get out. Sure enough, the trail ended where Gray Wolf stacked the trays of canning jars. There was room for a cat to crawl between them into the house beyond. Betty was bigger than Baby Boo, but she was able to push the trays aside and get through without waking up Matty.

The empty house was silent. Ignoring the mice and bats and bugs and other interesting odors, Betty stuck to her task.

Baby Boo had passed over the house’s wood floors and mildewed carpets quickly. The front door had another little door in its bottom, and one of the boards fastened over it was loose there. She was just able to squeeze through.

Outside, Baby Boo’s scent continued. No sign of the parrot, though.

Dawn could fly. She should be all right. Maybe it would have been better to wake Matty up before leaving the block, though. Maybe Betty should have let her know what she was doing. Would the elephant have worried about her then? Less? More?

Betty would have expected Baby Boo--and Dawn, if she was with him--to go to Shauneille’s block. Away from where the rabbits slumbered, full of quietly beating blood. But they went further than that even. A long way for a cat to go, on sidewalks slimy with wet, dead leaves, down roads where stacks of wood and rusting metal waited for salvagers to haul them away.

Baby Boo’s scent vanished. Betty cast about without finding it, then sat still and listened. A section of the grape vine climbing the building beside her didn’t rustle in the wind as much as it should. Something was holding it down--something or someone.

She guessed that was where the cat was hiding. She wished Matty was around to lift her up there. “Hey!” Or change her box’s volume. She chanced calling out again: “Hey!”

A slithering descent shook the vine. “Will you shut up! Dawn’s right outside their window--she could get caught!” Baby Boo’s voice was turned way down.

“You ain’t gotta be so mean.”

“You don’t have to be so loud!” Baby Boo walked away from the vine, toward an old, rotting porch across the street. Betty followed him underneath it.

“I’m not going to lie,” said the cat. “This was mostly my idea. I thought we’d spend a little time alone together, the two of us, and get some training under Dawn’s belt--can you imagine the potential? She’s the perfect spy! No one’s going to suspect a bird--everybody knows you can’t mod them!

“But apparently the ‘bad guys’ really were coming here.”

“How she fine that out?”

The cat tilted his head one way, then the other. “The same way you or I would, I guess.”

She’d smelled them, then. “So now what we gonna do? Tell the Collective they’s troublemakers come to town?”

“You don’t know much about government, do you?” Baby Boo had lived in Philadelphia for years; Betty had only been here since the spring before last. “Until they do something wrong here it will be impossible to get rid of them, no matter what Rose says happened to her in Wilmington. We can only keep on guard and listen to their meetings to find out what they’re plotting. Like tonight.

“Dawn’s had enough--”

Bam! The smash of wood on stone. Screams and growls and curses blared into the night. “Got it!” shouted a human. “Shit! No! Fuck! Shit!”

Betty was suddenly alone under the porch. A plume of loose cat fur settled on her snout. “Let her go! Let her go!” That was Baby Boo, but humans would never be able to hear him over the screeching and squawking and yelling coming through the thrown-open window.

She raced across to help. But what could she do? Confused, Betty started barking, jumping as high as possible. She saw steps to the right and ran up them to a closed door, scrabbling against it uselessly.

Baby Boo’s tense whisper of “Come on!” stopped that.

“What?”

“She’s loose. She got away. Come on!”

#

They went back to the block while it was dark, when humans had a hard time seeing. They hid sometimes anyway, just to be sure the bad guys wouldn’t catch and kill them, though that made the trip take longer.

Matty had woken early. for once, and when she realized they were missing she got everyone else up to go search. The whole block had gathered in the garden, but the moment Betty and Baby Boo and Dawn got back the rain began. The cold rain. Baby Boo invited everyone into the barn, though it wasn’t technically his. So that was where they were, making decisions while the morning faded in.

“You rescued yourself. Smart bird.” Jerry stroked Dawn’s head feathers slowly.

“Dawn is free. Dawn is free.” The parrot talked the same way she always had. Jerry was listening to her differently, though. More seriously. He wasn’t the only one. Especially when she described what the bad guys had tried to do, and what they’d actually done.

“Kidnapping is a crime,” Deucie said. She and the other humans sat on bundles of Matty’s food.

“But if Dawn’s not fully modded, she’s only Rose’s property. Could we accuse them of theft? Attempted theft?” Amy put her hands on Betty’s back. Betty had been Amy’s property. Not anymore. She could go anywhere she wanted, by herself. She trotted across the barn to Matty’s feet.

Matty’s trunk curled away and ignored her. But Betty could tell she wasn’t only and exactly angry: the elephant reeked of fear. Fear and the memory of pain.

Deucie didn’t act like Amy’s suggestion would work. “We’d need to ask Rose to press charges. I doubt she’d want to draw that much attention to herself.”

“The treatment is only supposed to last a few more days,” said Baby Boo. “Can’t we say it’s already over?”

“We aren’t going to lie!” Matty must have been shocked by what Baby Boo was saying, because she pushed Betty protectively to a spot beneath her wide belly. Without out thinking. With only love. Betty lay down and thumped her tail five happy times. She and Matty were going to stay together. Even if right now they had a fight.

“Fine, then.” Baby Boo hopped on Gray Hawk’s lap, turning his nose and eyes the direction his ears had been pointing since they got here. The direction of Dawn. “Keep her here the rest of the week. Don’t get the bad guys arrested till we catch them doing something bad.”

“Dawn helps. Dawn stays. Dawn helps. Dawn stays secret. Dawn stays secret.”

“But they knows you here,” Betty objected. Safe under Matty she relived her helplessness as Dawn cried and struggled out of reach, up above.

“Dawn hears. Dawn talks. Talking secret. Dawn talk secret.”

“Wait--you means--” Betty felt like she needed a bigger head. Like her brain was so little it rattled around inside her giant new idea. “--if we don’t tell no one you modded--”

“Talking secret! Talking secret!” Dawn bobbed her head like a human nodding fast.

“--won’t nobody--includin those bad guys--realize you spy on them for us. And we gonna learn they every plot. That what you wanna say?”

“Yesyes! Secret! Yesyes! Secret!”

“But you’ll get hurt!” Baby Boo’s mouth was open. He panted.  

“Maybe she will,” said Matty. “Bad stuff happens. Even to free people.”

“But I love you. If you’re hurt, that hurts me.” The cat’s tongue pulsed with every panting breath.

“Bad stuff happens. Even to people you love.”

Dawn began suddenly to preen. Betty thought that was strange. Just as suddenly, the parrot stopped, pulling a feather from one wing with her strong beak and dropping to flutter gently down toward Baby Boo. The cat grasped it firmly in his teeth, leapt to the ground, and disappeared with it. Then Dawn flew to the far side of the barn, to the dish with the day’s serving of her special feed, and began to eat.

*****************************************

"Pancakes," he says. "And spicy muffins, which smell great!"

Maya takes her share and bites into a muffin. "It's a strange story, but I really like it," she says, with her mouth full. "All those animals. And so interesting what the dog understands and what she doesn't."

"Yes," he says. "They're all family. She often writes about family, and this is one of her strangest ones, all those animals, the parrot and the elephant, and the people too, black and white."

"That's a great kind of family," Maya says, finishing her muffin. "Should we save some of these for breakfast?"

He glances towards the window, where the long angle of the light is indeed declining towards another sunset. "Good idea. But we have time for another couple of stories, I think. Shall we take them downstairs?"

The cat licks butter of Maya's fingers and purrs, and does not want to get down when Maya wants to stand up. Maya detaches him, and they stand, leaving four muffins on the table in case breakfast is hard to find. They stop in the bathroom, and then go downstairs and settle themselves at the table at the back and switch on the green shade. "What have you brought to read?" Maya asks.

"I thought we'd have time for two things," he says. "So first, we have the beginning of C.S.E. Cooney's novel The Twice Drowned Saint."

"Great title," Maya says enthusiastically.

And they read.