A sparrow said something.
It was too far away for Saskia to make out the words.
What? she said. What did you say?
She heard a second, closer sparrow repeat the words, but some of the sounds had changed. A third sparrow, closer still, repeated the words. Again they changed. Sparrow after sparrow carried the message to her.
Sparrow speaks to sparrow speaks to sparrow.
What are you saying?
At last, the closest sparrow turned to her and said, ‘Grey growth conceals the anger.’
What? What?
Another said, ‘Grade growing covers the rage.’
Ute, the sparrows are talking to me. What are they saying?
Below, her arm took position in front of her face and the dog bit her. Its teeth passed through to the bone and locked.
Scraping.
The eyes of the dog were pale rings on darkness, like the halo around the moon.
Saskia felt herself slipping. The fall, when it came, was like a fall in a dream. She tumbled and screamed. The flapping of the unseen sparrow wings blurred into a single tone, and the tone increased in pitch. At the same time, a terrific pain in her arm blotted out all thought, until she was back in her body.
The dog shook the arm. Once. Twice. With each shake, it rested, stared at her, and snorted great, stinking breaths. Saskia was drowned, deafened, by the hurt in her arm. Blood was running freely into her lap and the edges of her vision were retreating to a tight circle focused on the dog.
Grim day slew the rage, said a sparrow.
She had enough focus to think of the men. They were not nearby, as far as she could see. They had sent in the dogs to do the work.
The dog shook her arm again, but the movement was weaker.
Colourless, said a sparrow. Ideas.
Something was happening. The i-Core had acted.
Sleep, fury.
Saskia felt overwhelmed with tiredness. It was too much effort to push back with her arm any more. When the dog yawned, allowing her to work the arm off its hook-like lower teeth, she yawned as well.
Yes, said a sparrow. Sleeping furiously.
The dog licked its lips and sat. She stared at it in confusion. There was a drunken sway in her torso. For the first time, she felt the wet earth through her skirt and small knots of the apple tree, which had scored her back. The dog had shredded part of her jacket and blouse.
Her arm, however, was destroyed. While there was no arterial bleeding, the venous return tipped her blood steadily into her lap. She could not feel the outside of her forearm or move her fingers. Saskia understood, without quite knowing how, that the palmar cutaneous branch of the median nerve was severed. She held it to her chest like a child cradling a broken doll.
The dog stared at her.
Something twitched in her arm and she hissed with pain.
What is he waiting for?
Colourless green ideas slept, said a sparrow.
What?
Furiously, said another.
Everything is blood. It overwhelms me. But blood alone cannot describe this taste-smell. It is the life recipe of the woman I see. She is dangerous, interesting, forbidden, very much bleeding.
I shudder.
Saskia shivered. She could still feel her own mouth. When she licked her teeth, they were straight, and short. But the human body was a ghost, or a recent memory. The more immediate body was that of the dog.
The blood.
There is one word for the man. Love. He is everything. I need him.
As the dog trotted down the hill, slipping between the trees, Saskia felt—
Pain in my chest. Hurts when I breathe.
When I lick the blood.
When I—
She felt the chest muscles bouncing. Her nostrils moved independently now. What is it like?
When I lick the blood.
What is it like to be a dog? This dog.
I see the man. He is clear in the darkness. He holds the lead in a coil and I remember what it means to be whipped by it.
My chest—
Saskia gasped and slid sideways. Something had pierced her heart. Suddenly, her cheek lay against the wet earth, and she forced her eyes shut. I must not scream, she thought. I must not—
Yes, I see the man. I hear his breathing, the movement of his clothes as he stands there, and the wet noises of his mouth and lips. His body is tense.
This is my man.
Now, he is crouching.
Saskia does not want to experience what she knows to be coming. She feels nauseous and unable to stop the dog. Perhaps this is true; perhaps only the i-Core controls it now.
The pops and whistles of human speech emerge from his mouth. They mean he is pleased. I run my paws up his chest as we greet each other, and this signals to my man that he is in danger, but it is too late.
His throat comes away in my mouth.
Saskia rolled to her side and vomited.
He is making noises again. The breath-sound noises. They are loud and meaningless, but some element of them speaks to me; I must shout with him.
Shout.
She heard the dog bark.
Shout.
Another bark.
The blood gets in my nose. I sneeze. It is warm. Like the blood of the woman, it is particular to my man, a recipe of him alone, and the ways the juices mix are his secrets.
The secrets spill out. I hear them patter on the ground. They are rain.
What is it like to be my man?
What is—
Saskia sat up. She worked her jaw and blinked, screwing her eyes shut each time. She felt heavy, smothered by her clothes, and limited by her human nose. She was cold and uncertain of her role in the murder of the dog’s owner. Did the i-Core possess her, as it had possessed Cory? He had believed that his mind was his own. But that was untrue. His mind had been a cartoon of its former self. It had been a structure running within the i-Core and no more a real mind than blueprints were a real building.
No, she thought. I don’t believe that. He was real.
I am real.
‘You’re a tough one.’
Saskia blinked again. She looked up to see the last of the three men. He was dressed in tweeds and a night cloak. The clothes were new. Someone had given him cash and told him to blend in.
‘Not going to talk?’ he asked. The words were Russian but the accent Finnish. Saskia might have believed the man had been sent by Lenin himself, if Lenin ever handled these things personally.
‘I’m sorry,’ she said, in English. She could not help him.
‘What?’
The dog was silent until its last footfalls: eight of them, drum roll sounds of crushed moss and leaves. It exhaled when it jumped, just as a sniper will exhale at the shot. The man was slammed sideways by the impact. His head struck the tree, and this, she guessed, killed him before the dog bit the abdomen and the legs as though searching for something. When the dog reached his face and tugged out his cheek, probing the clenched teeth with its tongue, Saskia turned aside.