What the Dog Knows

What've you got there.

Three words, light as a man asking after the weather, and the whole room reorganises itself around them. The soft box keeps burning. Adam's hand keeps its white-knuckled grip on the dead scratched tablet. And I have about one second, maybe two, to decide what kind of woman I am going to be in front of my brother-in-law, because Damien has stopped smiling and Damien only stops smiling when the numbers stop working, and right now the number that has stopped working is the one piece of proof I told Adam to hide, sitting in Adam's open palm under a light built to show every flaw.

The appetite is already moving. I feel it come up under my breastbone, fast and cold and clean, with the play fully formed, because of course she had a play for this, she had a play for everything. The play is: take it off him myself. Cross the room, laugh, pluck the prototype out of Adam's hand with a fond what is this old junk, you sentimental thing, and carry it out the door under my own elbow the way Damien carried my notebook, and make it nothing, make it noise, make it the kind of object a busy founder does not have ten seconds for. It would defang Damien instantly. It would tell him there is nothing here worth his attention. It would also put the first working Lantern, the only object on earth that has no paper trail to lie about, into the hands of the body that wants to bury me a second time. The appetite knows that. The appetite is counting on me being too frightened to see it.

I do not move.

"A bit of dead hardware," I say, and the cello does it bored, which is the hardest note to hit when your pulse is a drum, the rich careless boredom of a woman who has never had to worry about anything. "Adam's gone all maudlin about the old studio. He found a museum piece in a box. We were having a moment." I let one corner of my mouth go up. "You're interrupting."

It is the right register and I know it the second it is out, because Damien's eyes flick to mine, doing the arithmetic, founder-bored versus founder-frightened, and the bored reads true enough to give him pause. But Damien is not Petra and he is not the board. Damien has spent thirty-eight years learning to read his sister, and the body has spent two years learning to be read by him, and there is a thing under the boredom he can smell even if he cannot name it, the way Pim can smell it, the way the dog growls at the mirror.

His gaze goes back to the tablet. "Museum piece." He takes one step into the room and the frosted door sighs shut behind him, and now we are three, and the soft box hums, and I count us because the dread wants counting. One, Damien, both hands empty, my whole life no longer under his elbow, which means he put it somewhere and came looking. Two, Adam, who has just been told to hide this exact object and is now holding it in front of the man he was told to hide it from, and who is decent and slow and a beat behind, God love him, a beat behind. Three, me, wearing the woman they all answer to, the only person in this room who knows what the thing actually is.

"May I?" Damien says, and holds out his hand to Adam.

The body has a tell in moments like this, one I have learned to read like weather: my own hand, Cosima's hand, twitches toward Damien. Not toward Adam, to protect the prototype. Toward Damien, to give it to him. The appetite wants the loose thread cut and it does not care which set of hands does the cutting, hers or her brother's, as long as the thing that proves I existed ends up somewhere it can be lost. I feel the muscle fire and I flatten my palm on the table to kill it, the way I do, the way I have had to do a dozen times now, holding her own hand still against her own want.

Adam does not give Damien the tablet.

He looks at it. He looks at me, one fast unreadable flick, and then he looks at Damien, and the people-pleaser, the man who has spent his whole life handing the brightest person in the room whatever they reach for, closes his fingers over the dead screen.

"It's mine, actually," Adam says. His voice is not steady. It does not need to be. "Found it years ago. Sentimental thing, like she said." He slides it into his jacket pocket, the inside one, over the heart, and pats the outside of the fabric once, the way you pat a thing you have decided to keep. "Bit embarrassing, honestly. Don't make it a whole thing, Damien."

I have never loved him more and never been more afraid for him, both at once, in the wrong chest.

Damien's smile comes back. That is the worst part. It comes back on like a light, warm and even, and he lowers the empty hand, and he says, "Of course. Of course not," in a voice that means he has filed it, has stamped a date on it, has moved it to the column of things he will deal with later when there is no founder and no fiancé watching. He is not a man who fights for the object in the room. He is a man who notes where the object went and comes back for it at three in the morning. I know this the way I know the route and the espresso. The body has watched him do it for two years.

"I came to find you," Damien says to me, pivoting so smoothly it is almost graceful, "because Meridian moved. Their diligence lead wants the Lantern provenance pack by Friday. The full chain. Authorship, dated files, version history, the lot." He watches my face when he says it, the way you watch a board when you have laid a piece on it, and I understand that this, too, is a move. He has spent five weeks burying the basement files in cold storage so that when the buyers ask for the chain, the chain will be exactly as long as he decides it is, and no longer, and it will end well short of a junior designer in a basement. "I told them we'd have it together. Won't we."

We will not. We will have a chain with a fourteen-month hole in it, sealed under a two-of-three lock he holds a third of, and he knows it, and he is telling me he knows it in front of Adam, pleasant as Friday.

"We'll have it together," I say.

"Good." He turns to go, and stops at the door, and does the thing he does, the brother-in-law thing, the one that used to feel like family and now feels like a hand checking the lock. "You look tired, Cos. You've been off." A beat. "Petra's people said you got a bit lost in there. The origin story." His eyes are very kind. "Maybe don't do the documentary tired. The myth doesn't survive you forgetting it."

The door sighs shut on him and his empty, watchful hands.

For a moment neither of us moves. The soft box hums. Adam has his hand pressed flat to the outside of his jacket, over the prototype, over his heart, and he is looking at me with the question he has been not-asking for two years backed all the way up behind his teeth, and I have spent so much of myself holding this body still through one morning that when he opens his mouth I think, here it is, who are you, ask it, I do not know what I will say but ask it.

He does not ask it. He says, quietly, "I'll keep it safe."

And then, before I can answer, before I can decide whether the thing rising in my own throat is relief or grief or the cello reaching for one more lie, the dog starts.

I had not even registered Pim was in the building. The whippet has a bed in Cosima's office two floors up, a walker who delivers him mid-morning, and, since today began, a terror of me: he slunk the long way round the kitchen wall rather than pass me, he would not touch his bowl while I stood in the room, because animals do not read the face, they read the thing behind it. And somewhere above us through the glass and the steel he has started to scream. Not bark. Scream. The high, broken, drilling sound a dog makes at a thing that is wrong in a way a dog has no word for, and it does not stop, and it does not stop, and I feel the body go cold all the way down, because the body knows that sound. The body has heard Pim make that sound exactly once before.

This morning. When I woke up dead in this skin, Pim made that sound at the bedroom mirror.

"That's not nothing," Adam says, already moving, and I am moving too, the body taking the route before my mind has the floor, out the frosted door and into the corridor where two designers have stood up at their desks with the spooked-meerkat look of people who have heard an animal lose its mind, and the lift is too slow so I take the stairs, Cosima's heels in Cosima's hand, and I climb toward my own office and the screaming dog with the certainty arriving cold and total that Pim is not screaming at me.

I am two floors down.

Pim is on the eleventh floor, alone, screaming at something in Cosima's office.

I come off the stairs at a run and the corridor is empty and the office door is standing open, which it should not be, I left it shut, and the screaming is coming from inside it, high and broken and pointed at something I cannot see from the doorway. And under the screaming, under it and inside it, in my own mouth's exact timbre laid over the place where my pulse is loudest, the sleeper says the first full sentence it has ever offered me unbidden, patient and pleased and dry as a closing door.

He can smell which one of us is home.