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Apparently, there were refrigeration coils in my spine

All the rhesuses we had seen thus far had been about two feet tall They were trouble enough At four feet, they would constitute a different nitude of threat

"Major head," Bobby said

"What?"

"Four feet tall, big head"

"How big?"

"I didn’t try toas yours or mine"

"On a four-foot body"

"Top-heavy And risly"

Bobby leaned forward over the steering wheel, squinting through the windshield

About a block away, so About the size of aone hand on the shotgun, I said, "What else?"

"That’s all I saw, bro It ay fast"

"Soonna be a bunch of that"

"Tu object

Neither of us relaxed

With the ine that the park across the street arh in--thethat had alalow, Bobby said, "Thirty? Man, they’re busy breeders"

I told hiht and thecars, trying to date our women"

He finished his beer and handed the empty bottle to me, which I planted upside down in the ice chest

Fro It was probably just one of the shop signs swinging on its s, disturbed by the breeze

"So Jimmy could be anywhere in Wyvern," Bobby said "What about Orson?"

"The last I heard hi from here in Dead Town somewhere"

"Here on Commissary Way or over in the houses?"

"I don’t know Just this direction"

"Lot of houses over there" Bobby looked toward the residential streets on the far side of the park

"Three thousand"

"Say like fouraround the clock, to go through all of ’em And you don’t do day work"

"Orson’s probably not in any of the houses"

"But we have to start somewhere So where?"

I didn’t have an answer Besides, I didn’t trust

"You think Orson is with Jied

"Maybe this is one tiested

Manuel Raht Bay He had once been a good man, but like all the cops in town, he had been co-opted by higher authorities

"Maybe," Bobby said, "in this case, Manuel’s interests are the saot the manpower for a search"

"He’s not just corrupted by the feds," I said "He’s becoenetically afflicted use to describe the physical,place in thee and reached a crisis

Bobby was surprised "He tell you he’s beco with him I don’t trust Manuel"

"Hell, I don’t entirely trust reatest fear--that we ht not ht start beco aware of the changes taking place

I sucked down the last of the Heineken, jaotta find Orson," I said

"We will"

"Crucial, bro"

"We will"

Orson is no ordinary dog My ht him home from the Wyvern lab when he was a puppy Until recently, I didn’t realize where fur face had come from or how special he was, becausehis secrets The intelligence-enhancement experiments were conducted on monkeys and on hardcase lifers transferred fros, cats, and other anined for paws, and because he lacks the co, he isn’t capable of speech He understands everything, however, and in his oay he makes himself understood He is smarter than the ence At least

Earlier, I suggested that the ave them the ability to drea them lost outside the natural order But if this explains their hostility and thirst for violence, why should Orson, who is also outside the natural order, be so affectionate and good-hearted?

He is trapped in a body that serves his enhanced intelligence less well than the monkeys’ bodies serve them He has no hands, as they have, and his vision is comparatively weak, as is that of any domesticated breed of canine

The monkeys have the communal comfort of the troop, but Orson endures in a terrible solitude Though ht have been created, I’ve yet to encounter another Sasha, Bobby, and I love him, but we are too little comfort, because we can never truly share his point of view, his experience Because he is, at least for now, a singularity, Orson lives with a profound loneliness that I can perceive but never fully co his friends

Maybe his basic doggie nature explains why he doesn’t share the s were put in this world to ree, patience, and good humor are the qualities that, with honesty, are the essence of admirable character and the very definition of a life well lived

In good Orson I see the hopeful side of ht into an often dark world, to lift us up, to stir the spirit and to remind us that the universe is a place of wonder and infinite potential

She did, in fact, hope to accoical-weapons project solely because this was the only way to obtain the high level of funding needed to realize her design for a gene-splicing retrovirus, which she believed could be used to cure many illnesses and inherited disorders--not least of all, ood reason She did it trying to help me Because of me, all of nature is now poised on the brink Maternal love beca of ultimate terror

So…you want to talk about your conflicted feelings for your mother?

Orson and I are her sons I am the fruit of her heart and womb Orson is the fruit of her mind, but she created hiuratively We are bound not by blood but by our mother’s passions, and in that sense we share one heart

If anything were to happen to Orson, a part of me would die--the purer part, the better part--and die forever

"Gotta find him," I repeated

"Faith, bro," Bobby said

He reached for the key in the ignition, but before he could switch on the engine, a sound arose, louder than the softby the second

Bobby put one hand on the Smith & Wesson in his lap

I didn’t drawof wings Many wings

Like wind-torn shingles froht, tusparallel to the pave in our direction The hundred birds I’d seen earlier were surely part of this apparition, but another hundred had joined them, perhaps two hundred