Chapter ONE

There was no time. Germany had to keep running. She pounded through the alleyway, her breath coming ragged in her throat, frenzied to escape any way she could. Turning and looking back over her shoulder as she ran, she watched the men come after her as though it were in slow motion. The alley was dark, the walls and floor slimy with unknown, glowing substances. The sky above her head was gray with smog so thick you’d have to cut it with a knife. The air smelled of chemicals she couldn’t recognize, couldn’t even try to recognize, because the effort would slow her down. She had to concentrate, always concentrate on what she was doing, because if she didn’t, she might slow down and that would be deadly. Rats and small white escaped lab mice battled for life-and-death between barrels that lined the alley. Some carried radiation warning labels that she didn’t understand but knew she’d seen before. Her back leg slipped in a puddle that resembled some kind of green Jello-like substance. She refused to acknowledge it. If the dangers in the alley were bad, the dangers of her pursuers were a thousand times worse.

Two men were chasing her, their feet slapping the bricks not quite as fast as hers, but fast enough to be a threat. The larger man was very tall, maybe about six feet, and he carried a long pole with a net on the end. She knew that if he managed to get close enough he would drop the net over her head and pull her in, as easily as if he were going fishing in a lake. She knew because he’d done it before. This was not her first attempt at escape, but she vowed it would be the first that was successful. The second man was very short – if the first were six feet, he had to be about four – but he was just as dangerous, if not more so, because she saw the gun he carried in his right hand. It was a DNA-shooter. Rather than your normal gun with bullets of gunpowder, this was a high-tech weapon-of-the-future manufactured by the factory. It fired darts, and if one of its darts pierced your skin, it was all over for you. Specially bred viruses inhabiting the tip of the dart multiplied rapidly in the bloodstream. Within seconds, your DNA mutated, changing your physical appearance permanently. Then the men would catch you and take you back to the factory. Maybe, if you were lucky, they wouldn’t kill you right away. They might decide that your mutation was particularly unique or interesting, and maybe it wasn’t worth killing you. Maybe you were more valuable alive. You would be locked up in a steel cage, not too big, but not too small. Every day they would come for you and take you into a big room, where the tools lining the walls glittered as instruments of torture and the floor was blood-red marble, and they’d strap you down on the table in the middle of the room. Your back would be numb with the cold; the temperature was kept very low so as to slow down the heart rate; your limbs restrained by thick harnesses, your head fuzzy and foggy from the injections. Then, oh yes, then, they would have you.

Sometimes you would wake up and there would be a new scar on your body. Again, if you were lucky, it would be on a part of your body that wasn’t necessary for everyday life, but that was highly uncommon. Normally, the men made an incision about a foot and a half long down your chest and over your stomach. It wouldn’t be very wide, but it would be very deep. They would tamper with your DNA, with your very genetic makeup. Once you’d been under their knife, you would never be the same again. There were some who woke with new limbs, strange things protruding from their bodies, depending on what DNA they’d received. Some woke with special powers. Their eyesight or scent changed. Some bodies were mutated. Necks became longer, legs shorter. Tails disappeared. Eyes changed color. There was no way of knowing what would happen until you woke up, and then there was no way of changing it. Germany could not go back. She could not let them catch her.

She’d escaped just a moment before, and she hadn’t gotten very far. The factory was a deserted area. It’d been built in the slums of New York City, in an area most people already didn’t visit, so it wasn’t very hard to keep everyone away. It was believed by most of the small children that the Doctor had some kind of mad Frankenstein living in the factory with him. They were too frightened to approach. The Doctor only worked with animals, but he couldn’t risk being found out. The policy stated that any human outside of the factory workers who discovered what went on inside had to be killed. Sometimes the remains were spliced and human extremities fixed onto the bodies of test subjects. The FBI and other authorities still could not figure out what happened to everyone who disappeared.

A long alley ran along the back side of the main factory itself. Huge smokestacks mounted on the walls puffed gallons and gallons of smog into the atmosphere. It was impossible to see the blue sky and, flying, it was impossible to reach the blue sky until one traveled over a hundred miles up. The air was dense and thick as pea soup. Germany ran through this alleyway now. Her pursuers were the same men who had, three days before, been her caretakers. She’d had her last operation yesterday and overheard the Doctor when he’d mentioned having her killed and her body taken apart for further experimentation. He’d made the SuperDog, but he wanted it dead and not alive. The problem with his plan, though, was that she had other ideas.

When she’d lived in the factory, she’d been the Doctor’s pet. She underwent surgery almost every day, until it became a part of her daily life, something she was used to tolerating. There were more scars on her body than there were bars in her cage. They crisscrossed her stomach, white ropes of scar tissue each about a foot and a half long. Her DNA had been combined with the DNA of more than a hundred other animals, but her body showed no physical sign of changes. The Doctor was fascinated with her. At first, he’d thought that all his work had been to no avail, because all his other test subjects had developed strange new limbs or vast horrible mutations in their old ones, but she showed no signs of anything being done – apart from her scars. He was about to have her killed when her neck became elongated, rubber-like, and she sank her teeth into his ear while not moving from her prone position on the table. Then he forgot all about his murder plans and became, instead, incredibly excited. She was, indeed, the SuperDog. By the time the operations were finished, Germany could do anything from fly to swim more than 100 mph to live underground and eat worms. She was the most dangerous thing he’d ever created. And she hated him.

None of his previous test subjects had ever shown any real signs of animosity. Most were so afraid they trembled and shook in his presence and would never have dreamed of hurting him in any way whatsoever. But from the first day one of his men brought Germany in to the factory, a squeaking, wriggling ball of German Shepherd covered in puppy fuzz, to the day she’d burst out the door of her cage, overpowered her caretaker, and escaped, she’d hated him and demonstrated her hatred every chance she got. There’d been the first time she went under the knife as a six-week-old puppy, when she sank her tiny, sharp canines into his finger and drew blood, and things just went downhill from there. The Doctor had her anesthetized if he planned on going within five feet of her for his safety. The SuperDog could take care of herself, and she knew it.

Germany’s main problem was that she couldn’t always control her own powers. She hadn’t had them very long, and she was even still learning more about herself. She’d tried to escape several times before and made it at least part of the way, but something had always happened, and she’d been caught again. Once she’d used her beaver teeth and chewed a hole through the bars of her cage. She managed to make it to the back door then before her legs shortened to those of a turtle. Needless to say, she was easily caught and moved into a larger, stronger cage. Beaver teeth may be powerful, but even they can’t chew through titanium. Then there’d been the time her muzzle morphed into the snout of an alligator while she was eating. That proved quite handy. She bit off the hand of the man assigned to change her bedding, jumped past him, and made it all the way outside before her legs became like the fins of a goldfish and she was rendered motionless again. But that’d been before the operations were complete, when she still had no idea how to control herself. It was somewhat easier now, now that she was older with a longer attention span and more power over her own thoughts. Because that was the key. As long as she concentrated entirely on what she was doing, she could control her morphing. She could use the abilities of whatever she chose, but the moment her concentration slipped, it was all over. Other animal DNA took over, and there was no knowing what she would do next. Concentration was the most important thing. The only problem with that theory was that the SuperDog was a dog who hadn’t learned to sit on command until she was four. Her attention span, at its best, lasted for about ten seconds. It’d taken a great deal of training for Germany to hold any one morph for more than three minutes, and she was still drained if she lasted more than five. She’d been running with the legs and speed of an ostrich for at least four. Her head was beginning to hurt. There wasn’t much time left. She had to switch morphs, and quickly, or she’d be caught again, and that couldn’t happen. Not this time. If she were caught once more, it was almost certain that that would be the end of the SuperDog for good.

The alley ended in a few feet at a brick wall maybe about ten feet high and a foot or two thick. There was no escape that way but up. The men were closing in – if the taller one got any closer, it was almost certain that he could reach her with his net, and despite her legs and speed, she’d have to morph pretty quick and chew her way out or he’d tranquilize her and it’d all be over. Part of Germany’s mind wanted to panic. The ostrich was a creature that spent half its life burying its head in the sand, and she didn’t have only the DNA of its legs but its unique set of instincts as well, so she had to restrain herself from shoving her own neck into the cement or curling up into a ball in the corner the entire time. But she didn’t have much more time to decide what to do. The familiar pounding in her head was becoming worse and worse. Her concentration was slipping and, as it did, the men gained. The taller yelled after her, his voice echoing down the alley and frightening the mice, all of which scurried rapidly for the dark corners. The ostrich half of Germany wanted to do the same.

“Don’t worry, 64D. No need to run any further. You’re trapped.”

Germany’s kennel number had been 64. She’d been one of the Initial 100 – that was the name the Doctor gave to the first animals he’d ever worked with. His goal had been to turn each of them into a Super – i.e., the SuperCat, SuperRat, SuperBeaver, etc., -- but after what happened with Germany, he decided it was safer to settle for one SuperDog. He couldn’t risk turning 100 SuperCreatures against him. The danger would be too great. Then, however, he had to decide what to do with the rest of the Initial 100. They were all killed and stuffed, and their bodies stored in the deep freezers beneath the factory, each one labeled similarly – 1A, 2A, etc. Even now, as Germany raced frantically through the dim alleyway, there was an empty freezer in the depths of the factory with her “name” on it, 64D; “D” for dog, of course. The Doctor didn’t believe in wasting anything. There was always, he believed, an experiment that could be performed, and any discovery in the name of Science was always important. This was unfortunate for Germany, however, as it made him only more determined to see her body in one of his freezers, and her only more determined not to let that happen.

Germany drew up suddenly at the foot of the wall. She’d been letting her mind wander, her concentration drift, and the ostrich legs were disappearing more and more with each second that went by. The urge to hide in a corner was also disappearing, to her great relief, but the men were only a few feet away now, and she had to do something fast. The pounding in her head had slackened off enough so that she could think. It was long past the time to think.

“Hawk. Hawk. Hawk. Hawk. Think hawk.”

“Why don’t you just give up, 64D? It’s over. You’re mine.”

“Hawk. Hawk. Gotta be a hawk.”

Slowly Germany focused her thoughts on an image of a hawk, a large bird spreading its beautiful wings and soaring up, up, up, over the buildings and trees and fences and particularly away from the factory and the men with a big stick and a big gun and the Doctor with his long, shiny knives. It took a great deal of concentration for her to do this. If she were a human, she might’ve rolled up her sleeves, but as it was, she merely furrowed her brow and waited. She felt her legs shrink up into her body and spread out again, her bones splitting and dividing to form the complicated spider-webbed network that makes up a bird’s wing. Her fur slowly disappeared and was replaced by a light coating of snow-white feathers soft as the coat of a newborn kitten. This was covered by the thicker, harsher feathers of the hawk’s outer coat that reached down all the way to the tips of her wings and back up again. Then the more complicated changes began. Her body itself began to shrink, her vision to sharpen. She suddenly felt the heat radiating from her pursuers. Her back legs shriveled and became thick, leathery talons. Her toenails hardened and lengthened into claws as her muzzle sank into her face and formed the sharp, dangerous beak of the red-tailed hawk. Her organs were rearranged, her very bone structure adjusted, as her ears shrunk into her head and disappeared. The underweight German Shepherd was suddenly replaced by a beautiful, deadly predator. She spread her wings, prepared herself for flight, and –

Suddenly found herself trapped under a thick canvas net.

She’d known that the metamorphosis was taking too long, but there’d been no other option. Unfortunately, there wasn’t another option now, either. She was good and trapped. Unless…

The taller of the two men dropped the handle of the net and came forward. Crouching down, he peered at the hawk feebly beating its wings under his net. “So, 64D, you really are the SuperDog, aren’t you? Too bad it’s curtains for ya now. The Doc won’t have you around. Says you’re too dangerous for him. I guess I can see why.”

“C’mon, Mikey, whattaya taking so long for? It’s creepy out here. I just wanna go back home,” the smaller man whined, inching closer to Germany and peering at her out of thick, foggy glasses. Now that she saw him clearly, she realized that he was not only short but round. Both wore white uniforms, though neither was spotless, but the shorter man’s was stretched tight around a formidable belly while the taller one’s hung limply on his lanky form. Germany huddled under the net and made sure that her body was racked with feeble shivers. For her plan to work, and it was of dire importance that her plan did work, she had to appear terrified. The less of a threat she was, the more the men would lower their guard, and the greater her advantage of surprise when she actually did attempt escape.

“Aw, lookit her. She’s frightened of us. Bill, you think we really have to bring her back? I mean, they’re just gonna kill her, and she doesn’t look that threatening, y’know.”

“Mikey. We do what he tells us. We gotta take her back to the factory. The more we stand here yacking, the scarier this place gets. I wanna go back home,” the shorter one whined desperately, grabbing the handle of the net away from his partner. “I say we go now and just forget about her. We’ll all be a lot better off when she’s lying in some freezer somewhere. Trust me.”

Germany was getting nervous. The clock was ticking away, dwindling her five minutes down to four. She wouldn’t be able to hold the form much longer. Then she had a better idea. She lay down on her side, tucking her wings underneath her body, and began a series of jerking twitches. After about five, she let her head fall limply to the ground and held her breath. All movement stopped.

“Hold on a sec. She’s not moving,” the taller man said suddenly, bending over and peering cautiously down at the limp hawk. “Think we might’ve hurt her? The Doctor won’t like that much.”

“I dunno. Should we get her out from there so we can have a better look at her?” Bill asked, dropping the handle of the net and coming forward to squat down with his partner. The alley was hushed. Darkness was falling. Even the rodents in the corners had stopped their play as the two men hunched over the limp figure of a beautiful red-tailed hawk trapped under a canvas net.

Germany opened one eye. Now was the time.

She waited until the men were very close to her body, checking for any sign of movement. Then she flung herself up into their faces, beating her wings wildly. With her sharp beak, she snapped wildly at the fabric of the net, trying to chew a hole through it, at the same time as she scratched frantically at the bodies of her tormentors with her talons. They scrambled for her, trying to throw their weight on top of her wings and pin her down, but she gouged the shorter man’s arm and frightened him, giving her enough time to make an escape. Through the torn fabric of the net and up into the smog-filled sky rose the glory of the red-tailed hawk, beating her wings and laughing at the two men down below that stood as though in shock, gaping up at her and calling “64D! 64D!” After five years, Germany was free.

Chapter TWO

Night fell across the streets of New York slowly. The buildings were draped in a quiet blackness, but the lights in the windows across the city stayed lit. It truly was the city that never sleeps. Taxis whizzed by in the streets, men and women strolled the sidewalks, the homeless sat in their corners begging, and Germany walked down the middle of the Boardwalk undisturbed. Most of the New Yorkers were far too busy, even in the late hours of the evening, to pay any attention to a scrawny stray German Shepherd picking her way down the sidewalk. Perhaps, if she were completely healthy, Germany would have been a show dog, or perhaps, if she were able to regain her health, she could become one, but as it was, she was in no condition to win any kind of blue ribbon. Her coat was thin; gone was any of the luster it had in past days; her tail hung, scraggly and rope-like, down almost between her legs, and one could almost count her ribs, but none of this mattered to the SuperDog at all. She was free. She’d lived her entire life thus far in a cage, with occasional breaks in time when she was under the knife at the hands of the Doctor, but now she was free, and it was overwhelming. There were so many things she could do now that she no longer had to worry about being caught, so many people to watch and things to sniff, but most importantly, so many things to eat. She didn’t intend to waste any time getting started. She had no need to morph today and, if she were lucky, she would never have to morph again. It was high time to stop being a freak of nature and start becoming a normal dog. Maybe, Germany thought, she would even start chasing little round balls and barking like an idiot at the mailman. But there were more important matters to attend to first, and her stomach first on that list.

On the right side of the street stood one of the most prestigious hotels in the city, the Madison. A tall doorman, all decked out in red and yellow with a tassel on his cap and a shine on his shoes, stood next to the broad glass double doors. Germany started to pass by him, and then thought better of it. She returned and sat down in front of him. Maybe he had some food in that jacket of his. But the man didn’t respond.

A long, black limousine pulled up to the front of the hotel as the SuperDog watched. The driver’s side door swung open, and out stepped the driver. He walked over and opened the door for a beautiful, thin blond woman. Her eyes glittered an angry ice blue as she surveyed the streets, but other than that, she showed absolutely no sign of any emotion. Germany sat in front of the doorman, who was glaring down at her out of the corner of one eye and kicking her with his foot inconspiciously, and watched the woman as she strode from the car up the red carpet in front of the hotel and stopped directly in front of the doorman, next to Germany. Her driver scampered up the carpet behind her, pulling her luggage behind him and trying not to spill the bags that he carried in his arms. The woman tossed her hair back behind her shoulders with a gesture that was more of cruelty than of glamour and scowled at the doorman before speaking.

“This is the Madison, correct?”

“Yes, ma’am, it certainly is,” the hapless doorman responded, not bothering to point out to the woman the huge, glowing sign hanging over the door itself. She ignored him and looked down at Germany.

“The hotel staff can bring dogs to work these days, I see?” She spit out the word “dogs” as though it were too vile to speak.

“Er, she’s not my dog, ma’am. I’m not exactly sure whose dog she is.”

The doorman kicked Germany as hard as he could in the tail with one suede shoe, while still attempting to maintain his cool before the tall, prim woman, who Germany decided must have been some kind of actress. Just before she gave up and decided that staying around this hotel and being kicked was an absolute waste of her time, the woman bent down to nose-level and spoke – if she hadn’t known better, Germany could’ve sworn that this was a person who actually liked dogs.

“You know, I think my son might enjoy this… mutt.”

“Your son likes dogs, ma’am?”

“No matter how hard I’ve tried to discourage him from such a foolish notion, yes, and I think this would be a good birthday present for him.”

Germany stared at her. She was going to be a birthday present for the son of some snot-nosed woman who dressed in furs and treated doormen like dirt? Not in this lifetime. She bared her teeth and growled, the fur on her back rising in anger. There was no chance. But there was always a chance that this rich woman would have food, she realized, and maybe even rich, yummy food, because she obviously had money. That might work well for her. Maybe being a nice doggy here would be a better idea. She relaxed her snarl, tongue lolling in relaxation and friendliness, as she watched the woman come closer to her face in distaste.

“I suppose so, yes. It looks rather… scrawny, but perhaps it will cheer my son up anyway.”

“I am not an ‘it’. I am a ‘she,’” Germany told the woman very calmly and clearly, then realized too late that dogs weren’t something most humans expected to be talking.

The woman screamed more loudly than Germany had ever believed any human being was capable of screaming. Then she collapsed at the feet of the doorman in a dead faint, and the poor man had no idea what to do with her. The last thing Germany saw of the two of them before racing away down the sidewalk was the doorman kneeling down and poking the woman’s face with one finger in an effort to revive her. She sincerely doubted that would help anything, but the doorman hadn’t seemed like a terribly bright fellow in the first place, so she left them alone.

Chapter THREE

Bryan lay sprawled across the center of his bed. It was a large enough bed that he could manage to sprawl across the center of it quite comfortably, without his feet hanging off the end or any disturbance of the sort, but the spread on it annoyed him terribly. He would have much rather had a plain bedspread, maybe navy blue or forest green or even plaid, than the ridiculously expensive gold silk one his father had insisted on, but he didn’t waste time arguing with James Ardmore II. Nobody did. They started out knowing that they’d lose. In fact, the only person who’d ever argued with Bryan’s father had been Bryan’s mother, and even she hadn’t lasted long. They’d divorced about eleven years ago, and now she was wandering somewhere around the streets of New York, maybe acting on Broadway – he wasn’t entirely sure, and it didn’t really matter. She’d always been able to take care of herself and was a very responsible person, if a little too daring; she had to be a little too daring to get into an argument with his father. Everyone else was too afraid to bother.

Bored with the early-afternoon nap, he leaned on one elbow and surveyed his latest “bedroom.” Since he and his father had started traveling around so much, he hardly ever bothered to even unpack his stuff between hotel rooms. There wasn’t any point in it, considering that he’d probably just be packing it again a few days later; or at least that had been the pattern for the last few years. So far, this had been the longest time he could ever remember staying in one place. The hotel was actually starting to feel a little like home. He was beginning to call the Templeton Suite his bedroom. It was a scary thought.

The windows were hung with gilded curtains, the rug a delightful cream shag, the furniture brass and teak, yet he wasn’t interested in any of it. He’d spent his entire young life surrounded by such niceties, and it had only served to make him more interested in the simple things in life. There were a few things he’d always wanted more than anything. One of them was a happy, TV family – loving parents, two children – one of them was a house that he wouldn’t have to move out of every week, and the third, and, as far as he was concerned, most important, was a dog. So far he had none of the above. When he’d been younger, about five, and actually lived in a house with his parents and about fifteen servants, he’d asked for a goldfish. Then it hadn’t mattered so much to him what kind of pet he had, just so long as he had something living to depend on him and keep him company, but it hadn’t worked. In fact, his father whipped him with a belt afterward, and he couldn’t sit down for two days. That had created quite a sticky situation at the celebrity dinner planned for the day afterward. He’d sat in a tall, velvet-lined dining chair fidgeting the entire evening. The mayor scolded him later on for that. That was the kind of teenager he was – the kind who was scolded by the mayor of New York. And he had no dog. And the worst thing of all was tomorrow was his 16th birthday. His 16th dog-less birthday.

There was a knock at the door of his suite then. This was a new hotel for them to stay in – normally his father stayed loyal to a few chains of luxurious hotels throughout the states and never deigned to rent a room anywhere else, but this time they were staying in a place he’d never heard of. It was called the Madison. Personally, he thought that because of the name, the hotel should have been on Madison Avenue, but it was actually on the Boardwalk. That really just made no sense to him.

“Bryan Ardmore? Er… Bryan Ardmore? Is there a Bryan Ardmore here?”

Bryan sat up then. Over the years, he’d learned that the best way to deal with servants of all shapes and sizes was to give them what they wanted. They went away faster if he did so without objection. He wouldn’t have been so curt with all the maids and butlers he’d met if they were nicer, but they’d been hired by his father and his father had no knack for hiring servicemen, so most of them were snotty and aristocratic. There was nothing he hated more than a snotty butler. He sighed, pushed himself up from the ridiculously gaudy bed, and went over to the heavy, polished door. He wondered if it was teak, and at the same time hoped it wasn’t.

“Yes? This is he.” How many boys his age, Bryan wondered, knew that the proper way to answer a call was with the phrase “This is he?” He wished he weren’t one of them. He wished he were one of the more normal sort, who would say “Wassup?” or perhaps “Yo!” instead. But he’d been trained far too well for that, and training wasn’t something easily erased.

“Message for you.”

Bryan sighed again, deeply and agonizingly, then grasped the brass handle and yanked the door open with a force that made the busboy on the other side grimace in disgust. There really was a package for him on the other side. It was quite large sitting on the soft carpet of the hallway, out of place, and all done up in cardboard covered in a vast amount of an ugly brown duct tape. It was certainly not the kind of gift anyone in his family would ever dream of giving him. He loved it already.

“How much do I owe you?”

“Why, sir!” The busboy was shocked. Bryan could see it written all over his face. “You don’t owe me anything! This is the Madison. Your father will be billed for the full cost.”

“I’m sorry. I was unaware of that. I beg your pardon.”

“No need to beg my pardon, sir. I’m but a servant. If you will, I must be going now.” Bryan nodded, disgusted with the pair of them, and watched the busboy bow his way backwards out of the hallway so fast he was surprised the poor fellow didn’t fall over. Then he turned his attention to the package.

He wasn’t entirely used to that sort of thing. In his family, all surprises and spontaneous events had been thoroughly planned out weeks in advance to allow for no unexpected problems. This, however, was nothing if not unexpected. It was large, bulky, hideously ugly, and sitting right in the middle of the hallway on the 17th floor of one of the most, if not the most, prestigious hotels in all of New York City. He walked forward a few paces and looked at it more closely. There were all manner of stamps all over the outside of it, as though it might have traveled around the world before coming to him, and there were several unusual stains in a few places that he couldn’t quite recognize. He had no idea who had sent it, but he was dying to find out. He bent over, picked it up – discovering in the process that it was much lighter than he’d expected – and carried it back into his suite, shutting the door behind him.

There was a high chance that his father would not approve of him putting the package on the bed. So he put it on the bed. It would be easier to open at eye level, anyway.

The first stamp Bryan looked at was from Vatican City, Italy. That really sparked his curiosity. Not many people in his family – well, that he knew of, anyway – had ever been to Italy, or would ever even want to go to Italy. He didn’t really think they had anything against Italians, it was just that they were perfectly famous in America, and none of them had ever felt the need to go anywhere where they weren’t. So whoever had sent the package was clearly not a member of his immediate family. That narrowed the options down somewhat.

The rest of the stamps were from various countries and cities all over the globe, some with vibrant, eye-catching patterns and colors, some with duller, more subtle shades, but all different and all from places he’d never seen or ever even dreamed of seeing. Now he was even more curious to see what was inside. He felt in the pockets of the silk bathrobe he was wearing, and then realized that his knife was actually in the pockets of his pants, rather than his hotel-courtesy bathrobe. It wasn’t a sharp knife, but it was considerably more dangerous than a letter opener, at least. And he hated those bathrobes that came free with the more expensive hotels. He wasn’t even really sure why he was wearing one, other than the fact that he’d been too lazy to change. Ryan walked across the room again, feeling despicably rich when his toes sank into the shag carpet, and found his pants on the floor from where he’d thrown them the night before. Normally he kept most of his important possessions in his pockets – his wallet, his keys, his knife – but recently, because he’d been living in the Templeton Suite for so long, he’d been tempted to start keeping his things in his room now. But today his knife was still where it belonged, in the pocket of his slacks.

It was a beautiful pocketknife in a sterling silver case with his initials on the front; he’d gotten it from his father for his birthday last year. He hadn’t seen his father for his birthday, of course, but he’d received the pocketknife in a leather box in the mail, and that was all of his celebration for that year. The knife became his lucky charm from then on. Now it was going to be his letter-opener, in a manner of speaking.

He pulled it out and slit open one side of the box, then the next, and carefully lifted the lid, holding his bathrobe shut with one hand as he did so. From his vantage point, he could see nothing inside, but there was always the possibility that there was something further down at the bottom and he was just at the wrong angle. He put the box back on the floor and looked into it again. Now he could see that there was a layer of foam pellets inside. He dove both hands into the layer of foam noodles, desperate now to find out what was inside, and pulled out… a slip of paper.

The first thing that ran through Bryan’s mind was something along the lines of “Why would anyone mail me a package this large for a slip of paper the size of a picture frame?”

The second thing that ran through Bryan’s mind was something more sensible. It was along the lines of “One second. Maybe I should actually look and see if there is anything on the slip of paper.”

He dropped the handfuls of foam noodles he was now holding, brushed the remnants of foam noodles off his bathrobe and onto the floor, and turned the piece of paper over. Sure enough, there was something written on it, but it was very faint, and he had to walk over to the window and hold it up to the light to read it. In light, delicate script, it read “Come to the Book Rack on the corner of 23rd St. and 35th St. at 10:45 a.m. on Thursday.” The content of the note, however, wasn’t the most surprising thing about the package. The message was written in his mother’s handwriting.

Chapter FOUR

Germany raced down the sidewalk in the middle of bustling New York City. She was tearing down the streets, not because she was running away from anything, but merely because she hadn’t been able to run free for years and years, and she was making the most of it while she could. It was a glorious feeling, she thought, just to race around – not going anywhere, necessarily, not in a hurry to make it to an appointment or to avoid capture by the henchmen of a mad scientist armed with nets and DNA-shooters, but just to run for the simple joy of running, to feel the wind ruffling one’s ears and blowing through one’s fur and the ground flying by beneath one’s paws. The night before last she’d curled up under the bushes by the Bank of New York somewhere, and last night she’d found a place to sleep by the back steps outside Macy’s. She’d found food in trash cans, water in rain gutters, and there were so many people to meet in this city that she imagined she’d never sniff them all. It was wonderful to have such freedom after so many years of being locked up. Now if she could only convince a human to throw one of those little yellow balls for her to chase and bring back like an idiot, life would be perfect. As far as Germany the SuperDog was concerned, she’d sworn off morphing. Permanently. Life was much simpler when one was just a regular dog. The fur on her stomach that had been shaved for as long as she could remember was now even starting to grow back; rather than short, harsh stubble, her belly was now covered in a downy fluff. Her scars were hidden more and more each passing day. She couldn’t be happier, Germany thought – well, unless a giant steak came falling out of the sky, but that wasn’t very likely to happen, so she had to make do otherwise. That was okay with her.

The only really interesting thing that had happened to her in the past few days was the latest developments with that woman who’d called her an “it”. It seemed that Germany had been seeing her all over the city for awhile. First it was in front of the Madison with the incompetent doorman, then it was driving down the street with her windows open in the limo (Germany was eating the remains of a Whopper from the dumpsters by Burger King at the time. The woman had glared at her), then yesterday it’d been in front of another hotel, and now here she was walking down 17th St. by herself. Wait a minute. What’s this?

Germany skidded to a stop and spun around. Yep, the woman was there, all dressed up in a pinstriped suit and high heels, still glaring at everything that passed by. Germany laughed to herself – she may seem like a real tough cookie to the rest of the world, but she couldn’t even stand up to the sight of a talking dog. Okay, so revealing that she could talk to a stranger hadn’t exactly been the brightest of ideas, but it wasn’t as though anyone would believe the woman’s story, so she was safe. What had been bothering her lately, though, was that she was awfully curious about the son the woman had mentioned. If he loved dogs, well, he couldn’t be all bad. Maybe he needed a friend. Maybe, she thought now, if she could find him, she might even be able to convince him to throw a ball for her! That would be good. There were a lot of people in New York City, but not many of them were willing to stop and play. Most of them just walked by very quickly with their heads down and their briefcases swinging, never pausing to say “Hi!” to a friendly dog, let alone play fetch with one. She needed a human of her own. The only problem was how to go about finding one. Now, though, following the woman seemed like a good idea. She turned around, but she’d been thinking so much that the tall, blond woman had already vanished into the crowd. With a shrug and a sigh, Germany turned off the side of the street and walked over to a Chinese restaurant. It’d been putting out the most tantalizing smells for the past five minutes, and her stomach was growling. Even if no one would pause on their way out and throw her a piece of their lemon chicken or sweet-and-sour pork or walnut prawns, there was sure to be some yummy food left over in the trash cans. She headed around back. It was long past time for dinner.

Chapter FIVE

James Ardmore II strode briskly into the lobby of the Madison Hotel. Though his eyes passed briefly over the many beautiful antique decorations hanging from the walls and placed stylishly in the corners, he paid no attention to any of them. He had to find his son. The lazy boy was probably just lounging around up in his room again, and it was going to be his birthday… er… Damn, he’d forgotten again. It was sometime this month that his son was turning sixteen, and he’d be willing to bet that the rats in the gutters had more of an education. That was certainly something that needed to change, and fast. There was no way his only heir was going to be an uneducated guttersnipe; no way, not as long as he had a say in the matter, that was for sure. Tomorrow, Mr. Bryan Ardmore would find his pampered butt right in the middle of a good, old-fashioned high school, and he’d have to start coming out of his suite.

The Ardmores had always been a family with plenty of money to spare; that had never been a problem for them. James’s father, James Ardmore the First, had been heir to a fortune in stocks from his father, Steve. In his relatively short lifetime, Steve had experienced fantastic luck in the stock market, making over $3,000,000 in just ten years, and the luck had spread down through the generations. James was beginning to run out of it himself, but he was sitting on a fat enough nest egg that he and his son could afford to travel comfortably around the world for the next ten years without ever worrying about winding up in the poorhouse. There were a few hotel chains he trusted, and he stuck with those, traveling to a new city every couple of weeks, seeing the sights, gambling in any casinos he could find, and haunting nightclubs often until the early hours of the morning. He’d had a wife a few years ago, Evelyn, but she’d been too bullheaded for him. If James Ardmore were going to be married, his wife would damn well be both obedient to and respectful of him, and Evelyn wasn’t that sort of woman. She was eager and ready to argue with him over the slightest thing, and the worst part about it was that once she got her teeth into an idea, she’d never let it go. He’d had to divorce her, but it hadn’t been that easy to convince his son of the fact. Bryan had been upset over it for at least a few years, and as far as James knew, he could very well still be upset over it. Lately he hadn’t seen much of his son – in fact, in the past four cities they’d visited, he couldn’t recall his son ever coming out of his hotel room. That didn’t really bother him; there were plenty of nice things in the suites for his son to amuse himself with, and at least he wouldn’t get into any trouble. Bryan was definitely a troublemaker. Ever since James could remember, his son had always wanted a pet. When he was a very small child, he used to come into their house with long, slimy earthworms clenched in his tiny fists and try to keep them in boxes of dirt under his bed. The maid hadn’t been very happy about that; in fact, when she was vacuuming and sucked up half a shoebox full of black dirt, she took the rest of the boxes and dumped their contents into the compost pile in the back. Bryan was distraught over the loss of his worms for a week. Then there was the time he’d found a small white rabbit hopping around their vast gardens and carried that inside. For three days, he managed to smuggle carrots up to his bedroom and keep the rabbit in his walk-in closet, but one day when he had a dentist appointment the maid went up there and had a heart attack when his rabbit jumped out of a tennis shoe at her. She died twelve hours later. It had probably been a mistake to hire such an old woman in the first place, but still, James thought, if Bryan hadn’t been so after hiding animals in the most unsightly of places, she might have lived a little longer. If he had to have an heir, it would be a lot easier if said heir were a little… well, a little more normal.

As it was, the divorce hadn’t been very painful for James, and even that might have been a slight understatement. The papers were signed and, less than two hours later, Evelyn was out of the house and James was serving a classy business dinner in their dining room on her best china (which he’d kept). Neither was very affected by the arrangement at all. The only problem for James was that he’d been stuck with his son and he really, really hated children. It had been Evelyn’s idea to have a child in the first place and she’d convinced him of its benefits by telling him that any rich man needed an heir. She hadn’t told him, however, that if they ever divorced it would be up to him to take charge of his heir – his sulky, depressed teenage heir who wanted to do nothing more than sit in his hotel room all day and order shrimp cocktails through room service. Actually, that wasn’t quite accurate. The business with the cocktails hadn’t really started until after his divorce.

It’d been an unsuccesful day for the entire Ardmore family. Bryan’s tutor had quit the day before – it was the third one they’d gone through that month – and James’s fighting with Evelyn was worse than ever that morning. They’d entered the stage where two people become so angry with one another that they lose all qualms they may have had involving breakables and start to fling anything they can lay their hands on at each other. Then Evelyn picked up James’s prize jewelled dagger he’d bought in Las Vegas three years ago and drew her arm back to fling it at him. He blocked the throw with her favorite antique serving platter. Both the knife and the platter were destroyed, and, consequently, they were so angry at each other that the papers for divorce were signed that very afternoon. When Bryan found out, he went straight up to his third-story bedroom suite and bolted the door. He refused to come out, despite the threats of beatings his father yelled up the stairs after him, and that was when the cocktails started. From then on, all Bryan would order from room service or eat in the house itself was an iced shrimp cocktail. James just fed him as many as he wanted because it was easier than trying to force him to eat anything else. The surprising thing about the whole diet was that Bryan never seemed to gain much weight from it, so no one objected.

Neither James nor Bryan ever saw Evelyn again after the divorce, but every year on Bryan’s birthday he unfailingly received a present from his lost mother. Sometimes it would be something funny, like a rubber chicken or a whoopee cushion. Sometimes it would be something she knew he’d like, like a photograph or a pillow or blanket for his bed. Sometimes it would be something he’d always wanted; for example, when he was younger, maybe about nine, she’d been the one to send him his first two-wheeler. The butler taught him how to ride it, as James was in San Francisco, about three hundred miles away, at the time. But she never delivered her presents personally. She always sent them from somewhere far across the country, occasionally even from another country, but she never bothered to find Bryan and give him the gift herself. This probably stemmed from the fact that she’d never really wanted him either. He made a good heir to the Ardmore family fortune, and it always looked good in the tabloids when an actress had a child in addition to being stunningly beautiful, but other than that, Bryan meant nothing to either of them except a lot of trouble. And today was no exception.

The stairs of the Madison were striped with red velvet and the floor on either side of the carpet strip a beautiful nut-brown and smooth as silk, but James didn’t bother with any of it. He strode straight up the short flight to the elevator, ignoring the man behind the desk, the people who glared at him in the hallways as he brushed by them, and the man operating the elevator who tried to ask him what floor he wanted.

“Seventeen,” he snapped, and retreated to the corner staring angrily out the glass at the floors below. It was not a good time to mess with James Ardmore, and everybody around him knew it.

Chapter SIX

In the shower, Bryan hummed a Clay Aiken song lightly to himself as he scrubbed his hair with the foamy, minty shampoo (also provided courtesy of the Madison) and pondered the origin of the strange message. There had to be a reason why the note was written in his mother’s handwriting when he hadn’t seen her for eleven years. She always sent him a present on his birthday, every year without fail, but she’d never actually come and delivered it to him herself. It wasn’t the sort of thing he expected from her, yet there it was, a slip of paper with her handwriting on it telling him to go to The Book Rack. Though it didn’t say exactly to meet her, he figured she probably would be there, unless she’d set up a birthday surprise for him and left it waiting for him to go pick up, but that wasn’t very likely. He would finally see his mother for the first time in eleven years. He wondered what she looked like, what she sounded like… if she was still as nasty as he remembered. She’d always been somewhat like his father in that he felt sure she’d never wanted him, and though she sent him presents for his birthday every year, he knew that that was really a way of buying him off. It was sort of “I don’t want to deal with my son, so I’ll send him a gift and then I won’t have to deal with him for another year,” and it bothered him to no end. One of these years he kept telling himself that he would just send back her gift, but he never got up the courage to do it. It was easier just to take them anyway. Some he sold, some he donated, and every now and then, when one seemed especially personal or it was something he’d always wanted, he’d keep a few. He didn’t really like to keep too many, because it was a real pain having to lug his things around from hotel room to hotel room, but there were a few things he just couldn’t pass up. It would’ve been a lot easier if his family could just live in a house like they used to, even if his father had servants again, but Bryan guessed that didn’t fall under James’s plans. The only part of the whole traveling-around-the-US thing that was even remotely okay with Bryan was his schooling. Because the two of them kept moving, his father just hired a tutor for Bryan and paid the man well enough that he didn’t mind traveling with them. The odd thing was that the tutors never stayed long enough to collect more than a month or two’s salary, so Bryan tended to wind up with a new tutor every few months anyway. His father liked to say that this was all his fault for being so difficult, but Bryan didn’t really see how, exactly, asking for skim milk every forty-five minutes was difficult. After all, man cannot live on cocktails alone.

He ran a hand through his hair, making sure that he’d gotten all the shampoo out of it, and looked in the mirror to double-check. His father had always told him that he had the kind of face women would fall all over themselves for, but he’d never really believed it. His black hair was longer than it should’ve been because he didn’t really like to get haircuts – he’d always been worried the barber might be having a bad day and lop off one of his ears or something horrible like that – but he didn’t think that was terribly attractive or anything, it was just a sign of his intrinsic paranoia regarding scissors. In fact, now that he thought about it, long hair really should be considered unattractive. It wasn’t long enough for him to pull it back in a rubber band or braid it like that guy on Pirates of the Caribbean every teenage girl dreamed about, but it was beneath his ears. Maybe he really could use a trim. His eyes weren’t anything special, either; at least not to his way of thinking. He’d seen the backs of enough cheesy romance novels to know that women fell for men with unusually-colored eyes (also men with muscles coming out their noses and hair down to the middle of their back and egos with their own gravitational force, but that was something else altogether), while his were only gray. Sure, he personally didn’t have anything against gray eyes, but he was positive females preferred the unusual, and there was really nothing unusual about his face. Maybe that was the reason why he’d never had a girlfriend, or ever even anyone who might’ve at least considered the possibilty of ever becoming his girlfriend. He wasn’t a nerd really; he liked his studies well enough, although the same couldn’t be said of his tutors; but he wasn’t very athletic either. He really wasn’t anything much, except a rich boy who wanted a dog, and he didn’t even have that. He certainly had money, but Bryan knew that that wasn’t a foolproof method. Money may be enough to get a girl interested, but once you’ve gotten that far, it’s up to the guy to keep her interested, and that was something he wasn’t very good at. He’d never really had any friends, because he’d never really gone to school, and he didn’t really know what went on in the world of sports or entertainment, because he stayed mostly in his hotel suite. The world held no real attraction for him. After all, even though he could drive and, if he didn’t want to drive, he could always go for a walk, he had no one to walk with unless he wanted to take a servant with him, and he hated the servants. He could get anything he wanted brought up to his room any time he wanted it, he didn’t have to deal with his father this way, and his tutor would just come to him when it was time for school, so there really wasn’t any problem. But now he’d have to go out this Thursday. There was no way, absolutely no way, that his curiosity would let him stay locked in the Templeton Suite while his mother could very well be waiting by the Book Rack only a few blocks away for some unknown reason. That was the real thing he wondered over. Why had she come? What could she possibly want with her son? It was enough of a surprise that she still remembered her son existed, let alone that she might actually want to see him, and if she had wanted to see him, why not get around to it faster? After all, he was already going to be sixteen in two days; why not meet him several years ago? In a way, it made him nervous. There was something about the whole deal that just didn’t bode well.

From what he managed to remember about his mother, she didn’t sound terribly much like a person he’d want to get to know in the first place. He remembered her eyes, because they were definitely unusual – they’d been a vibrant ice blue and, though she never acted emotional in any way, shape, or form with the rest of her body, when she was extremely angry, her eyes flashed, and when she was extremely sad, they turned almost the color of his, a very dark gray. If you ever wanted to know what kind of mood Evelyn Ardmore was in, all you had to do was look into her eyes – if she’d let you, of course. Sometimes you could tell she was in a particularly bad mood because she’d belt you if you even tried to look in her eyes, but that didn’t happen very often. He remembered that she’d been pretty tall – taller than him, at least, but since this memory came from probably about the age of four, even a mailbox would’ve been taller than him. That didn’t help much. Other than her looks, he really couldn’t remember that much about her. He knew that neither of his parents had really wanted to have any children, but that his father had needed an heir, so they’d had him for that purpose only – he’d heard that story during one of his parents’ arguments – but he knew no more than what he could piece together from memories during the first four years of his life, and that just wasn’t much. Meeting her on Thursday would definitely be an interesting experience.

Bryan went over to the suitcase he kept lying on the floor, unzipped it, and pulled out his favorite comb. It was rather like his favorite knife, in that the handle of it was stainless steel and bore his initials, but this had been a Christmas present rather than a birthday one. He normally didn’t use it every day because he hardly ever went out, but today his hair was beginning to look as though it were a nesting ground for rats, so he figured now would be a good time to start combing his hair more often. In the mirror, he started raking the teeth of his comb through the tangles and managed to make himself look slightly more respectable before he heard a knock at the door of his suite again. The maid hadn’t been in more than an hour ago, so he knew it probably wasn’t any of the hotel staff. That left… well, that left pretty much nobody, considering that he had no friends. Curious now, he walked over to the door and, without even speaking, pulled it open to find himself face-to-face with his father.

Right away, he could see it wasn’t a good day to be face-to-face with his father.

In fact, it probably wasn’t a good day to be in the same room as his father.

Bryan could tell this because of the look in James Ardmore’s eyes. He looked as though there was nothing he would like more at the moment than to find the nearest hapless passersby and snap his neck. He instinctively backed up a few paces and carefully studied his father once more before daring to speak.

“Eh, hi, Dad. Was there something you wanted?”

“Not really, boy. Not really. I just came to let you know of your schedule for tomorrow, so that you don’t think you’ll just be staying up in this suite all day like you have been for the past week. Your skin is starting to become translucent, for God’s sake. You need to get out of here and go to school like a normal teenager, and so help me, that’s what you’re going to do.”

“Wait a minute. You want me to go to school? As in, a public school? Like, with classes and annoying teachers and… homework?”

“It’s long past the time you should’ve been enrolled. I can only hope that too much damage hasn’t been done already.”

“What about my tutor?” Bryan asked, desperately grasping for a thread to save himself from the fate he saw looming on the horizon.

“What tutor? He QUIT, boy. Approximately ten minutes ago.”

“Well, er, can’t you just find another?”

“My boy. My dear, dear boy. You’ve up and gone through every availible tutor in the eastern United States, and every tutor you haven’t had has heard of your reputation and refuses the job on sight.”

“So basically, you’re sending me to my death because some fat-headed fellow in a suit is too afraid of having to bring me skim milk?”

“Basically, that about sums it up. If I were you, boy, I’d go to sleep early tonight. I hear the bell rings at eight, and if you’re even a second late, they mark you tardy.”

“Dad. Think about this for a minute. Seriously. I don’t have anything for school! I don’t have a backpack or a pen or a binder or paper or whatever normal teenagers carry in their backpacks. How do you expect me to learn anything? And where do you expect me to go? There’s a school near the hotel?”

“If you’d stepped outside your suite door once or twice, boy, you’d have seen it. There’s one about two blocks up the street. You can even walk to it if you want. I don’t care how you get there, I don’t care how you get the things you need, I just want you to go. I refuse to waste any more of my time trying to find a tutor for you when you wind up driving them all away in the end. For all I care, you can go and fend for yourself. I want a normal son for once. School starts tomorrow at precisely eight A.M. I suggest you leave early to make sure you get there on time. First impressions are very important.”

With that, James Ardmore II stormed right back out the door, down the hallway, and into the elevator again, leaving his son wondering how on Earth he’d gotten himself into this mess and, more importantly, how on Earth he could get himself out of it.

Chapter SEVEN

The Ardmore’s butler was a man who knew what he wanted, was always quite sure as to how he could get it, and was never completely happy until he got it.

This made him a very difficult man to go shopping with.

This was very unfortunate for Bryan, because the butler happened to be the only man he could go shopping with.

The day after his father made the fateful announcement that he was to begin attending high school, Bryan and the butler piled into his father’s limosine and headed off to the nearest Bloomingdale’s to look for the various things Bryan believed a teenager needed for school. In the morning, Bryan woke up with a sense of dread. Rather than sitting up immediately and turning on the television or perhaps going and taking a shower like he usually did, he simply scrunched down to the foot of his king-sized bed, pulled the covers over his head, and went back to sleep. It didn’t help. In a few minutes, the butler came straight into his suite anyway – without knocking, nonetheless – yanked the covers off the bed entirely, and dumped a large bucket of ice water over his head. Needless to say, Bryan woke up quite quickly. It’s not very comfortable to lie in a puddle of water, and he’d had previous experience with this butler, so he knew that the man was an extremely persistent fellow. An hour or two later, much earlier than Bryan would have risen normally, the two of them were whizzing through the streets of New York toward Bloomingdale’s, and Bryan was trying to think of everything he’d need for school.

“A gallon of skim milk... They don’t have skim milk in the lunchroom, do they?”

“No, sir. I don’t believe they do.”

“Maybe a pound or two of those cocktail shrimp and a jar of my favorite cocktail sauce, do you think that would be enough for lunch?”

“For one day, sir? For a week might be better. Unless you plan on becoming a blimp very quickly.”

“I’ll have to get a very large backpack. Or maybe I can bring you to school with me and you can carry my lunch around?”

“No, sir. I’m afraid not. After all, you do want to fit in with your… ahem… peers, don’t you?”

“I’ve never fit in with my peers before, Stanley, and I doubt that will change now that I’m a… what was it called again?”

“A junior, sir.”

“Ah yes. Now that I’m a junior in high school, I don’t think any of that will be changing. In fact, I’m sure my classmates in high school will hate me just as much as everyone else I’ve ever met has. So I don’t really see the point in my trying to win their approval, do you?”

“But you would want to fit in, sir.”

“Of course.”

“Then don’t you think you had better try your best to do so?”

“Yes, Stanley,” and with that, Bryan succumbed to a sullen silence that lasted for the rest of the drive. He settled back in the leather seats of the limo and watched the rest of the world slide by through the tinted glass. As far back as he could remember, he’d seen most of his life this way; by watching it from the other side of the glass. He might as well have lived in a zoo for all the good the world did him, and he didn’t really understand why he had to start trying to fit in now. He wasn’t the sort of fellow who fit in. The city was nice, though, and he wouldn’t mind living here for awhile, maybe even the rest of his life, but he wasn’t going to get his hopes up. His father was known for never staying in one place, especially one city, for more than a week or two at the most. That was particularly why he was so puzzled at the decision to send him to a public high school. He didn’t think his father would waste so much time and money enrolling him in one school only to move him to another a week later, would he? Did that mean there was a chance of him staying in New York City for more than two weeks? Maybe he’d even get to move out of that ridiculously gaudy hotel he was living in and get a chance to stop being the stuck-up rich boy for awhile. The only problem was that that was all he knew how to be, really. After all, there’d never been anyone around to teach him how to be something else. He was the sort who was used to getting his skim milk when he asked for it and who expected a butler to carry his backpack around for him. That meant he was also the sort of fellow who would never be accepted in a normal society. He knew that and, at the time, would settle for living in a hotel suite and ordering up shrimp cocktails by room service – or he would settle for it, that is, if he could only have a dog. That would be wonderful.

As it was, he didn’t see a dog in his future any time soon, so he resolved himself to staring out the window. It was really a fascinating city, with buildings reaching so high up into the atmosphere that he often would have to stick his neck out of the window to see their roofs and a constant flow of people of all shapes and sizes wandering down the sidewalks. He’d always loved to watch people, ever since he was a small child. Just looking at someone walking by made him wonder dozens of different things about him and half the time it’d set his imagination off, thinking about what kind of life they led and why they led that kind of life and if they’d ever wanted to change it, but more importantly, where were they going, why were they leaving, when would they get there, would they ever get there… There were dozens of things he could think about just by looking at one person, and here in New York City there were thousands of people, often all in the same space. It was almost overwhelming. He watched the trees along the side of the street, each confined in its own wire stand, scroll by outside the window in various shades of orange and brown and wished he could see what they looked like without the tinted glass in the way. He watched a tall girl, more legs and flowing amber hair than anything else, walk a large white dog down the sidewalk and wished he had a large white dog too. Maybe if he had a large white dog, his large white dog could stop and talk to her large white dog, and then maybe the two of them could become friends and maybe even later she would want to be his girlfriend… but he didn’t have a large white dog, and even if he’d managed to go and get one they’d already passed her by going the opposite direction, and here was Bloomingdale’s up ahead. Bryan sighed. It was time to do what his father had asked of him yesterday. It was time to go and be a normal teenager. The problem was that that was really easier said than done.

Bryan watched as the limo pulled up to the curb and the driver got out and opened his door for him. He’d never really understood why rich people needed a driver to open their door. It wasn’t like they were physically incapable of pulling the handle for themselves. Maybe it was just that they liked exercising the right they had over other people by having servants perform the simplest tasks? He wasn’t quite sure, but it still annoyed him. He swung his long legs onto the curb and got out of the car, stretching in the afternoon sunlight, then waited for the butler to come around and meet him. There were packs and packs of people on the sidewalks; it seemed like there were almost more than he’d seen from inside the car; and it was amazing at the variety. He watched a woman walk by in a blouse that was so small it could have been used for a dishrag with more rings poking out of her belly button than there were on his shower curtain, followed by another older woman in a business suit so tight he was surprised her boobs weren’t completely flat underneath it. Then the butler walked over and tapped him on the shoulder.

“Sir, it’s time to go inside.”

“Yes, Stanley. I’m coming.”

Bryan and Stanley walked through the door of Bloomingdale’s, and Bryan found himself in a whole new world.

Well, that’s a figure of speech, of course.

He REALLY found himself standing in the middle of a huge crowd of people and fat shopping bags all scurrying around like rats on a sinking ship, surrounded by racks and racks of clothes and all sorts of things marked up with sales for the upcoming school year.

It was the strangest thing he’d ever seen, and certainly the strangest thing he’d ever stood in the middle of.

Suddenly the butler appeared at his shoulder. (Bryan never ceased to be amazed by the fact that all butlers had a way of appearing at his shoulder at the most unexpected times.)

“This way, sir. Shall we start with a backpack?”

Chapter EIGHT

On Broadway, people never seemed to stop moving. If it was really early in the morning, that was okay – there were plenty of early risers to go around. If it was really late at night, maybe one in the morning, that was okay too – there were always plenty of night owls with nothing better to do. Germany wondered why on Earth all those people wanted to wander around the street and where they were all going. To her mind, it was the most ridiculous thing she’d ever seen. You wouldn’t see any self-respecting dog carrying a shopping bag in the middle of the night, now would you? (Actually, you wouldn’t see any self-respecting dog carrying a shopping bag at any time of the day, but that was irrelevant, really.)

She’d found a wonderful place to sleep on this particular street, and that was precisely where she intended to stay, until the doorman found her again and shooed her out with his silver-tipped cane. He wasn’t a very old man, so she didn’t really understand why he had to use a cane. Maybe he felt it gave him a look of prestige and high standing in the community to go around whacking friendly stray dogs. Then again, that was kinda cancelled out by the fact that he was a doorman. She didn’t suppose there were many doormen with a high standing in the community. Of course, that really didn’t give him a right to go smacking her with a cane. The front of the Madison had obviously undergone a great deal of landscaping in its time, and this was something that helped Germany very much in finding a place to sleep. From the street, there was a rather long cement pathway leading up to the big glass double doors watched over by the doorman and a red-and-gold awning over the path tastefully designed to match the servicemens’ uniform, but that wasn’t the key. The most important thing was the bushes that grew along the sides of the path. They were not terribly tall – maybe about knee-high on a taller man – and not terribly eye-catching either, which made them the perfect place for Germany to sleep. She could curl up in them safely and be hidden from the eyes of all passersby (that came in very handy, since there were passersby at all times of the day) because, though they had obviously been planted by a very talented gardener, they were hardly ever tended, and never cut back. This meant that instead of growing in a row of neat squares the way they were supposed to, the bushes grew in a large, tangled mass of green, leafy vines. Somehow, though, a general air of neatness and tidiness was maintained by the fact that the bushes never really grew over the path itself and that every time a branch did dare to try the one gardener in the place would come out and hack it off with big rusty garden shears. The plants were probably too afraid to even attempt it any more. As it was, they formed the perfect bed, and that was where Germany slept every night now.

With her nose, she’d managed to create what could generously be called a hole in the wall of shrubbery so she could actually see what went on outside when she was hidden. It came in very handy when she needed to escape the pesky doorman, and at night it was the only safe place in the city thus far she’d found to sleep, so she used it all the time. Tonight the moon was full, the stars shone bright, and the doorman was paying no attention at all to her. It looked to be a good evening. She tucked her paws over her nose, curled up into the bushes, and settled down to go to sleep. This was the perfect place for her to live – food, excitement, a cozy bed – if only there were a human around, it would be absolutely perfect. She could barely see her scars now, although she could feel them, and it was good to have them there as a reminder of how much she never wanted to go back to the factory again. Sometimes she’d have nightmares about it, but that wasn’t much of anything. The first time had been three days after she’d escaped. She was running frantically in a huge, dark room, so long that she couldn’t see the exit, and the Doctor was chasing her, only he was much taller than he really was. Every now and then she heard a gun firing and knew that he was getting closer. She’d run and run and run until a net dropped down over her shoulders, and she’d wake up flat on her back howling. The nightmares didn’t really change – they all pretty much followed the same pattern, so it was nothing unusual, but Germany still had to get up and walk around for a bit afterward, and she’d have the shivers for awhile. Surprisingly enough, the people who had rooms in the hotel by her bed never seemed to hear anything when she’d howl late at night, because she never heard anything from them and no one ever came looking for her – well, besides the doorman, but theirs was a personal battle.

Germany was just about to drift off to sleep when she heard a car drive up outside the hotel. At first, she didn’t think this was anything unusual, because cars drove up and down Broadway all day and all night – some louder than others, with their music blaring, some older with broken parts that put out clouds of smoke and made her gag, some speeding so much she wondered why they weren’t arrested, but the flow of traffic never stopped, so this particular car shouldn’t have been important. Then her well-tuned canine ears picked up a different noise. The car was stopping in front of the Madison and – turning her head – yep, there went the doorman to go find out who it was. She lay and waited to see what would happen next. It was awfully late at night for new guests to be checking in, so it must be someone who already had a room. Now the question was, who living in the hotel would be out and about this late at night?

With her eyes fixed on the pathway in front of her, Germany watched and listened carefully. In a minute, she heard the opening of a car door and the doorman’s greeting “Good evening, Mr. Ardmore. What can I do for you this evening?”

“Nothing, sir, thank you very much.”

“Sir, it’s high time you got up to your room and went to sleep. Have you forgotten that you have your first day of school tomorrow at exactly eight o’ clock?”

“No, Stanley. I haven’t forgotten.”

From her position in the bushes, Germany watched as three men walked up the pathway to the hotel. One was considerably taller than the other two, maybe about six feet, with dark, shoulder-length hair. His arms were loaded down with packages and she saw that he was carrying a backpack – the wrong way, on his front instead of across his back. He obviously had never carried one before. For his sake, she hoped there was someone around to teach him how. The second man stopped at the glass double doors and held them open for the taller one; he wore a spotless suit and was balding a bit on the back of his head, but his hair was combed over the spot in a futile attempt to hide his hair loss. She thought it looked ridiculous. The third man was no one she hadn’t already seen before – it was just the doorman again. He took his place next to the doors and with a quick wave and a “Good night, sirs,” the doors swung shut, the two men were gone, and the street was quiet again; or as quiet as it ever got on Broadway, that is. She lifted her head up. There was a young boy who lived in the Madison, and she’d never met him before? That absolutely had to change.

It was wonderful to have escaped the factory; it was wonderful never to have to undergo an operation again; it was wonderful to have a warm place to sleep and delicious free food available every time she wanted some; but it was just flat-out boring to never do anything exciting. She needed, really, desperately needed a change of pace, and the tall boy with the long hair who didn’t know how to carry a backpack looked like just exactly that. She had to find a way to meet him without that pesky doorman around, because if she did, she might even be able to convince him to play fetch with her. That would be wonderful. She’d never played fetch before, and it looked like so much fun. Maybe she could even live with the boy and sleep at the foot of his bed and get her yummy food in a shiny bowl every day without having to go look for it. And maybe, just maybe, she could even teach him things. He obviously didn’t know anything about backpacks, for starters. Somehow she felt that he was a human who could tolerate owning a talking dog, and there weren’t many who could. But that wouldn’t be the best thing about it.

There would be no more annoying doorman kicking her and trying to whack her with his cane in between sucking up to anyone with money.

There would be a soft bed to sleep in. Sure, the bushes were great, but they would have nothing on a comfy mattress and a warm blanket, she was sure.

There would be free food every day in a bowl for her. She wouldn’t have to go look for it in dumpsters and trash cans all the time. That was fun, of course, but it would be a lot easier if somebody just gave it to her.

And best of all, the Doctor would never think to look for the SuperDog in the richest hotel in town, under care of a rich boy. Of course, Germany hoped he’d never look for her at all, but it was highly likely that he would. She’d been the first who’d ever hated him and shown it. She’d been the first and only of his experiments to ever draw his blood. She’d been both his pride and joy and his archnemesis, and she’d managed to escape his grasp. No matter how Germany tried to reassure herself, she was absolutely sure that there was no way the Doctor and his factory workers would let her get away with it. It was only a matter of time before they came after her, and she intended to be far, far away when that happened. The Doctor may have been strong-willed, but she could be just as strong-willed when she wanted to be. He may have been determined to have her lying in a deep freezer somewhere, but she was equally determined to get away from him for good, and if it took living with a human to get that done, well, she would live with a human. If it took never morphing again for the rest of her life, well, she would do that too. As long as she could stand on all four legs, the Doctor would never catch her again. That was something she was absolutely certain of.

Germany shook her head, partially from annoyance, partially from determination, and lay back down in the bushes. She closed her eyes, gave a sigh that was at least half sneeze (lying in the dirt gets pretty dusty after awhile), and drifted off to sleep. Tomorrow she’d meet the boy. Tonight she was tired, and it was way past midnight.

Chapter NINE

Why would anyone in their right mind want to wake up at seven A.M on a perfectly good weekday when they could be sleeping in?

It was insane.

It was a ridiculous, stupid notion.

It was the craziest thing he’d ever heard of.

It also happened to be what Bryan found himself doing come Wednesday morning.

To his mind, the idea of school in general would be a great deal more palatable if the thing only started a bit later. There was absolutely no reason why everyone should have to get up so damned early, take a shower, put their clothes on – their everyday clothes, nonetheless – and eat breakfast, all by eight in the morning, just to make it to school in time so they could sit in cramped plastic chairs in large, ugly rooms staring at a dirty board and listening to a teacher drone on interminably for the next eight hours. Bryan thought, then and there, lying in bed in the middle of the Templeton Suite in his silk bathrobe, that something should be done about that rule. After all, it wasn’t as though he actually wanted to go to school in the first place. Life would have been so much nicer if he could just have one of his tutors come in and teach him instead. Every time he’d encountered someone his own age, they’d either made fun of him, tripped him, laughed at him, or beat the shit out of him. Really, it was no wonder that he didn’t like associating with his peers very much.

Of course, that didn’t mean that he didn’t want to be normal, or that he didn’t think it would be fun to be normal. There was nothing he wanted more (next to a dog, of course) than to be an average sixteen-year-old boy who avoided homework, kissed his girlfriend between classes, and rode his bike home from a small-town high school to a broken-down house in the suburbs. Instead, he was a sixteen-year-old boy who ate shrimp cocktails and skim milk for 90 of his diet, rode in a limosine anywhere he wanted to go, slept in a silk bathrobe, and had never so much as held a girl’s hand, let alone kissed one. The most contact he’d ever had with a member of the female species, aside from his mother, was the time when he’d stepped on a girl’s foot walking down the sidewalk. She’d spun around and blacked his eye. For a week he’d relived the sensation of her fist connecting with his eyeball over and over, scanning it for hints of anything sexual in the hopes that she’d been somehow transmitting a message of love along with her right hook. Nothing ever came of it. And now he actually had to get up and go to high school and be surrounded by two thousand of his peers for eight hours. The thought was enough to give the devil nightmares. He’d never been a particularly courageous sort.

He wasn’t worried at all about getting good grades in his classes. If there was one thing in the world he could do without any trouble, it was learn. Sometimes he wondered if his mind really was something akin to a sponge – he could memorize information after seeing it only once – but it wasn’t even just that; he had a photographic memory, hearing-wise. He couldn’t take “photographs” of anything he saw with his eyes, but if he heard someone say something – anything – he could parrot it back days after the fact and be precisely accurate. It was no wonder he’d never gotten anything but As. In fact, he worried his grades would be so good it would become another reason for the other students to hate him.

It was long past the time to stop worrying. Bryan slid up in bed, pulled the covers off his head, and glanced at the silver-framed clock on the wall across the room. It read 7:15. He’d slept in for fifteen minutes – well, not technically sleeping exactly, but the principle of the thing was that he’d stayed in bed and wasted fifteen minutes of the time he could be using to get ready for school and look as normal as he possibly could. Soon he knew the butler would be coming in to wake him up if he weren’t already awake, and that wouldn’t be good because Stanley’s favorite way to wake him up was by pouring ice water over his head. (This wasn’t the maid’s favorite way to wake him up, of course, because she had to clean the sheets afterward, but she didn’t have any say in the matter.) He tossed the covers off, removed his bathrobe, got up, and headed into the bathroom off his suite to take a shower and try to tame his hair as much as he could so it looked less like a birds’ nest and more like… well, more like a head of hair. It was probably hopeless, but he could at least give it a shot. Didn’t people think first impressions were the most important ones? Something like that, anyway.

Bryan shut the bathroom door, padded straight across the marble floor, twisted the cold faucet in the shower as far to the left as it would go, waited until the water was as freezing as it could possibly get, took a deep breath, closed his eyes, and thrust his head directly under the spray.

His scream echoed almost all the way down to the lobby, but everyone ignored it because this was his favorite way of taking a shower and they were all used to him by now. (It was either that or lose your voice yelling at him, which never helped anything anyway.)

After scrubbing his hair for a few minutes with the hotel-provided minty shampoo and trying to get as many tangles out of it as he could, he rinsed his head off again, cranked the water to cold and shocked his system one last time, stepped out and reached for his towel. It didn’t take him long to towel off, but he did have to rub his head a great deal to get his hair dry because it was longer than he’d thought at first. Then he dug out his comb from his suitcase again, went through the ritual of taming his mop, and began the age-old process of trying to decide what to wear. This was something he’d vowed not to agonize over. Since he figured chances were no one was going to like him particularly anyway, what did it matter what he wore, really? (As long as he didn’t wear his silk bathrobe, of course.)

Not caring certainly didn’t mean that he wanted to dress unusually. There was no need to stand out more than he would already.

That probably meant he should wear what most men his age wore.

Which led to the all-important question…

What, exactly, did most men his age wear?

He figured that there probably weren’t many teenagers who went to school in tuxedos or ties, so that crossed about two-thirds of his wardrobe off the list. What he had left in his closet ran along the lines of classy, somewhat expensive jeans and button-down shirts, most of which were plaid or with some kind of muted pattern. Bryan supposed that would do, and got dressed as quickly as he could. Blue and gray plaid seemed to match his eyes. He didn’t own any sneakers, but he picked the dirtiest pair of dress shoes he had and put them on without polishing them. Then he walked over and picked his backpack up from the chair where he’d thrown it the night before. He wasn’t sure if he’d packed everything he’d need, but, thanks to Stanley’s advice, he hadn’t bought the cocktail makings and his pack really was considerably lighter for it. Again, he fiddled with the straps and puzzled over the right way to wear them, before giving up entirely, sliding his right arm through the right loop and carrying the pack on his right shoulder. He was running late, and it would just be a big waste of his time to mess with all those little buckles and loops again, since he was certain he wouldn’t be able to figure them out. With that, Bryan Ardmore took one last look around, slammed his suitcase shut, zipped the sides up, bolted out the door of the Templeton Suite, down the elevator all the way to the lobby, into the car waiting outside, and off to his first day of high school. If he’d had a lucky rabbit’s foot, he would’ve been carrying it. As it was, he settled for hoping to make it through the next eight hours alive and, for the most part, in one piece. That would be a miracle in itself.

Chapter TEN

Nikki Reynolds wasn’t the kind of girl anybody ever wanted to mess with. That doesn’t mean she was the kind of girl you could mess with on certain days and get away with all your teeth. That means you didn’t mess with her ever – if you wanted to stand up afterward, that is.

To the rest of the world and everyone in her family except for her crazy, mildly psychotic yet undeniably perceptive uncle, Nikki was a little insane, constantly illogical, and incredibly tough. To her crazy, mildly psychotic yet undeniably perceptive uncle Joe, Nikki was a crab.

To clarify.

By “crab”, Uncle Joe did not mean anything along the lines of “constantly cranky”. He did not mean anything along the lines of “always ready to snap at anyone who approaches her the wrong way”. He didn’t even mean anything along the lines of “an aquatic creature with many claws and two large pinchers that enjoys grabbing the toes of hapless bathers”. As he used to tell her whenever she was depressed, when he called her a crab, he meant “someone who hides everything about them that is sensitive and sweet under a very thick, incredibly durable outer shell for protection”. In this, he was more accurate with his judgment of Nikki Reynolds’s personality than anyone else had ever been and, probably, could ever hope to be.

Nikki was a sophomore in high school. She lived in New York City, in a small house on the corner of 17th St. with her grandmother, her crazy, mildly psychotic yet undeniably perceptive Uncle Joe, her pet cat, and about six dogs (on average). The cat’s name was Woodrow Wilson. He was a very disturbing cat who enjoyed peeing on everything; if you were to leave something – anything – on the floor, it was absolutely guranteed that it would be thoroughly soaked in cat pee after only half an hour. Woodrow worked very quickly. Nikki’s dogs were all petrified of him, but they lived in one large kennel in the back yard (which actually took up most of the back yard, so it would be more accurate to say that the back yard simply was one large kennel) so they didn’t really have anything to fear as Woodrow was an indoor kitty.

Truthfully, if you wanted to get technical about things, Nikki’s dogs didn’t really have anything to fear in the first place, because Woodrow was the biggest wimp in all of cathood. There are plenty of people to be found who will tell you that their cat is a skitso, that their cat is frightened of dust bunnies, that their cat is the biggest wimp on the face of the Earth – well, in comparison to Nikki’s Woodrow, all those cats look like miniature versions of Hercules. Woodrow was a cat who would sleep calmly, mildly, peacefully curled up at the foot of Nikki’s bed all night, only to burst awake and begin running frantically around the room yowling at the top of his lungs because he saw a branch move in the wind outside her bedroom window. That was the sort of thing he did frequently and, when he was having a particularly bad day, about twice a night on average. You had to have a very special, patient temperament to own a cat like Woodrow, and, luckily for him, Nikki could be incredibly patient when she needed to be. She also could function quite well on very little sleep, which came in handy very often – especially during a rainstorm. Rain was what Woodrow hated most of all. The moment he heard a drop of water hit the roof of their house, he was off like a shot and buried, a trembling mass of fur and limbs, at the very back of Nikki’s bed against the wall, where he’d refuse to budge again for two hours after the rain finally stopped and, when he finally did come out, water running anywhere in the house would set him off again for the next three days.

Nikki hadn’t named him Woodrow because she had anything against the dead President or because she believed the dead President to be a wimp or anything of the sort. She’d simply named him Woodrow because she was fond of the letter “w” and wanted to come up with a name that was full of “w”s. In addition, she hoped that perhaps having a very long name would inspire courage in the poor cat. It didn’t really help. The only reason she was allowed to keep him was because his yowling at midnight never disturbed either her grandma or Joe – they were both too deaf to hear it. If Nikki ever wanted to talk to them, she had to yell so loudly the neighbors complained. Needless to say, they didn’t converse much. The two of them spent most of their days sitting in front of the TV watching the Home Shopping Network on mute. The fact that there was no sound didn’t matter. Even if the volume were on, they wouldn’t be able to tell the difference, and Nikki’s grandmother liked to watch soaps in the afternoons, which Nikki couldn’t stand. So having the sound off just worked out better for everyone, except for Woodrow, who was terrified of the TV (also terrified of the family room in general, but that’s another matter), and the dogs, who were out in the back yard and couldn’t hear it anyway.

The dogs Nikki raised weren’t exactly the kind of dogs that won blue ribbons in huge dog shows. They weren’t exactly the kind of dogs that famous people paid lots of money for puppies from. Basically, when Nikki saw a stray dog on the streets of the city, if she could catch it without getting her hand snapped off, she’d bring it home, feed it, bathe it, give it its shots, and put it in the kennel out back. She didn’t normally fix them, but that was okay with her because when they had puppies it was just a few more dogs to adopt out. The oddest thing about the entire business really was that, even though her dogs weren’t anything special or anything better than what the average person could pick up off the street, she still managed to keep finding homes for them without fail. That certainly wasn’t based on Nikki’s amazing people skills. It was probably based mostly on the fact that most dogs, when given the chance, are not inherently vicious and will actually behave in a friendly, affable manner. The problem with that is that most dogs are never given the chance. Nikki was there to give them that chance. The problem with her people skills, however, was that she never gave anyone with two legs the same chance she was willing to give to stray dogs.

To begin talking about Nikki’s people skills, it’s probably better to start off with talking about her parents.

If there was one thing everyone in school knew about Nikki (besides the fact that you were better off ten feet away from her), it was that she didn’t live with her parents. Unfortunately, no one was exactly sure why.

There were plenty of theories, of course. In a high school, the one thing you are never short on is theories, rumors, guesses, hypotheses – whatever you choose to call them, they amount to the same thing really, and none of them were ever true. If one of them did turn out one day to be true, everyone would immediately dismiss it as blasphemy. Murphy’s Law was never on the side of Nikki Reynolds. Some people thought Nikki herself had murdered both her parents, then stuffed them in wooden crates and sunk them to the bottom of the Atlantic Ocean. Some people thought Nikki’s parents had run away from her when she was a baby because her feet were cloven and they knew she would grow up to be horribly demonic. (Ironically enough, those people were normally the ones who’d just gotten through watching Rosemary’s Baby, but her temperament was often enough to make them believe it had some grounds in truth.) There were those who believed her parents were super-spies that had gone off to save poor Third World countries somewhere in Europe and those who believed they were the children of Batman busy following the BatSign halfway around the world. One person had even suggested that her father was a mad scientist and he was off making more Nikkis somewhere, though they’d had no idea as to the fate of her mother. There were even the more normal people who just thought her parents were dead.

They were closer to the truth, although the whole children-of-Batman idea really would’ve been cool.

When Nikki had lived with her parents, she’d never actually known her mother, and had instead lived only with her father. The two of them had never been very close, though, which really made things worse. The truth was that her father was an alcoholic, and most of the time when Nikki saw him, he was flat-out drunk; but he wasn’t a crying drunk, he was an angry drunk, and he often became abusive. She’d lived with him until she was about nine in a room in the slums and listened to him late at night when he’d bring women into the adjoining bedroom until the early morning hours, but that came to an end the day he beat her cruelly with his belt. When he’d fallen asleep afterward, she’d crawled to the phone and called the police. He was put in jail, and that’s where he is to this day. Unfortunately, Nikki had never learned the story behind her mother – who she was, what she looked like, etc. Sometimes when she was sleeping, she’d have dreams about something that she assumed must’ve been her mother, but the dreams were never very clear, so they didn’t help her remember much. Most of the time her vision was fuzzy and somewhat grayed at the edges, and she could see the vague outline of her mother’s face, but that was about all she ever saw. Once she had a dream in which she felt a soft blanket rubbing against her face and smelled a flowery perfume – that wasn’t enough to discover the whereabouts of her mother either, though, so Nikki really had no hope of finding her. She was really just glad to be rid of her father. The experience hadn’t scarred her for life or anything; it hadn’t given her a drastic, everlasting fear or hatred of men; she didn’t want to see all men castrated; but it influenced her personality a bit. She became more cautious of opening up to other people, and chose more carefully who she did open up to. She didn’t want to be hurt again. It was best to be careful.

If being careful led sometimes to being rude, standoffish, or a loner, that was something Nikki had to put up with.

That isn’t to say she didn’t have any friends or anything. It did mean she didn’t have and never had had a boyfriend, but that had never been very important to her in the first place, so it didn’t matter so much. There were