Devoted(84)

She raced around and around the living room, leaping on and then off sofas and armchairs.

Into the kitchen. Through the pet door. Across the porch. She circled the yard again and again, as if it were a racetrack.

When she returned to the house, she collapsed on the cool tile of the kitchen floor, tongue lolling, panting, happy.

Later, after she’d recovered and had a drink, she considered sprinting upstairs.

She wanted to wake Andrea and Bill. Larinda, Sam, Dennis, Milly. Her people. Her loves.

She yearned to share her joy with them.

But she could not share.

They didn’t know how very intelligent she was, and she could not speak, and they weren’t on the Wire.

She loved them, and they loved her, and if she could have no more, what she had was more than enough.

Yet right now, her great joy rested on the quiet sadness of loneliness.



Nature was a green battlefield where the weak were forever preyed on by the strong. Nature did not care, nor did the earth, which for all its beauty was nonetheless a hard place, indifferent to its creatures.

It was mind that mattered, mind that cared, mind that loved, the best works of the mind that changed this hard world for the better.

Mind—and the heart—had bonded people and dogs for tens of thousands of years. They had formed an alliance for survival and a covenant of affection against the darkness of the world.

If the minds of dogs were undergoing change, enlightenment, then the bond between them and people might one day be even more satisfying than it had been for millennia.

As she composed another Bellagram to report the existence of the community in Corvallis, Oregon, she hoped that one day more people than just the boy Woody would be on the Wire.

She hoped that, when the time was right, Andrea and Bill and Larinda and Sam and Dennis and Milly would know her in her fullness.

She hoped that she would live long enough to see the mystery of the Mysterium solved.

She hoped to know why she’d been born as she was, what it all meant, where it was all going.

From her toy box, she retrieved a hard rubber bone infused with an interesting flavor.

For all that she was, she was no less a dog.



The toy bone was conceived by the human mind, crafted by human hands, given to Bella as an expression of love, so it comforted her even when she was alone, while her family slept.





89



Woody was in the world as he had never been before, embarrassed neither by himself nor others. As he’d shared his fear of closeness with Kipp, the dog had shared his need for closeness, for touching and sharing. Knots deep in Woody had been untied. He could not say what kind of knots they had been, whether psychological or physical, or both. He could not say how they had been untied, except that the means by which he and Kipp opened each to the other—the Wire—served not merely two purposes but as well a third; it wasn’t just a means of communication and swift education, but also a mysterious instrument of change. He intuited that Kipp understood the third purpose and how the Wire functioned to fulfill it. He wanted the golden retriever to explain it to him, how the Gordian knots of autism had been untied, but this was not the right time for that.

At the moment, in addition to himself, the house contained four people—his mom, Ben Hawkins, Rosa Leon, and Carson Conroy—three of whom had been total strangers an hour earlier, plus a dog who was no longer a stranger and as well-known to Woody as Woody was known to himself. Furthermore, there were deputies everywhere outside: two in a patrol car in front of the house, on Greenbriar Road; two in an all-wheel-drive SUV at the end of the backyard, near the forest; two more in another SUV that was parked at the foot of the back porch steps.

After what had happened earlier with the Shacket thing, all of this activity and all of these people would once have spooked Woody, so that he would have gone away to Castle Wyvern. He didn’t want to go away now. He thought maybe he would never want to go away again.





All of these people, minus the deputies, were gathered in the living room, where the draperies were closed over the windows. No one had been offered coffee yet or Mrs. Brickit’s excellent muffins, because everyone had something urgent to say, especially Mr. Conroy, who told them about Shacket’s escape and archaea and ninety-two dead in Springville, Utah. Ms. Leon told them about Dorothy and Kipp and the Mysterium, about the enormous inheritance and her legal custody of Kipp. It was all very exciting, like something in an adventure story, but also scary. Sitting on a sofa with Kipp’s head in his lap, Woody expected to embarrass himself when they asked him about the Dark Web and the site called Tragedy, but it all came rushing out of him without hesitation, everything he’d discovered over the past sixty weeks, the satisfaction he took in seeking justice for his dad. He was amazed by himself. He wondered . . . if his vegetables and potato and meat were all served on the same plate the next time he had dinner, would seeing the different foods in contact with one another sicken him as before, or would he be able to eat like a normal person?

When everyone had said what most urgently needed to be said, an uncomfortable silence settled over them, as though they had become autistic, though it was most likely amazement that left them briefly speechless, for they had fallen down a rabbit hole for sure. Then everyone but Woody started talking at once. They were in agreement about the situation in which they found themselves. Woody had kicked a hornet’s nest, and he was in deep shit. If Woody was in deep shit, so was his mom. Kipp wasn’t going to be separated from Woody, the only human being who could use the Wire, so Kipp was in deep shit. Because Rosa Leon was legally and morally responsible for Kipp, she, too, was in deep shit. And because Lee Shacket, in the hospital, told Mr. Conroy about the true nature of the Springville experiments, the medical examiner was in deep shit. All of them were now enemies of Dorian Purcell, who had a zero tolerance policy when it came to people he believed were a serious threat to him.