Amity woke ravenous. She’d been trying to wean herself off using the privacy screen Victor had constructed for meal-time, back when she’d been unwilling to eat outside her locked bedroom. But, that morning, the white-clothed frame didn’t even occur to her until an over-eagerly mashed spatter of eggs escaped from between her molars.

“Sorry,” she whispered, fetching a kerchief from beneath her plate.

“Don’t be- I’m glad you’re enjoying it.” Amity ate slowly, even going as fast as she could. She’d gotten better at ‘chewing’, but it still took a while. Victor had finished several minutes earlier, and begun trying to extract a report. One

“So you ran from the thing, you’re saying.”

“Not to esca’e!” Amity lowered her head to look at Victor more directly as she brought a hand to cover her mouth. She tipped it back again to swallow before continuing, lest any more eggs be lost.

“I saw it struggle to change direction on the hill. Thought I could outrun it like that. Tire it out. It didnt ‘o’e…” She paused. “It didn’t run so good.”

Victor hummed. “Not a bad instinct, but a terrible first resort. Should have left when you caught sight of it, if you were going to need to do all that. You’d have needed to keep it up for a while, too, for that to work. Not sure that’s practical for you, at this point.”

Amity nodded. The pain from being shaken around returned, partly in memory. “It’s not. It got ‘y leg. Long reach, like I said.”

“ I see. Points for working off changes to its body plan, and then all of them off for being caught by it unaware. Was this when your arm went?” Amity shook her head, pointing to her neck.

“Glad the collar held,” Victor said. “That’s why we wear those, by the way.” Amity threw her head back to deposit another forkful, and began mashing it against the inside of her gums with her tongue.

“So it had you by the neck, then. And you used the captive bolt?”

Amity set down her fork, lifted her knife, and repeatedly stabbed the tip towards her jugular.

“Ahh. Well, that’d have been a good chance. Canny things take a long time to bleed out.”

“It hated the collar. S’at ‘e out.”

“Uh… I’m sorry. Didn’t catch that.”

Amity opened her mouth wide and mimed vomiting.

“Don’t do that,” Victor said. The edge in his voice shut her jaw. For a few seconds, they sat in silence.

“But, yes,” Victor continued. “I’m glad the irritant on the spikes worked. I’ve only tested it on myself, so far.” He paused momentarily, as an unpleasant memory was called suddenly to mind. His eyebrows shot up with a visible effort to think about something else.

“So, what, you hit it with the captive bolt, then?”

“No. It tried to get the other dog.”

“Untangled from your coat?” Amity nodded. “It probably thought it was dying,” he mused. “And that you were done moving. Wanted to help its packmate be the one to eat you. Lucky, lucky. You should be dead, I think. ”

Amity hugged her good arm across her cast, nudging the load still on her fork against the plaster. It felt very cold, suddenly, despite the fire still burning under the stove.

“I’m working on something related to this, actually.” Victor continued. “It’s interesting that it was motivated towards a fresh kill. I suspect they’re more ‘valuable’, somehow. I’m investigating if it’s because of some quality the meat loses, or something related to the predator’s mentality on a kill. Could be both.”

Amity put her eggs back on her plate and began mashing them into a wad. It was yellow, but not altogether unlike the contents of a canny thing’s stomach. This was going to be a chicken, at one point, and that had once been a man. It was all protein.

Craning back her neck, Amity deposited another forkful. She mashed it against the roof of her mouth and her gums before swallowing with a few tilts of her chin. “I ran to sto’ it. Thought two at once’d not ‘e good. Hence doing that at all.”

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“Must have surprised the thing,” Victor said. He nursed his beer, waiting patiently for his ward to finish.

“I got ‘em when they were tangled together. Undoing the coat.”

“And that’s when your arm broke.” Victor smiled, lifting his beer over his beard. Pride, maybe, or else a little satisfaction at piercing together the violence.

“Had to hold it still. Ca’i’e ‘olt… The, uh. The tu’e. The ‘etal…” Amity huffed, pounding the butt of her fork into her thigh. She could feel some mostly-healed cut split under the impact, alongside a wave of instant, throbbing regret.

Victor’s speech was muffled by his near-empty mug. “Don’t do that.”

“Sorry.”

“That’s alright. You won’t do any live work until your arm is healed, by the way.”

Amity gathered the last of her food to the edge of her plate and threw it back. The scraped-together mess of egg and soggy bread looked almost-chewed already. She swallowed it like medicine.

“So that’s it,” she said, dabbing at her neck with her napkin. “I hit it. Using… the thing. And it died, and I took its guts here.”

Victor clapped shut his journal with a slow, even sigh. “That’s it, then. I have that part already. And you didn’t hurt your arm firing the thing, either. That’s good. Good control.” After a moment, he closed his eyes, as well. Amity kept her eyes on him as she began clearing her place at the table. The question escaped as her silverware clattered to the bottom of their scullery tub.

“So… That ‘erson. The eaten one..”

Victor opened his eyes and thumped his journal on his stomach. “ What about them?” A smile parted his beard, but he didn’t look happy.

“Uh.” Amity paused. “They’re ‘ith us. Right?”

“They were, until recently. But I didn’t receive any notice, and no one checked in with me. So that all leads me to think I wasn’t supposed to know they were here. Which is more than a little frustrating, since we’re short staffed, as it is.” As he spoke, Victor withdrew a smaller black notebook from his pocket, and began to flip through it. Amity took her chair and dragged it up beside him, to peer over his shoulder.

“It could be one of maybe five or six people,” Victor said, as he flipped through the pages. “That I know, at least. There was a little gray in the hair, but not much.”

Each entry in the booklet was accompanied by a slightly-better-than-crude drawing of a person. Some of the drawings had been crossed out with ink, and Amity swore she could recognize the likeness of at least one or two. Few looked particularly happy. “But none of them would’ve been killed by a dog, that’s for certain, canny or not. Not one you were able to bring down- no offense meant.”

Amity elbowed him, offended.

“We’ll find out soon. If not by my inquiry, then surely by Ortia’s. Remember, we weren’t meant to know they were hereabouts in the first place. There’ll be questions. You’ll want to practice giving your report.”

Victor’s words hung in the air, for a few moments. He took another sip of his beer, and let his eyes rest on Amity. The heat of the summer began to flood away from the kitchen, and she could feel goosebumps building underneath her shirt.

“I can’t,” she said. Heat set into her cheeks, fighting the chill with an almost painful burn.

“Sure you can,” Victor replied. Victor leafed through the journal until he reached what appeared to be the most recent entry- the first with a blank page opposite to it.

“I can’t. ‘Cause I ain’t a ‘ar’er. I don’t…” The inquisition would come from Ortia, too.

“Sure, you’re a barber. You understand the Mete, and you know more than you think, and you’ve killed your first canny thing as of yesterday, haven’t you?” Victor rubbed his thumb over the page. “Besides, it says so right here.”

The drawing on the page was of a girl with ragged black hair and a cloth wrapped to cover her smile, with ‘Amity Matagot’ written next to the eyeline. All the tension went from her jaw, and it fell open. Tears began welling in her eyes.

“Those are happy, I hope. Since your old name’s gone, and all, I figured that…” Victor was cut off by the sudden impact of an open-armed hug. Amity grunted as her cast smooshed into his side, but her efforts to resist sniffling drowned out the noise. After a moment of surprise, Victor laughed.

“Ha! There, there. You’re not on the job today, so that’s quite alright.”

“Thank you.” she said, her voice muffled by his shoulder. After a few rapid breaths, Amity rolled her head just enough to briefly uncover an eye. “You’re serious?” she asked.

“Sure am,” Victor said, gently putting an arm around her uninjured shoulder. “You’re a good kid. I’m proud to have you here, and I want to make this a place you can belong. You’re a barber in my books, which aren’t very formal, admittedly. I’ll see about the rest. But that’s not the best thing I’m going to give you today.”

Amity could feel him rummaging for something, and braced herself against the movement by squeezing tighter. Something light brushed against her ear, and then something cold, hard, and heavy thumped down her chest.

After a handful of sniffles, a pat or two on the head, and what felt like not enough time, Amity pulled herself free to inspect the thing dangling from her neck.

The ring was too large for her, but was beautiful nonetheless, and gleamed enough to make her wish for a chain to replace its string. Its face bore a familiar engraving: a dragon swallowing its own tail, coiled around a human skull.