Chapter 7

I let my neighbor know beyond the hill;

And on a day we meet to walk the line

And set the wall between us once again.

We keep the wall between us as we go.

- Robert Frost, "Mending Wall"

Pit awoke.

Three gasps of relief welcomed his sudden grasp on consciousness. His whole body jerked, and he launched himself up by his shoulders. His head craned around on a sore neck. He stretched the whole of his long muzzle towards Jace's conflicted face.

Muzzle?

Jace smelled really sour.

Fuck.

Pit parted his jaws to vocalize his summary of the situation, but only a low, mournful howl emerged. He snapped his teeth closed against the inhuman sound, and his shudder carried down to the tip of his cybernetic tail.

Tail?

He swiveled, but it wasn't quick. He rolled ponderously onto his low, ample stomach, staring down at his velvety paws.

Paws?

Jace got in his face, still stinking, but smelling more decisive. "General Scolan, do you know who I am?"

Pit worked his jaw. Every time he brought his lower lip upward, he produced a soft woof. He swung his head from side to side, then up and down.

This was horribly disorienting. This was horribly weird. Weirdest, most horrible of all, he felt an unfamiliar prickle of empathy for the discarded daugment whose body he now inhabited.

It passed quickly.

"Pit, eyes front," Jace said. Pit's attention swung back to the present reality. A surprisingly light smile crossed the lieutenant's face. "Hey, the bionic eye looks pretty good."

Pit raised his ears, and without prompting, his tail wiggled from side to side.

Oh, for the love of the gods. He was wagging his tail.

He worked his jaw again, brow furrowing as he summoned the human words he needed.

Something fizzled in his brain. A spark of electricity where dog-flesh and human consciousness soup and cybernetic container came together and made sense out of madness.

"Hoooowwwly shit, Jace, this is awful!" Pit unleashed words in a rapid-fire stream, making the vocalization box in the back of his throat vibrate. "I have paws! I have a tail! I have a godsdamn TAIL! I have four legs, I don't have hands anymore-I'm short, I'm fat-"

Jace threw his head back and belly-laughed. Pit's jaw snapped shut again. He'd never seen Jace laugh like that before.

When he recovered, Jace managed to say, "You were always short, sir."

"Did you just-" Pit heaved himself onto all fours. "Interrupt and insult-" He lost his balance and fell forward on his face, finishing the sentence into his chest: "A superior officer?"

"Yes, sir."

Pit popped his head free. His neck was fat, ungainly, hard to control. He rolled his head a few times. "That's better. Fuck. This feels horrible."

Liev started, "General Scolan, sir-"

As Pit turned to the other man, he caught sight of a tarp draped hastily over a human-sized form. His canine heart surged as he recognized the fallen grey cap lying beside it.

"Call me Pit," he said roughly, dragging his gaze away from the body. "General Scolan is otherwise occupied."

"Pit, sir," Liev said. "We need to run a few diagnostics. Optimize you before you go."

"Mmph. Of course." Still reeling from the realization that he was feet away from his own corpse, Pit sat down hard on the table. Metal scritched against metal as the four tail segments swept across the table surface.

Thirza moved in with a plastic-tipped wire, which he let her attach to the port just behind his implanted eye. "Speech tests first," she said. "Please start speaking. Say whatever you like. I'll adjust a few things while I listen. You might feel a slight tingling right here." She brushed him lightly under the jaw, close to where the vocalizer box sat, and Pit leaned into her touch without thinking about it. "But don't worry, you'll still sound like you."

Pit blinked. He did, in fact, sound like himself, even if the words had come out of the mouth of a jowly dog. Further words failed to bubble up from his brain.

"Tell me about your planet," Thirza urged. Pit caught the look Jace shot Thirza, sharp and concerned, and the silent admonishment she shot back. Instead of the outrage at Jace's disloyalty that he expected to feel, Pit experienced a deep well of homesickness for a place he'd never been.

"Prowess. She's my masterpiece," he said, and the dam broke. "Bringing her to life is...exhilarating. I've never been an artist-I consider myself an engineer, if anything-but something about shaping Prowess makes me into a poet."

Though Thirza covered her mouth, she had the composure not to laugh out loud. She contained her giggle behind her wrist, leaning in to adjust some clearly urgent setting. Pit's tailtip wriggled and he slacked his jaw a little between sentences.

"Taking command of an entire planet, bending the very ecosystems to my will-it's invigorating. Makes me feel powerful." Pit tipped his chin towards his chest and summoned his best military voice of authority.

Liev leaned in as Jace shot a tense look towards the door, his arms tight against his chest.

"But you know, the moments I remember the most are nothing like that. Nothing grand. I will never forget ordering the first imported plants from Earth." Pit swayed, lost in reminiscence. The spots Thirza had pushed under his chin thrummed not uncomfortably with electricity. "I woke up long before dawn on a field mission and dug up an ancient projector so I could watch the robots putting the first coffee plants in the ground. Spent a good four hours glued to the projection from countless millions of miles away, staring at little more than automated shovels planting a field. But it was magnificent. Towards the end, I told the camera to swoop low and it caught the sunrise with the silhouette of the little seedling in the foreground. Absolutely breathtaking." He lolled his tongue, panting, and raised a brow at Thirza. "Got enough yet?"

She nodded. "You can keep going if you want."

"He can't," Jace cut in. "We have to move. Five more minutes."

Thirza's hands fluttered, but she seemed to center herself by tapping her temple. "Okay. We'll just run minimum test requirements. We can get you on your way in four minutes." In a very specific tone, she added, "Pit, stand up."

Pit obliged without a second thought, jumping to his feet to stand with his head tilted up, like those show dogs on the dumb afternoon holo specials he watched instead of sports. Perhaps was something in his robotic brain forced him to respond to that peculiar voice humans affected when they gave commands to animals.

That would be quite the strategic flaw in this arrangement. His stomach churning with adrenaline, Pit lifted each of his four paws as Thirza directed.

Well. He'd fight it. He was aware of it, and he'd fight it if anyone tried to use that voice against him.

"This one might feel a little weird," Thirza said. "Blink three times fast."

After all his determination, Pit still obeyed. The room went dark, then came back dim. Dark, dim. Dark, and then instead of just dim, red laser-like lines outlined the people and the objects in the room. Pit snarled in surprise.

"You're fine." Thirza switched to a soothing voice as she touched the monitor several more times. "Read me the smallest letters you can."

Symbols like an eye test appeared at a forced distance in his heads-up display. Pit squinted and it refocused. "Bee, tee, em, cue, ee, oh."

"Very good. Just one more," Thirza said. "Let's get you off the table. You need to practice jumping."

"Jumping?" Pit flopped onto his hindquarters and scratched at an interminable itch on his ear. In the process, he switched the HUD on and off several times and noted the action. "Odd test for minimum requirements."

"Not really," Thirza said, wrapping her arms around him. Pit resisted an urge to see what her cheek tasted like. "This is an escape mission. You'll need all your faculties to get away."

A chill tingled down Pit's spine. Until now he'd managed to avoid thinking about the fact that there was a next step. Surviving the transfer, that was something, and so far he'd seemed to integrate into his borrowed (stolen, whispered a little voice he ignored) body without a glitch. Veritable miracles.

And compared to escaping from the Makopsian palace, a fortress on a barren, brutal world...compared to scouring the known, probably the unknown, galaxy for a place he'd be safe from the far-reaching network of General Tristan...

Compared to all of that, he hadn't even completed the tutorial level.

Thirza knelt down in front of him and pushed a low, long box onto the floor between the two of them. "Okay. Jump over the short side."

Pit backed up a few steps, scritched at the floor, and then reared back and broke into a dopey trot.

Gathering his legs beneath him, he sprang.

And cleared the box.

"You got it," Thirza said, rubbing the soft flesh under his chin. "Nice work. You can go."

Achievement fucking unlocked!

"Three minutes. Well done," Jace said. His hand swung low to brush against Thirza's hair. "Alright. Well. Let's suit us up and get out of here."