Bubochka (Rabbit, Smart Pet, Trainee)

The instruction had three parts. Find it. Do not catch it. Arrange for it to be seen. Bubochka took them one at a time.

Finding it meant thinking like a cat, which she had never done, but she had watched one every day since she arrived. A cat takes a small thing in its mouth. Then it wants somewhere safe to put it down: somewhere high, or somewhere closed in. The things had gone missing from the desks nearest the walkway. The things had been found on the cabinet top and in the boot and in the vent. So the cat came along the walkway, and the cabinet was where it liked to go.

She got into the evidence tray on the low shelf beside the records cabinet. It was the right size for a rabbit, and it was grey, and she was white, and nobody looked twice.

She counted who walked past. The Senior Sergeant. Two of the junior detectives. The monitoring officer with her slate. None of them looked at the tray. Then a cat came along the walkway with a stylus in its mouth.

It was small, and grey and white, and young, and it walked as if it owned the floor. It went past the Senior Sergeant's desk. He looked up, saw a cat, and said, "Barsik. Put that down," and went back to his slate without looking properly. The cat did not put it down.

It was not Barsik. Barsik was black. Barsik was, at that moment, on the Superintendent's desk; Bubochka could see the end of his tail through the office door.

She put that away whole, and it was about something at once. On a station with one cat, every cat is that cat. Nobody had asked. Nobody ever asks about a thing they have already explained. It was her own cover, the one under her collar, working perfectly — for somebody else, who had not earned it.

The cat jumped up onto the records cabinet, set the stylus down beside the reel of tape that was already there, and looked down at her with an expression she filed as pleased with itself. Then it went back the way it had come, along the walkway to the far end, where the corridor turns toward the transfer berths, and through a door somebody had propped open with a boot.

Do not catch it. She did not. That left the third part.

On Drithane she had learned that being interesting was also a kind of cover: people explained you to themselves and were finished with you. She had never once thought of it the other way round. A rabbit standing bolt upright in a corridor is a thing a person looks at. And a person who is a detective looks at what the rabbit is looking at.

She went and stood outside the Superintendent's door, on her hind legs, ears flat, facing the cabinet. She was very good at this. She had been practising since she arrived, without knowing what it was for.