Bubochka (Rabbit, Smart Pet, Trainee)

She had kept counting the night pass after the detective's test ended, because a route is a fact about the floor and the floor is her job, and on the first night of the new month the route was wrong.

Not wrong. Longer. The housekeeping unit came through at its third hour the way it always did, slow and square, and then, where it should have turned at the end of the walkway, it went on — along the evidence shelf, which it had never done — and its tray came back with three small bagged things in it that had been on the shelf with the bureau's own tags on them. It stopped at the records-room door and did the thing with its front panel. Bubochka filed the route, and the count, and the time, and sent it up, and by morning Barsik had answered with one line, which was that he had read the reason two days earlier and she should keep counting.

She kept counting. Every night the unit took what was on the shelf. Every day somebody put more on the shelf, because that is what an evidence shelf is for. Nobody on the floor looked at the shelf, because nobody looks at a shelf until they need what is on it. She put that away whole: a thing can be going wrong in plain sight for exactly as long as it takes somebody to want it.

On the twelfth night Barsik came down off the cabinet top, which he does not do at night, and told her that tonight's exercise was to watch.

She watched. The unit came at its hour. Barsik stepped onto it as it passed the cabinet — onto the flat top beside the tray, the way a person steps onto a moving walkway, without hurrying — and rode it down the length of the floor, sitting upright, entirely composed, like an inspector being driven. At the records-room door the unit's service hatch opened at floor height, the door itself locked above it, and the unit went through with the cat on it, and the hatch closed.

She counted. It was longer than a route.

The hatch opened again and the unit came out with the cat still on it and something in the cat's mouth: a small clear bag with a slip clipped to it, a bag of the kind she had seen six of in the spring. He rode as far as the Inspector's desk, stepped off onto the chair and from the chair onto the desk, set the bag down in the exact centre of the blotter, and sat beside it for a moment, adjusting nothing. Then he came back to the cabinet top and did not look at her.

She asked, in the morning, why he had waited twelve nights when he had known on the first.

He said: A report delivered before the question exists is volunteered. A report delivered after the answer is gone is nothing. There is one day in between. That was it.

She wrote that down exactly, and then, because it was the first time she had ever seen him carry anything, she wrote down that too.