Lev Saunders (Human, aged eight)

Lev went to the bureau because his cat was fine, and the rabbit should know.

That is a reason. Grown-ups do not think it is a reason, but Lev had been read to by someone who understood that when a thing is finished you go and tell the person who did it, and the rabbit had done it. So he went up the two decks and along to the bureau, with a piece of his lunch in his pocket in case the rabbit wanted it, and the tray on the low shelf was empty.

The sergeant at the desk said the rabbit was on the walkway with the cat. He said it the way grown-ups say things they think are jokes. Lev said thank you and went to the walkway.

The walkway was full of people not moving. He was small, so he went through under their elbows, and came out at the front, and there was a detective with a long plait standing very still, and a box with a rabbit in it at her feet, and in the warm place on the floor was Muffin.

He knew it was Muffin because everybody said so. He knew it was not a cat, because he had a cat. It was the size Zhulik had been in the spring, and it was not a cat, and that was as far as he got, and he did not mind. Small animals are not for describing. They are for picking up or not picking up.

Everybody was giving it things. A cook gave it a bit of a roll. A woman gave it her glove, which is not even food. It did something, each time. Lev could not have said what. It did something, and the person's face went soft and their hand went out, and Lev felt his own hand go towards his pocket and stopped it, because that was his lunch.

Then it tried the rabbit.

The rabbit was looking at the wall of the box. Muffin did its thing at the rabbit, whatever the thing was, and the rabbit went on looking at the wall, and then the rabbit turned round and looked at Lev's pocket instead, because the rabbit had noticed lunch.

That was all. But Lev had been watching a whole walkway of people give an animal things because they could not not, and then he had watched a rabbit not give it anything because a rabbit does not know how, and he saw that the rabbit was right and everybody else was doing something they had not decided to do.

So he did what you do with a small animal that is where it should not be. He opened the box, and the rabbit hopped out and went straight past everyone's feet towards the galley, where the warm was. He crouched down and picked Muffin up from behind, under the front legs, the way you pick up a cat that will not like it, and it did its thing at him, close up, right into his face.

"No," Lev said. Out loud. In front of everybody.

He put it in the box and shut the door. It took about four seconds. Nobody said anything, and then the cook laughed, once, the way people laugh when a thing they have been afraid of turns out to be a box.

He picked the box up. It was heavier than a rabbit. He looked round for the detective, because it was her box, and she was looking at him the way his mother had looked at the quartermaster on the day of the crate. Then she went to get her rabbit, and he walked back to the bureau with the box, and she walked behind him, and the walkway started moving again as if it had never stopped.