“I prefer dogs to rats. My parents are Collie breeders, and those are quite intelligent, unlike many other breeds,” Valenan said with his never-pleasant voice, and that was the last straw for Nerines. He stormed out of the headquarters, decided to change things.

  “This cannot stand. You are all supposed to be agents of justice, and instead you are all terrible people!” He turned on his heels just to accuse the unwashed mass he had once considered companions.

  He hated to acknowledge where magic came from, and what the Retrievers did with the souls of the criminals they caught. He swore he would change it, and shook his fist in the air as his golden mane waved with the energetic movements of his head. Some women, of both the day and the night, had called him the most striking young man that had ever been raised in the heart of the Minced Meanders. He pushed the tall, metal and glass doors with both of his well-toned arms and strode out Retriever Central with utmost purpose, still wearing the uniform depicting their icon on both the left breast and, much larger, on the back: a friendly Golden Retriever carrying a ball of energy, representing a soul. He truly embodied the ideal of a hero of legend, and maybe one day he could become one.

  Three days later I found his wallet by a nearby ditch, and that stirred a feeling of contentment inside me. I also found his mangled cadaver hanging from a dead, ossified tree, right above the scar on the terrain. He was not so gorgeous anymore, with one of his blue eyes dangling from the optical nerve, and the improvised marsupium the murderer had carved in his abdomen, from front to back. That meant only one thing: nobody would mind if the wallet got lost.

  I shrugged, stashed the bloodied thing in my pocket without checking how much it had in it and kept walking towards the HQ. It was the early morning, nobody else seemed to have noticed the cadaver, and its smell would get masked by the misfires of the Governor’s Sacromotor. Keeping the city’s dome in shape so the meanders didn’t… well, meander in, sometimes stressed him out a bit too much, and he happened to do things like turning a tree into a jutting spike of bone or a bystander into the sort of person that answers “it’s complicated” when you ask about their relationship with corporeal existence.

  The Retriever central had always stood in one of the less stinky neighborhoods under the stroma dome, stroma being one of the tissues found in corneas: We Two-M’s mean it when we say we live in the eye of the world. Our HQ reflected the dome above, somewhat, being a circular building with a semi-spherical ceiling, all painted in blue and yellow tones. I hated walking by its mural because you could notice it had been painted by spell and not by hand, despite the depiction of the six Retriever breeds being mostly true to life. There were some mistakes a real painter wouldn’t make, if you looked up close. And once you noticed, they stole attention away from the rest of the piece. One too many claws in paw, one too many canine teeth in a panting jaw, things like that.

  I wondered briefly about what Nerines had said. That we were all terrible people. It made me feel inadequate: If the others seemed as bad as me, that meant I was slacking. Which, to be fair, was totally in character.

  I would have loved to kill time, but a peer had been already deposed by rather penetrative means, and I didn’t want to give anyone a reason to go for seconds. I had never fostered Nerines’ ideals and the idea the higher ups had of me was at worst slightly negative, but there were also career criminals that hated us Retrievers, and I had no guarantee that my class member’s murder had been a disciplinary action instead of good ol’ blind retaliation.

  They were justified, before anyone asks. Nerines’ reaction, and possibly his murder.

  I sighed as I crossed the doors. My gaze focused on the unwrinkled dorsal of my hand: I had been told mine were hands that had never seen a day of honest work in my life. I generally answered that it was expected of a pair of hands to be unable to see jack shit.

  One could almost glide over the lustered floors of Central. Nobody was employing mages to apply those thick coats of polish: The Retrievers were stingy with taxpayer money in so many things, but not in the business of inconveniencing the ones who filed the bill whenever they deemed themselves worthy of forcing us to do our job. In theory, we were the people to call if your kitten had got stuck up a tree or some wild animal had magically found their way inside the dome and taken residence in your cozy dwelling. In practice, we endeavored to make it humanly impossible to gather the force of will required to file a claim for anything that didn’t involve soulgyving criminals.

  I found, or skidded, my way to Klena’s desk. She was the receptionist, and we rookies, in theory, were obligated to report to her and the beginning and end of our instruction days. In practice, we ignored the rickety woman and her not-so-rickety eye bags.

  But that day I approached her, and rang the little bell on her desk, because it was a good bell, all silvery and ornate, and because being needlessly obnoxious runs in my family. She stared at me like you stare at a fly that you know you cannot swat, because the little fucker is faster than you. Silent disdain. Acceptance. A bit of a suicidal thought or two.

  “What do you want today, Saon?” she asked after a defeated sight.

  “To go home and sleep like a normal human being.”

  She grabbed the bridge of her nose. “What do you need today?”

  “To go home and sleep like…” I puffed and gestured excessively with the right hand. “Nah, I am kidding. Nerines isn’t coming to work today.”

  “He didn’t come yesterday or the day before either. Is he sick, did he tell you to deliver the message when he could just call as it is protocol?”

  The narrative has been illicitly obtained; should you discover it on Amazon, report the violation.

  “He has problems with his throat. Cannot speak very well.”

  She opened her eyes a bit more than normal. “You mean he has something like the flu or pharyngitis?”

  I shook my head and scratched the tip of my nose so casually. “I meant that throat muscles need brain activity to function normally, and somebody infected him with a very aggressive condition that interferes with that. He has like, a hole the size of a platter in his guts, there, impaled on an ossified tree as he is. Could be Chron’s, if you ask for my inexpert medical opinion.”

  It took her a moment to process my words, and she remained slack-jawed and horrified for a second afterwards. Priceless. “You mean your companion got killed?!”

  “Yeah. Pretty much. He chose a beautiful morning to get murked,” I said, and leaned over her desk, supported by my left forearm. “Now, speaking of the devil and murder: have you seen Lillypod around?”

  “Your coworker appears dead and you ask about your goddamn raven!” It wasn’t a question. She was blowing hot air out her oval-shaped nostrils. She was positively mad.

  “I. Raise. Crows,” I said, in a tone far more serious than the one I had been holding up to that moment. “Lillypod is a crow. A group of crows is a murder. A group of ravens is an unkindness, Klena.” I slammed both hands on her desk to show I meant business. More or less. “Get it together.”

  I walked a couple steps away as she counted out loud, but still to herself, probably to avoid decapitating yours truly with a slice of her manicured pink claws. “By the way, is she alive?”

  “I don’t know about your damn bird!”

  “No, no. Flenafide. Is she…”

  She adjusted her glasses with a fury I found pretty amusing to watch. She was trembling, possibly from containing a stream of insults that battled to get out. “The coffee machine is still out of order, Saon.”

  “Then today is no day for celebration.”

  I shuffled my feet out the luster hell that was the lobby, with airs of a man whose soul had been defeated (not precisely in battle), worthy of the prospect of a day devoid of precious caffeine. Nobody at work would mind if I took a short trip to the coffee shop a few hundred meters from Central during my rest. But it wasn’t the same. The charm of the mixture of stale lab rat shit, excess sugar, cheap milk and hideous soulgyver-sourced cinnamon turned the machine cappuccinos into the clearly superior drink when one went for the slow and steady path to suicide.

  After crossing the gloomy tunnels of posters reminding us rookies about the exploits of the governor —chiefly, the gruesome ones— I arrived at the office of my team. We were on the verge of graduating, and we used to be four brilliant individuals. Considering I counted as at least three of them and Valenan as the fourth, we still were fourth brilliant minds rife with potential.

  I lazily waved at Valenan, who sit spread on his chair as he read a report, at Valenan’s face hook, which believed itself a nose but I knew better, and at Revvie, local ostensible female, possible anthropophage, called human by eyewitnesses suspected of severe myopia. She tended to one of her trained ferrets, animals that she insisted on keeping in the facilities. Valenan, as it was natural, left his dogs at home —or at the place where the damn workaholic went to fantasize with another shift in his free time, anyway— and my trained crows lived in my room and garden, or, being crows, where they damn pleased. Yes, Lillypod, I am talking about you. Suffice to say, neither of us had chosen the preferred animal of most soulgyvers: the noble, intelligent, and quick to breed white rats. The higher ups didn’t mind: we were trained and intended to work for an organization founded by a soulgyver with a sacromotor base consisting mainly of Golden Retrievers. Experimentation regarding our animal of choice was even encouraged.

  “So, my beloved friends, I met with our dear Nerines today, and it seems that he began moving upwards in the world.”

  Valenan hummed a few seconds, and dedicated me a scrutinizing gaze. “Where did they hang him for you to call it ‘upwards mobility’?”

  “Not anywhere high. But as he rots the gases generated will soar in the atmosphere. Make your bet, thug or high rank Retriever?” I said as I threw the hat of my uniform over the table. I disliked the damn thing. I swore that as soon as I got my hands on a few human souls I would burn the fucking cap. Once you had enough spirits slaving away to let you cast powerful spells, people became way laxer regarding dress codes.

  “Betting about that seems like a good way of joining him inside his murderer’s sacromotor, in case it was one of us. They could even be listening.”

  Approval sounds came from the mouth of the ferret queen. She also believed the higher ups disliked any funny business. Probably that’s why her officebroken furry sausages were so boring to be around.

  “They don’t care about us talking or pondering about their assassinations. If anything, they will be happy they have set an example It’s not knowing the truth that gets you a hole in aread you’d prefer to keep whole. Is all about the attitude. We are soldiers of the status quo. We are content with it, unlike people who believe themselves paladins of change. They know us rats, weasels, dogs and carrion birds. They expect our moves, understand out motivations and even share them. It’s when you hiss at those who feed you with the intention of biting them that they put you down, not when you lick your paws and meow for some steak while you watch them double-team the girl that lives across the street with utmost disinterest.” Soon before I finished my speech, Revvie’s ample forehead had already met her desk, and Valenan’s face his palm.

  “Why are you like this?” they asked in unison.

  “I swear I am going to discover a spell to erase your damn capacity to use metaphors one of these days. On my honor,” Valenan continued, clearly disgusted by what I had said.

  “Swear on the child of a dragon and a unicorn, it has higher odds to actually exist.”

  I sauntered to my seat and let myself fall in it. “Also, I got his wallet, need to check how much it’s actually there but, I may finance your coffees one of these days.”

  “There are reports to file and forms to fill, Saon.”

  I grunted and grabbed a sheet from the pile. It always fell on us newbies and undergrads to do the job. Truth is, graduation merely meant you were now able to do magic. The whole having a date scheduled for it was to force certain minds to undergo the process, as some would waste years upon years training their animals before feeding their sacromotor. Being able to cast spells, in turn, meant you were eligible for field work that involved anything more dangerous than welfare checks and cat retrievals.

  “By the way, if you get all of the wallet’s worth, you get all of the work Nerines should have done,” Revvie told me, and, possessed by forces I refuse to understand, I let out an inhumanely long string of insults directed at her, her mother, her ferrets, the mothers of her ferrets, and so on. Grumbling lowly I obliged, because file work was not that bad compared to going out in the field, but, if only for a moment, I wished she had a sudden change of heart, either the kind that would take some work off my shoulders… or the kind that would get me some of her goodies.