A child?
Standing on the last enormous step, Ruger found a huge question mark forming in his canine mind.
Why was there a child here? And was a child in this place really a child?
Ruger did not need to turn his head to sense those same questions in the silence of the two people beside him. He was thinking the same thing, after all. His hesitation and his body language both said as much.
Mona closed her eyes.
Ruger and Mahama both looked at her and waited quietly. This was their final check. Perhaps she was communicating with Big Fish, or perhaps she was using some prophetic ability. Whatever the case, the two bewildered men watched expectantly as the woman who could fix a smile on her face as though with a spell did her work.
Thump!
The heartbeat sounded again.
Mona opened her eyes at that moment.
"White Scale can confirm that this is the source of the heartbeat we've been following, but it doesn't know anything about a little human girl either." Mona hesitated, then put on her smile again. "My intuition tells me there's no danger, but it tells me nothing else, either. Strictly speaking, everything is hazy-but intuition has never been something you can rigorously analyze. Doing so would be foolish."
An unknown child.
Ruger looked at the child again.
Thump!
Suddenly, Ruger thought he saw the child's eyelashes flutter.
A pair of clear eyes that seemed never to have seen this world met a pair of lively canine eyes unlike any others in existence.
Ruger froze for a moment, then blinked. This was a living, real child.
It was a biological instinct: at the very first meeting of their eyes, he knew this was a person, not an Alchemical Puppet or some other imitation