The first thing Rocky always heard was the fire.
Not the kennels. Not the washing machine. Not Harry's boots on the stairs.
Fire.
Heat came up through his paws. Iron railings pressed against his chest. Smoke rolled over the balcony in thick black folds and turned the night into something he could not see through.
Somewhere below, his mother made a sound he knew better than his own name.
Rocky pushed at the railings.
Too small. Too high. Nowhere to go.
Then the dog appeared through the smoke.
Large. Black and white. Scarred muzzle lifted towards him. One eye dark and fixed; the other pale and cloudy, catching the firelight until it looked almost white.
The dog barked.
Once. Again. Again.
To a pup trapped above the flames it did not sound like help. It sounded enormous. Angry. Close to his mother.
Rocky screamed back.
Boots hammered somewhere behind him. A human shouted. Yellow flashed through smoke - coat, helmet, something bright - and hands closed around his body.
He fought them.
His claws scraped metal. The balcony dropped away beneath him. His mother's smell vanished under smoke and burning and the huge dog's bark.
Then he was being carried.
Away from her.
Away from the balcony.
Away from everything.
"Rocky."
The voice came from somewhere much safer.
"Rocky, wake up. You're doing it again."
A cold nose touched his cheek.
The fire went out.
Rocky hit the staff-room floor with all four paws trying to run in different directions. His claws scrabbled on lino. A blanket came with him. For one ridiculous second he was fighting a chair leg.
Then Hearth returned around him.
Cold floor. Dented fridge. Kettle. Wet coats hanging behind the door. Dog hair in places dog hair had no business being. A string of tired silver tinsel sagging over the noticeboard because Ted had insisted the staff room needed "festive morale" and nobody had yet had the heart to tell him morale did not normally droop in the middle.
Above the sofa, Elsa looked down at him.
She was black from nose to tail, sleek, balanced, beautifully bred and currently wearing the expression of a headmistress whose pupil had fallen out of bed during assembly.
"Finished?" she asked.
Rocky untangled his back leg from the blanket.
"I meant to do that."
"Of course. Very advanced manoeuvre."
He stood and shook. Brindle hair lifted into the air and settled over everything Elsa considered clean.
She sighed.
"You were there again."
Rocky looked towards the dark window.
"Yeah."
"More of it?"
He hesitated.
Elsa did not push. That was one of the reasons he trusted her.
"Balcony," he said at last. "I remembered the rail. And... a dog."
Her ears tipped forward.
Rocky swallowed.
"Big. Black and white. One eye cloudy. He was below me. Barking."
"At you?"
"I don't know."
That was the worst of the old memories. They never arrived with explanations. They came as smells, sounds, a pawful of pictures, then disappeared before he could turn them over.
"Mum was there," he said. "I could hear her. Then somebody picked me up. I remember fighting them because I thought they were taking me away from her."
Elsa slipped off the sofa and sat beside him.
"You were a pup."
"I know."
"Pups misunderstand things."
"I know that too."
"Good. Saves time."
Rocky gave her a sideways look.
Elsa leaned her shoulder against his.
"You don't have to solve it before breakfast."
"That's convenient. I was planning breakfast before solving it anyway."
"A rare display of judgement."
He breathed out. The room stopped smelling quite so much of smoke.
Elsa was staying at Hearth because Kara had been called back to her main practice late the night before. That happened often enough that nobody made a fuss about it. Kara would work until some unreasonable hour; Elsa would remain at Hearth with Harry and Rocky; and if Harry had the energy, he would eventually persuade two sleeping dogs upstairs to the little flat above the staff rooms. If he did not, they stayed exactly where they were.
Last night he had not.
Rocky preferred it that way. The staff-room sofa was old, the radiator clicked like a beetle and somebody had left half a paper Christmas crown on the windowsill. It was home.
Upstairs, pipes groaned.
Elsa lifted her head.
A floorboard creaked. Then another.
"Harry," Rocky said.
"Your powers of detection remain extraordinary."
Boots crossed the flat above them.
Rocky's tail moved before the rest of him did.
There had been a time when boots meant something else.
After the fire there had been other places. He remembered them less as homes than as separate smells: polish and boiled cabbage; children's hands; a kind woman who cried when he left; a yard where nobody came out when it rained; shouting behind a door; a gate with a loose bottom corner.
The places had blurred as he grew.
He had not.
By the time he found the loose gate he was old enough to understand that nobody was coming to call him back in.
So he went.
Months followed in pieces: alleys, bins, railway arches, takeaway boxes, dry places found before dark. He learned which people threw food and which threw things that hurt. He learned to cross roads behind other dogs. He learned that a half-open gate was an invitation and a closed one was merely a question.
Eventually somebody caught him.
Then came the pound.
Then came a card clipped to a kennel door.
AGGRESSIVE STRAY.
Harry had read it.
Harry had sat down anyway.
No reaching through the bars. No hard stare. No nonsense about showing him who was boss. Just a man on a concrete floor with a sausage broken into pieces so small Rocky had to keep coming back for another one.
"All right, mate," Harry had said. "Everyone's written about you. Let's see what you have to say."
Rocky had not understood every word then.
He had understood the waiting.
The stair door opened now and the same boots came down.
Harry pushed into the staff room wearing an old fleece, yesterday's stubble and the expression of a man who had already remembered six jobs before finding coffee.
"Morning, trouble. Morning, sensible one."
Elsa stood with a restrained wag.
Rocky leaned against Harry's knee hard enough to move him half a step.
"Bad one?" Harry asked.
Rocky answered, "Same one," but Harry heard only a low breath and felt the weight pressed against his leg.
He rubbed the scar behind Rocky's ear.
"Yeah," he said softly. "Thought so."
Elsa watched them. Humans insisted dogs did not use words. Elsa had long ago concluded this was because humans were too busy using words themselves.