“Tick-tick-tock…tick-tick-tock….” Olin jabbered, thrown into sniffer’s trance by the promise of blood, crime, and the mystery of who and why. It was his job and the broad-spectrum autistic-triggers necessary for his work kept him sharp. He balanced on the knife’s edge, staring into the depths of madness. There were sniffers who went too far into their work and never came out; Cherrik worried that Olin’s edge might be too sharp, but he left Olin to his purpose. The City cared for broken sniffers with tax-payer money in the stygian wards deep beneath the sewers and the roots of monster towers; partners to any fallen sniffer were allowed retirement, or work in the wards to care for those to whom they’d been pair-bonded. Now, Olin maintained his balance, and so Cherrik pushed his misgivings aside. “Tick-tick-tock…tick-tick-tock; the fox runs, the hounds pursue. A corpse in troubled repose lies in brambles and bird-pecking beaks.” It was cold on the day Control coded punch cards and slotted them into the vast engines that summoned teams from off-shift slumber. It was cold and all Cherrik could imagine was warmth beneath faux-goose down as Olin slept beside him, ticking in his dreams…shuffling the numbers of probability as any sniffer might when there was no crime to hunt, no quarry to corner in some strange stretch of Zombie Town or The Bones, Crayfisher’s Neck, or the ghettoes of Rivermouth. “Tick-tick-tock…tick-tick—the wave function verges collapse, probability shrinks to the single point of now.” To hear Olin’s recitations was to forever learn the process of his rambling speech. Only his vocalized repetition of a clock’s wordless sound remained constant. The focus of Olin's olive-colored gaze went hazy and then sharp. He crouched, froglike, then pointed west, rocking on his heels. There were trees at the end of his gesture—the curve of railroad tracks, and beyond them, the tower of a bridge. Olin smiled—and for a moment his squared, boyish features lit with strange and alien glee. His hair was a dark tangle of rampant cowlicks tousled by the breeze. He leaned forward, pecked Cherrik’s lips with a kiss, then flashed his teeth in a feral hunter’s grin. “Tick-tick-tock…follow my unraveling in the labyrinth of Mynos where the man-bull awaits in his stink and his lice. He does not breathe. His slayer has run but his resolve is shaken.” There was a body. Close by. But there were always bodies in this stretch of Brambles’ Bore. “Whisper,” Olin said between rapid clock-work sounds. “Follow my skein to the lair of the dead and the tracks of the slayer.” And he was off in a low, military scamper. Cherrik kept pace with him. There were small things in the brush, vermin-mammals. Whoever had committed a crime here was gone, but as Olin broke away from zipper-seam of tracks and dense wooden ties, Cherrik spotted the point of Olin’s focus. Some hind-brain instinct impelled him to draw his gun. They reached a crumpled shape. A man. Birds pecked at his sightless eyes and gouged red marks in his skin. He’d been dead for a long while, only half-concealed by weed growth and scraggly sapling trees. His attacker was gone. A day departed at least, but it didn’t matter to Olin. He moved forward, tick-tick-tocking to himself as he slipped into mnemonic trance and recorded the scene with his eyes and ears. Sniffing clues and lapping at the air, dog-like, for telltale olfactory tags. Cherrik allowed him to work, keeping cover with his gun, watching for movement in the direction of the river and in the growth obscuring the corpse. After a hand’s span of minutes (or maybe more) Olin slipped out of trance and shook his head as if to clear errant thoughts. “Sniffer-sniffed…tick-tick-tock…the fox has run and the hounds pursue…a call to Central will summon my poetry and tomorrow’s weather is partly sunny with a chance of criminal apprehension.” ***