Free The Race by Nina Allan Page A

their tails, but in their own quiet way they seem naturally empathic. Most dogs understand the world around them through their sense of smell, but greyhounds are sight hounds – they use their eyes for communication as well as for hunting prey. In other words, they’re more like people – one of the main reasons greyhounds were chosen to be smartdogs in the first place.
    It’s weird, watching them train. The younger, less experienced runners tend to talk out loud to their dogs a lot, praising them and encouraging them or urging them on. Either the implant hasn’t been fully assimilated, or they don’t yet trust their ability. All that changes as they become more experienced, and the most naturally gifted runners – runners like Tash, or Roddy Haskin – hardly ever speak to their dogs at all in the normal sense. Everything happens on another level, an invisible, sub-audible level of communication that turns their training sessions into a kind of silent ballet. If you keep quiet and concentrate hard you can sense that communication taking place. It’s hard to explain but you can definitely feel it: a tension in the air, like electricity, the same sensation you get with lightning just before it strikes.
    Watching Tash run Limlasker always gave me goosebumps. The two of them were special together – two faces of the same coin.
    ~*~
    I ate a quick lunch then headed over to the Cowshed. I was worried that Claudia would either be in the depths of a catatonic depression or hyped up to the ceiling but she appeared perfectly calm. Thoughtfully, determinedly calm in a way that seemed just about as far from her usual vagaries as it was possible to get.
    “I’ve been jotting down some ideas,” she said, more or less the moment I arrived. “I should have done this ages ago. Lumey’s a grown up little girl now, she isn’t a baby.”
    She made us some tea, and showed me her diagrams and notes, plans to turn Lumey’s pink-and-white nursery into what Claudia kept calling ‘a proper little girl’s room’. The metal cot she slept in was to be replaced with a full-sized bed, the plush cerise carpet to be taken up and new wooden floorboards fitted. There was a nautical feel to everything. Clean, bright, cheerful. A room from a magazine feature.
    “Do you think she’ll like it?” Claudia said.
    I said yes at once, without thinking, then realised I meant it, that Lumey, should she ever return to the room, really would be delighted by the blues and whites, the neat little bookcase Claudia had ordered, the wooden dressing table with its circular mirror and secret drawer. Any child would be. We went online and I helped Claudia to pick out a wind chime to hang in the window, an assortment of dangling glass prisms and brightly painted fish made out of tin.
    I became quite caught up in it all, actually, giggling over trifles, searching out new things to waste our money on, and at some point I realised the fiction had taken me over, that on some level at least I’d conned myself into believing my own evasions. The realisation brought it all back to me: Lumey’s gone-ness, the danger, our lies. It was as if a vast hole had opened beneath me, sprawling me backwards into nothingness. I thought of the old mine workings to the north of the town, the way the ground still caved in there sometimes.
    People died in those collapses, several dozen every year.
    I pictured myself struggling for a handhold in the falling earth, and supposed Claudia felt like that a dozen times already today, a hundred, more. I excused myself then went to the bathroom and splashed cold water on my face. The water from the Cowshed’s taps had a metallic smell, like old coins kept in a shoebox at the bottom of a wardrobe.
    The smell always made the water seem colder than it really was.
    ~*~
    I drank a final cup of tea with Claudia and then walked up to the lunges. The lunges was where Del put the dogs through their time trials, a high stretch of what was once