. . .

“Oh,” says Mr. Gulley.

She blinks back into focus. “It is only hearsay,” Ms. Dalca explains.

“Well,” he says, a little uncomfortably, “it is on the nose. Perhaps I am wrong in my search for abstraction — but seriously. You must know what I mean, Ms. Dalca. Levi’s?”

“. . . fabric prepared according to the directions of Leviticus?”

“Siemens?”

“An eccentric mathematical term,” she says, “I suspect, indicating the structure of their hyperspace geometries.”

He opens his mouth to speak again, but she interrupts him.

“Be honest with me, Mr. Gulley.”

He can feel the wolf twisting within him.

“Tell me what this new company is for.”

“It’s to kill the wolf,” he says, softly, and there is such guilt and fear and longing in his voice as to sicken her. “It’s all to kill my only wolf.”

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