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Coldridge Prison is a house of firmly closed doors. Locks and logbooks and cold hard steel keep the world within from the world without, every warm body accounted for and in its proper place. But even so, no box is ever truly closed. It just depends on the size of your perspective.
A rat drops down from a crack in the wall onto a duct with a resonant thud. She pokes her little brown head up into the air and sniffs, sweeping in the bouquet of scents the prison offers: rust, oil, the cool tang of wet concrete, and a hundred different kinds of sweat. Blood, too. Mostly old. And food! The rat dips her nose over the edge of the duct, and— Yes, food, yeasty and starchy and close!
She skitters along pipes and railings and the corners of walls towards the scent of bread, pressing herself into the comfort of shadows. The rat’s sensitive whiskers map the world in texture and vibrations as she travels. Cold open grating becomes sandpapery concrete and she veers deftly away from the thunder of boots. Several of her kind have been here before and left markings, brilliant to her nose even after days or weeks.
Another scent: that of a hound drifts up from the story below. The rat freezes against the wall as adrenaline grips her, igniting memories of terror and leaping and wet breath and teeth. Her side still aches from the near miss of those jaws and her ear smarts, all but torn off. Her tiny heart thrums. The musky scent fades quickly though, only a residue. No true danger for now. She turns and scampers away.
The rat eventually comes to the end of a long dim hallway, blissfully quiet save for the humming of electricity through grimy lamps high above her. Her tiny belly twists.
There is something very wrong with her, she feels, as she rounds a final corner and leaps between cold iron bars. No, not the wounds. She can sense it, a heat in her body that drives her to eat, eat, eat. Alone like this it’s subtle, just a prickle in her jaw, but with others—soft-bodied siblings, tongues on fur and chattering squeaks—it surges.
A hunk of bread sits on a metal tray just inside the bars. The rat approaches and nibbles at the stale crust. Can she make off with the whole thing? Yes, she thinks so. She sinks her teeth in and hauls back.
The tray shifts with an unexpected clang, set too close to the edge of the cell’s steps to balance without the bread’s weight. The noise is explosive to the rat’s little ears. She panics and leaps into the air, twisting and kicking the tray with her leg as she goes. Metal crashes. The bread, forgotten, thumps to the floor. The rat shoots into the nearest dark place she can find, a low corner between the wall and an elevated concrete slab. Something rustles above her and she freezes mid-skitter.
There is a human here.
She’d missed the huge warm thing on the slab, its scent all muddled up with blood and grime and ammonia and her attention distracted by the promise of food. She waits with taut muscles for it to lie still once more but it doesn’t.
Feet land on the concrete and the human stands, a blanket reeking of sweat and fear draped around its body. It towers above the rat. It shuffles obliviously over to the mess she’d made, bends to pick up the bread, then sighs and slumps down against the opposite wall. Slowly, it—he—dusts the hunk off and begins tearing it apart.
Desperation wells in the rat. She is so, so hungry, and will get nothing of this feast. She must escape to continue her hunt for scraps to live another day. She begins inching her way along the wall.
The human’s head snaps up and freeze overcomes flight once more. He raises his arms. She flinches.
“Hello,” the man speaks in signs, slow with fatigue. “Did you make all that racket?”
But the rat is a rat, and understands no meaning in the gestures of hands.
The enormous creature leans forward, still several feet away. If the rat could see clearly beyond her nearsighted world of monochrome shadows and fuzzy lights, she’d be greeted by a lanky, haunted man with ragged nails and fever-bright eyes hiding beneath matted hair. He places another piece of bread in his mouth and chews thoughtfully.
A soft white crumb lands between them. The rat jerks away. But the human remains still, and after a long minute she creeps forward to seize the morsel. She shuffles backwards to her wall and tears into it. It’s too small to be worth fleeing with.
The man tosses another crumb. The rat sidles cautiously forward again and takes it. They continue like this for a good while, a timid back and forth in which she slowly grows bolder and bolder. The hot hunger burns in her still, a separate urge entirely from her growing satiation on the bread, but the itch to bite and tear and gnaw is scratched regardless. The human sits as still as a statue.
Another offering: this time a chunk as large as her head. When she takes it the man reaches out as though to examine her shredded ear and she leaps immediately away, the fragile truce broken. Too much! Too close!
The rat locks her jaws around her morsel and shoots out past the bars of the cell. She leaps from floor to chair to pipe to duct and finally finds safety in the gloom of the high places, quiet and small.
The human sighs down below. The rat hears shuffling, fabric on concrete, and then nothing. She finishes her bread and twists about to clean herself, scrubbing her face with her paws and straightening her fur with her tongue. The fullness in her belly is delightful but it never lasts for long.
The rat raises up on her hind legs and scents the air again. A subtle hint of grease entices her from elsewhere. She follows it, and the man and his bread are forgotten as quickly as they’d come.
The rat delights in her nest. It’s secreted away in a half-empty crate on the waterfront and filled with rags and grass and shredded paper, just large enough for her and nine tiny others. She weaned her second litter two moonrises ago but hasn’t moved on yet herself.
The world has been a wet, chilly place recently. She pokes her nose out of the hole she’d gnawed in the crate’s side and twitches her whiskers. Scents of salt, rainwater, feces, rotting wood, and blood running thinly in the puddles all greet her. Her kind have been eating well, fed fat on that blood. There are more and more of them each day, their hot wrongness blanketing the city’s streets and sewers wherever they go.
The rat scrunches back out of the mist into her nest. She circles about and fusses with an errant scrap of cloth, pushing it back into its place. Content, she starts to brux, grinding her teeth down as she settles in against the soft walls.
And then she feels it. A sudden tug like how she’d imagine a hawk’s talons grasping her and lifting her from the earth would feel, if rats were capable of imagining. A force sinks into her and pulls sharply backwards and then—
And then—
Then the rat is somewhere else. Gone is the warmth, the crosshatched texture of reeds against her fur, and the rattling of metal tracks high in the sky. Every hair on her back stands on end as prickling cold slaps into her body. Brightness floods the sky and the ground, or at least where the ground should be. She’s falling upwards, thrashing and scrambling at nothingness, until the tug comes again and she’s back on solid footing.
It’s cobblestones. Cobblestones and a horrible cacophony.
A gunshot cracks above her, excruciatingly loud. She scrambles as she tries to orient herself and escape. Humans shout and splash through puddles, soaking the rat’s fur, stenches of fear and aggression trailing behind them in the drizzly air. One human sees her and slashes down with a flashing blade but she springs out of the way. A strange mist is roiling about that makes her whiskers tingle, and as it dissipates she suddenly realizes that she isn’t alone. Her brothers and sisters are packed all around her, dozens and dozens of them.
A terrible switch flips inside her.
The tickle in the rat’s jaw explodes with a fury. Eat, it screams. Rip! Tear! There is no predator, no prey, only meat! The scent of blood overwhelms her. She can smell it beneath the humans’ skin, thrumming and hot and delicious. Some of it has even been spilled already, layered over oiled steel and gunsmoke. Her stomach is a pit and she is going to fill it.
She surges forward. Humans shriek and stumble before the tide of rats. She launches herself upwards and finds damp wool beneath her claws, easy to grip and utterly inconsequential to bite through. She sinks her incisors deep into the flesh beneath and ambrosia bursts into her mouth. The human screams, the astringent scent of his terror washing over her. Desperate hands crush her ribcage and throw her off, but she takes that chunk of meat with her. The rat hits the ground hard with a squawk but pulls herself right back up.
She scrambles forward again, this time swarming shoulder to shoulder with others of her kind. They overwhelm their prey and the human collapses, thrashing and screaming to the ground. It’s quick work after that. She scampers over smooth belts and scratchy wool piping to the throat, where the blood sings loudest, and tears at the flesh there until it gushes free. The massive creature ceases its twitching. And then she tears more , because she cannot stop.
The chaos flows into a hot red blur. Her siblings chitter and shriek as boots and blades crush their tiny bodies, but the rest of the humans stand no chance. Soon it’s silent save for susurrus of rain and there’s nothing left to rend apart.
One by one the other rats disperse. The wet chill in her fur and her over-full belly make themselves pointedly known to the rat as the hunger recedes in her siblings’ absence. She waddles out of a viscera-filled puddle and shakes the pinkish water off as best she can.
Footfalls. New ones, this time.
A human figure emerges from the mist, dark and flowing with eyes that glint like glass. The rat tenses. A powerful scent of ozone and ice and salt rolls off of him. She pauses, her instincts confused, until the strange chemical information re-writes them entirely. That cold, bright place—it connects the two of them somehow.
The man stumbles to his knees next to a gristly pile of bones and takes off his face. Then he throws up. He’s breathing hard and shaking, cloaked in gunsmoke and tangy iron. The rat lifts a paw to approach, but he makes a startled noise and scrambles back to his feet upon noticing the remains next to him. He wipes his mouth with trembling fingers.
He lowers his hand and looks at the back of it, disgusted.
The rat scampers closer. He takes a step back, fear flashing on his face below his rain-soaked hair. She goes up on her back legs and chitters reassuringly, but it doesn’t seem to work—perhaps it’s the wrong way for humans, or too high for him to hear. When the rat doesn’t leap at him the man slowly calms.
“Don’t,” he signs, a brutal chopping motion. “Don’t look at me like that. I…” He casts his gaze about and holds back another retch. “I didn’t know this would happen.”
The rat picks delicately closer. Past the vomit’s astringence, something else familiar lingers around this human. A body-scent that she’s smelled before.
The man drops to his haunches and extends a hesitant hand. She doesn’t flinch when he smooths a massive finger over her scarred ear. It’s a thoughtful motion, and even feels nice in the itchy spot at the base of her skull. She licks at his fingertip back in long grooming strokes. Then, emboldened, she hops up onto the man’s sleeve.
He jerks back. She scrambles for purchase but can’t find it, dropping back to the cobbles. He rises, putting a pace between them, and sweeps an arm out.
“Go on,” he chops, scowling. “Go!”
The rat remains resolutely still. The man turns his back and strides across the slick street, away from the carnage. She scampers after him and he hears her little footsteps splashing, turning over his shoulder several times before stopping again.
“What?”
She looks at him. He takes another step. She closes the distance and rises up on her hind legs. That tangy scent—prickly and somehow blue— makes her feel a kinship with this human deep in her delicate bones. It tempers both her natural flightiness and the hot itch in her jaw, and she doesn’t want it to vanish.
The human sighs. He scoops the rat up and holds her inelegantly around the middle, not quite certain what to do with her. She twists and scrabbles until her claws catch on the musty, lanolin-steeped wool he wears. Then she darts for the inviting crevice of a coat pocket. The fabric inside presses around her and offers delightful darkness. There’s lint and paper scraps and a stray button. She still misses her nest, but this will do pleasantly.
The man spreads the pocket mouth with his fingers and peers curiously in at her for a moment, then lets it shut. She pokes her nose out just in time to see the back of his hand flash bright blue, and the talon-like tug whisks them both away.
Days pass. Whenever the shouting quiets and the running stops, the man feeds the rat drops of a thick, pungent liquid that further soothes the fiery itch in her jaw. It leaves her clear-headed for the first time since she was a pup. He slips bits of cheese and tinned fish and more bread into the pocket, and she feels herself growing pleasingly fat. Her fur becomes sleek and her little paws very, very greedy.
Most of the time she lives in a dusty attic room above a human den that smells overpoweringly of alcohol. There are no other rats here, which is strange to her, but she catches whiffs of the fever mixed in with sewage from somewhere outside. She steals rags and feather stuffing and tears a hole in an old chair cushion to build herself a new nest.
There’s a girl who watches her dig out the stuffing and laughs, saying Corvo when she pulls the man over to see. Every few days he scoops her up and off they go on the cold bright tide of the nowhere-place.
The rat had to insist the first time. The man had put his face on again, so she’d been ready when she felt the pressure of the room snap around him. She scrambled up his leg just in time to tag along as he vanished.
“You can’t come with me,” he frowns, admonishing her with one hand as he holds the pocket open with the other. He reaches in but she pushes him back out with her paws, then opens her jaw and shoves him out with her teeth when he keeps trying. Eventually, after some upset squawking for good measure, he gives in.
They set off. The rat hunkers down and makes herself unobtrusive, poking out to scent the air and see what she can whenever her human pauses.
Salt water, rich and dirty with oil. The ultrasonic whine of electric current coursing through cables as they pass. The stink of the itch, in two distinct colors: her own kind, and human. The light beyond the pocket soon dims to the point that she can peer comfortably out into the dark, except for the occasional flare of floodlights. She watches fuzzy steel girders and chains fly by as Corvo flashes upwards.
Every so often he wrestles with other men. The musk of exertion filters in through the pocket to the rat, who braces there against the wild swinging of his coat. It’s accompanied by a quick spike of stress each time that overlays his comforting ozone-blue smell. The scrap never lasts for long, however, and they continue on once he drags the bodies somewhere quiet.
Eventually they make their way inside a building that smells of marble dust and it all goes wrong.
The music hits the man like a railcar. He stumbles back and screams hoarsely, the first loud sound the rat has ever heard him make. It hurts her as well: the music’s overtones scrape like nails at her delicate hearing, and worst of all she loses the man’s scent. It vanishes in a snap, as though her nose has gone blind. She writhes and erupts into shrieking chitters.
Humans shout. A gun fires like a bomb going off. Blood, very close. They’re running, swaying, and something briefly crushes the rat as they burst through a door. Sea breeze again. They’re outside and the music fades, but the heavy footsteps pursuing them pound closer still. The rat scrambles up and pushes herself partway out of the pocket, panicking.
Then- yes! Ozone snaps back around the rat, static electricity tugging at her fur. The man shoots out his hand and yanks them away through the bright place.
They come to a stop on a rooftop. Corvo collapses on his back, heaving. He stinks of panic and fear. The rat scrambles free and runs tight circles on the slate next to him, bouncing and twisting until she calms down enough to press herself back into the safety offered by his rumpled clothing. Then she remembers: blood! She pushes through wool and linen until she finds the graze on his arm and laps at it, not out of hunger but from an urge to mend. Iron-red saturates her mouth and chest.
The man groans. Fingers grasp her about the middle and pull her off, pressing her to his chest instead. He rolls up.
“Fuck,” he grimaces, his motions sharp and tight. He repeats the sign again and again until he’s bowed over with his chest to his knees and his hands just shake. She listens to his breath grow quicker and shallower and the adrenaline rolling off of him sours and curdles into something worse. Pressed up against him like this, the rat can feel the frantic beat of his heart.
She may not understand the minds of humans, but she understands terror that locks your joints and sets your nerves aflame.
The rat extricates herself from the man’s limp hold, clambers determinedly up into his hood, and shoves herself against the bare nape of his neck. He doesn’t react. She starts assertively grooming, pushing and digging whenever a clump of hair gets in her way. She feels his muscles gradually relax beneath her and his heartbeat begin to slow. After a while he even flinches and huffs an involuntary laugh when she makes her way behind his sweat-soaked ear.
Finally, Corvo shifts. Callused fingers coax her out and the rat drops down into his palms. Corvo presses his nose into her soft side and inhales deeply, the exhale banishing the final dregs of what had gripped him. She melts as he pulls long, firm strokes across her fur and scratches a fingernail against her cheek.
“Thank you,” he gestures with a soft, shaky smile. The rat perks up at the movement. “I’ll be okay.”
Corvo tends to his wound and takes a deep swig of the pungent liquid he keeps on him, the canister glinting in the evening light. When he stands he scoops the rat with him and returns her to his coat. He holds his palm gently against her through the wool for a moment. The pressure and darkness make her wriggle in deeper, content and confident in his presence again.
The next time Corvo dons his first face and flits out the window, the rat doesn’t have to insist he take her. He simply offers his pocket and she slips inside.
It’s the girl, though, who gives her a name.
“What happened to its ear, Corvo?” the child asks aloud. She’s perched on a chair feeding the rat scraps of eggs from her breakfast, which the rat takes happily in her lap. Corvo had shown the girl how to hold the rat without crushing her and she’s been doted on ever since.
“I don’t know,” Corvo shrugs. He’s splayed out on the floor stretching his legs. “A fight with another rat, maybe. It’s lucky it made it.”
Emily frowns. “It? You still haven’t given it a name?”
He gestures noncommittally. “I’ve never been good with pets.”
“You should. I bet I can think of lots of…” the rat is suddenly in the air, back legs splayed and swinging as Emily peers at her nethers. “Lots of good girl names.”
“Alright. Like what?”
Emily screws up her face in concentration.
“Like… Henrietta. That’s a good one, I think. A proper sounding name. She’s very proper for a rat.”
Back on the table the rat delicately rearranges the piece of egg she’s been nibbling at.
“That’s a chore to say,” Corvo vetoes. He rolls up, pausing his stretching, and finger-spells Henrietta for the girl. She rolls her eyes and sighs by the time he hits i.
“Okay, fine. Let’s try a different way. What’s your favorite thing about her?”
He thinks for a moment, his expression flickering dark for a moment before a sly smile shutters any other emotions away.
“The first time I met her she tried very hard to steal my bread,” Corvo provides. “I let her and we’ve been friends ever since.”
“Bread!” Emily exclaims. “That’s a fantastic name for a rat. See, you are good at this!”
Corvo grins and laughs, an airy, scratchy thing. He thinks for a moment, then crooks his pointer finger into the sign for r. He saws that hand back and forth across his other palm like in bread , replacing the normally knife-like gesture with the letter.
Emily watches closely, then tries the name sign for herself. “Bread but with an r, for rat?”
“Exactly. I think it fits.”
The girl whirls excitedly to the rat, who’d crept up oh so quietly to the tantalizing breakfast plate while the humans were distracted. The rat’s whiskers tickle against the crisp texture of bacon, her nostrils overwhelmed by the thick, salty grease saturating it. She freezes, caught out, one desirous paw on the porcelain.
“Hey! Stop that, that’s mine,” Emily gasps. The girl whisks the plate away, then gets in close. “You, you little thief, are Bread, got it?” she declares, signing as she speaks. Bread stretches up to follow her dancing hands, which smell like more egg. “Watch it with my breakfast, or I’ll turn you into toast!”
Bread learns her name sign. Or at least that if she comes dashing when she sees it, she gets a treat: cracker corners or jam or the rare nibble of pear. Soon Emily has her spinning around on command too, much to the girl’s delight.
She comes to forget the damp of the gutters and the terror of being small. Bread is safe and full in Corvo’s care even when they flit across the rooftops together, her yearning for the companionship of other warm bodies more than met. She’s content.
And then one night Corvo staggers into the attic room and collapses.
The thump of a body crashing to the floorboards startles Bread taut and awake. She peers out into the dim room from her nest and flicks her whiskers. It’s unmistakably Corvo, but his breath is laborious and stinks something foul.
Bread drops down the chair leg to go to him. Before she gets two lengths, though, the door creaks open and more people push in, walking slowly in the loud way that humans who are trying very hard to sneak up on her sometimes do. Though they reek of familiar tobacco and shoe polish, they aren’t Bread’s humans. She scrambles back into the darkest shadows beneath the chair.
The scene plays out in dark, fuzzy shapes and garbled sounds of conversation that Bread can’t understand. Corvo’s breathing slowly weakens as they talk and she grows agitated, bouncing back and forth with urgent indecision. More movement. Most of the figures leave, and the one remaining grunts with exertion.
Something heavy drags along the uneven floor. The door falls shut with a rusty, final-sounding click, and Bread creeps out into an empty room.
No! Where has Corvo gone?
She stretches on her back legs and frantically scents the air, listening. The door is impassable when she tries to follow the men, the gap at the bottom nearly nonexistent from years of swelling and warping wood. She scrabbles at it anyway. Her fear grows like another animal inside her.
There has to be another way. Bread launches herself up to an open windowsill and clambers out, balancing on finger-thin overhangs and anchoring her claws in the rough brick of the exterior wall as she descends. She searches for Corvo in the cool sensory tapestry of the evening, his brightness and clarity nearly magnetic after so long together.
There! The scent is weak and faltering but it still sings to her just as it did the first time it washed over her on that bloody cobblestone street.
She thuds to earth and gives chase. Bread skitters through the yard in the lee of barrels and crates and corrugated sheet metal until tiny her paws hit the cold, damp concrete of the dock. But she’s too late. There’s nothing there but reeds and the quickly fading purr of an engine, a cloud of whale oil exhaust bright in her nostrils.
She leans her body out over the water and dips frantically up and down, reaching as though she could dash over the surface after Corvo if only it would cooperate. In her desperation she stretches too far and slips, plunging into the frigid water. The blinding shock of it paralyzes her lungs. It’s all she can manage to swim the few feet to safety and haul herself out.
It’s silent now above the lapping of the river and she’s a miserable little ball of sopping wet fur.
She’s alone.
The cold wins in the end, forcing Bread off the dock as the sun’s warmth vanishes. She finds shelter behind a rotting barrel in a side alley and hunkers down, despondent. Even a full-body grooming to clean off the river water doesn’t help the shocking sense of loss, somehow much bigger than anything a creature like her should be able to feel.
She stays there when the shooting starts and long after it stops. The odor of death hangs like a blanket in the air.
There has been so much death in her short little life.
When the sun rises again, Bread is gone. She is a rat, after all, and the world doesn’t wait for rats who get left behind.
The dumpsters and corpse yards welcome Bread’s return with a furry jubilation of twisting bodies. Within two nights the compulsion to tear at succulent flesh has made its home again in the taut muscles of her jaw. She scraps for morsels among her brothers and sisters, squawks beneath the pinning paws of other rats with points to prove, and does the same in turn when she can. When it sleets, she curls up beneath ruined mattresses with dozens of thrumming hearts all around her.
The moon waxes and wanes and the rat slowly forgets having ever been Bread—not the name, as little as a name meant to her in the first place. She forgets how it felt to be loved by something greater and to cherish in return.
It’s evening. The rat skims her whiskers along the putrid mound of a refuse pile, slanted sunlight casting the alley in bright contrasts. She shoves her nose in and digs after the savory promise of a sausage that’s not too far gone. She shuffles backwards beneath a crumpled newspaper and tears into it, her ears alert for thieves.
The corpses that once fed their ever-growing numbers finally stopped coming at all several days ago, and her siblings have grown slimmer and meaner in their absence. So has she. The city wasn’t meant to brim so full with the whole of them, its veins and arteries choked with fur, and now they’re turning on one another. They’re all running scared, too: every day men with heavy boots and swords and scalding whale oil canisters push deeper into the lanes the rats once ruled.
This alley has been safe so far, though, surrounded by floodwaters as it is. A sausage is a prize find, the garbage heap fed by squatters still camped out several stories above. The rat far prefers them to humans who smell of polish and powder. The squatters, though unfriendly towards her, at least understand the safety of a good nest.
The rat takes another large bite of gristle, then stops dead. The breeze swings in reverse between the buildings and threads an earthy, oily musk past her flaring nostrils.
A hound.
Its claws scrape towards her along the cobbles and its ghastly panting blows like the wind of death. Human voices echo along the alley behind it, faint but intent. It stops and growls softly.
“Smell one, boy?” a man asks. The rat’s muscles coil, her sausage scrap slipping from her paws to the ground.
The growling turns into a whine.
“Go on,” the man says, and there’s the metallic click of a leash unclipping.
The hound bursts forward. The rat leaps from her hiding place and streaks for the sagging stack of shipping crates across the alley, catching sight of the horrible beast as it bears down on her from the side. It lunges, white teeth flashing, and they snap shut scant inches from her head. She barely leaps away in time. Its momentum takes it barreling over top of her, now blocking her path to the crates. She surges away down the alley instead but there’s nothing except bare walls and locked doors and the hound is very, very fast.
Cold claws sink into the rat and yank her upwards. She shrieks, squawking in panic and pain, writhing against a short and brutal end. She twists to fight for however long she can, opening her jaws to find—
Nothing at all.
And then it’s blue and bright and very cold.
The scent of ozone smacks into her as she sails through space, weightless and towed along by a thread that wraps itself at the very base of her instincts. Her breath puffs into a faint eddy of condensation when it hits the frigid not-quite-air. In the distance, blurry shapes float by in an incomprehensible dance. And then the second tug comes.
The rat’s paws drop onto soft, warm carpet. For a moment she’s utterly stunned, frozen in place as her mind catches up with her body.
Rich furniture lines the walls of a large room. A fire crackling in the hearth fills the space with the scent of wood smoke. It’s quiet and calm, and only her this time: no rain, no ravenous siblings, no blood, no surge of the violent fever. And there, kneeling on the floor across from her, power dissipating in glittering wisps from the back of his hand, is the man with a second face whose vivid, thunderous heartbeat she knows so well.
“Hi, Bread,” Corvo waves with a wide smile.
All the terror recedes from the rat named Bread, washed away on Corvo’s tide.
She bounds towards him chittering with delight so high that he certainly doesn’t hear it. She leaps up onto his legs and when he tries to stroke her little brown head she grabs his fingers and grooms them instead.
“I thought it was only fair to see if I could bring you back, too,” Corvo signs. He laughs his breathy barely-there laugh, then scoops her up in his big hands and holds her to his chest. He inhales deeply and presses his face into her fur for a long moment.
Corvo breathes out.
Bread lets her eyes drift closed. She savors the comforting pressure and knows that she is home.