3:8

There wasn’t much in her life that frightened Caroline, but she admitted to an unreasonable suspicion of nature. It wasn’t hard to understand what was going on as tons of metal and energy zoomed back and forth on a busy street or to calculate the likelihood of a monstrous bulldozer crushing her; a glass-covered high-speed elevator was just a system of gears and pulleys and had been tested and proven time and time again. Even the scum and unnamed masses armed with knives and hatred of anyone different were just a study in human psychology.

But have you ever looked into the eyes of a bird? Caroline had, and she didn’t like what she saw. What passed for minds in the natural world were unreadable. Whatever motivated the unfathomable desires of the myriad creatures that were allowed to roam unrestricted in her city was always hidden away, and what lay behind their beady, evil eyes was a source of great concern to her whenever she found herself confronted with nature.

And it wasn’t just the ’wild’ life. That people learned to love or trust all sorts of creatures, from the reptilian ugliness and unrestrained malevolence of caged birds to the unpredictable and bloodthirsty instincts of dogs and cats, was a thing that Caroline could never understand. Did people not understand that these were predators? Mindless beasts whose every genetic strand cried out to rend flesh and drink the blood of their prey?

If Caroline had had any say about it, a great cleansing of the beasts found in her city would be the civic government’s top priority. There were zoos for those who foolishly wanted some sort of relationships with the lower orders. But she didn’t have a say, and as a result, it was a rare day when she managed to make it through without some stab of fear from kamikaze birds or someone’s pet wolf trying to knock her to the ground. It was all well and good for people to train their vicious minions to obey their commands, but that just narrowed the victim pool, and Caroline had to be constantly vigilant to avoid being the snack of the day.

And this day looked to be especially vicious. Nothing like a visit to the park to rack up the tension: it was practically inviting the entire animal kingdom to take a shot at her, and she had no intention of letting even the smallest bug get the better of her.