Chapter 6
Rex's performance metrics during the six months following the demonstration were the highest he had recorded in any measurement period across his service history.
Major Hollis wrote the exception authorization himself.
When Aiden asked him, privately, whether he had known something before the demonstration — before Rex stopped, before the hand — Hollis was quiet for a long time.
Then he said that he had known Webb was not dead. That he had received the corrected notification fourteen months earlier. That the notification had included Webb's current assignment, which was regional, and that when the demonstration coordination roster had come across his desk with Webb's name on it, he had read it twice and made a decision.
Aiden looked at him.
Hollis said that Rex's transfer documents had included behavioral notes suggesting the dog had displayed periodic atypical states during stress evaluation that the veterinary behaviorist had not been able to fully account for. That Hollis had formed a hypothesis. That he had wanted to know if the hypothesis was correct before acting on it, and that a controlled demonstration environment with qualified observers present had seemed like the appropriate place to find out.
Aiden said, "You let Rex run an attack command at his own handler."
Hollis said, "Rex stopped himself. That was the point."
Aiden had thoughts about this that he did not express immediately, because they were complicated and some of them were in conflict with each other, and the conflict needed time before it needed words.
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What he eventually said, three weeks later, was that he understood the logic.
What he thought, for considerably longer, was that some debts between a dog and the person it trusted were not recoverable through official documentation and formal notification processes. Some of them could only be found the way Rex had found this one — at a dead run, through two years of absence, with everything he had.
