Subject 8

Fluffy white fur covers a dog of no identifiable breed, offset by black paws that Anya likens to the gloves and footwear of her cartoon hero Bondman. His build, coat, and snout point toward mostly Great Pyrenees ancestry, and he stands large enough for Anya to ride comfortably. Small dark eyes and drooping ears soften his bulk, while a soaking reveals a body far skinnier than the fur implies, oddly altering his bark as well. Around his neck he wears the bow-tie style collar Anya gave him along with his new name.

Beneath the imposing frame lives a placid, remarkably intelligent animal with a fierce protective streak. His visions of what is to come prompt constant quiet interventions, yanking a child clear of falling debris or steering his family away from harm, though his rescue attempts sometimes cause the small accidents he means to prevent. He also guards Anya's attention jealously, once shredding her Penguinman plush after she chose to sleep with it, then sulking and offering peanuts in apology.

The laboratory years left marks. Formal training and clinical settings unsettle him, structured drills recall his past so strongly that Loid's early guard-dog lessons distressed him, and his confinement ran so long that play itself was foreign on his first dog park visit. Life with the Forgers has since given him comfort and affection, which he repays with devotion while lounging idly through most days at home.

Under the designation Subject 8, the dog served as a test animal in Project Apple, an Ostanian research effort whose experiments granted him precognition and an intellect capable of parsing complex human speech. His conditioning included training to sniff out explosives and flammable chemicals, and his time in the facility overlapped with the dog later known as Aaron. The military research eventually funneled him into use as a bomb dog before the Forger family took him in and Anya named him Bond.

His foresight arrives as spontaneous flashes, framed like an old television screen crackling with static and heralded by his ears perking upright. The scenes run from minutes to hours ahead and are not fixed; deliberate action can rewrite them, most dramatically when a glimpse he had of the clock tower let Anya step in and save Loid's life. His readings can also mislead him, as when an all-black glimpse of his own unconsciousness convinced him death was coming. Because the visions strike involuntarily and in fragments, his panicked attempts to avert disaster occasionally become the very cause of it.