REMI'S POV
The particular quality of Isolde at four months was this: she was becoming legible.
Not that she had been opaque before — she had been, from the first day, entirely specific, with her own clearly held positions on light and sound and the Moonhaven carry and the satisfaction that followed a completed investigation. But at four months the legibility had expanded: she had more instruments now. The sounds had differentiated into a vocabulary of seven or eight distinct signals, each of which, I had learned to read with the focused attention I brought to documents that required close parsing.
She had, also, a laugh.
This had arrived on a Thursday in the third week of August — a sound different from the satisfaction sound, more percussive, full-bodied, the specific laugh of someone
