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shoulders as it dried. I watched as a man walked around the rows of tethered animals, checking a computer and tagging collars. When he reached me he did the same, reached down to snap a dangling tag on my collar and checked his watch. I realized with a jolt that all the preparation was probably for the auction, that I was about to be sold. Suddenly my head seemed to be floating well above the rest of me. None of this was real.
    Someone fastened my unresisting hands behind my back again, leashed me and led me around the outside of the next building. I seemed to be about ten meters up as I watched myself follow.
    I caught a glimpse through a wide side entrance of a large empty barn of a room, with rows of seats in front of a long platform. Then they led me in through a back door and fastened my leash to a ring in the wall. My brain, detached, was mechanically analyzing the setup. I couldn’t see the large room I had glimpsed, though there were stairs with big double doors at the top that must lead out onto the platform.
    For a long time I knelt back, tethered in the holding area with the other animals. Gradually I rejoined myself, and fear seeped in, not swamping me yet, but trickling audibly beneath the floorboards. The vraag was near me, ruffling its scaly feathers and eyeing me in a beady sort of way. I hoped its leash was short; I heard they bit. What would the men see when they looked at me? I was intensely thankful they hadn’t gagged me.
    I heard the auction starting, the cadences unmistakable even in the unknown language, and in voices so deep that they seemed to make aching vibrations in my belly. The leashed animals were led or carried up the steps and through the door to the back of the platform, one by one, in the order in which they were lined up at the walls or in cages down the middle. There was an empty feeling somewhere behind my breastbone that made it hard to breathe. Some man must be out there who was going to buy me. Own me. Very soon now, I hoped. This couldn’t be happening; could it? Perhaps I would wake up in my bed at home. I pulled my head away from the wall and felt the collar press very realistically against my throat. I had a small semi-arc in which I could move my head.
    I looked around. The room was half empty now. I wondered where the animals went that were auctioned. Where would I go, afterwards? Would a new owner just walk off with me, the way the keeper had walked me away from the ship? And then…? What then? And what if no one bid on me…?
    A big, bizarrely patterned cat padded by me, quite close, making me shrink back. That sale seemed to go on for a long time, with the next creature, something long, furry and impatient, winding itself around the keeper’s arms as it waited by the door. Then a pair of birds in a large cage was wheeled past. One of the wheels squeaked. They laid out a ramp and pushed the cage up to the doors and through. Two dogs were growling at each other close by; chains rattled. A man pulled one of them away and up to the platform. Claws scrabbled on the floor. I waited. I breathed a little, gently, behind the balloon that had lodged in my chest. Then the vraag , hissing, allowed itself to be dragged to the platform. It took two handlers, and yes, it tried to bite one of them. Once it was at the door, one of the handlers walked back towards me.
    This is it , I thought again, just as I had in the courtroom. Now I felt that this was the moment, the real start of it all. It was one of the events I had envisioned again and again – being sold. This scene, and the moment I saw men for the first time, and the moment in the courtroom – all had been icons of my inner world for years. I could assign this moment to my imagination if I just blurred my eyes a little.
    Obviously I had lived in a fantasy world far too long. My room, and my cell, too, had teemed with the figments of my fervid imagination. I could make them so real that when intruders had walked in, painfully