Cuimhne Graphic Novel and Pitch

CUIMHNE

(KIV-na)

A Graphic Novel

Full Script · Page by Page

Creator/Writer/Art by Barry Wrafter

Digital art by Pablo Moctezuma

Complete in one volume · 101 pages

“Where do you draw the line?”

Ennis, Co. Clare, Ireland · barrywrafterart.com · +353 87 654 6678

THE BOOK

NARRATIVE OVERVIEW

CUIMHNE — pronounced KIV-na, the Irish for both memory and reckoning. It is a dystopian satire about conditioning and lost autonomy. It takes place inside a programmed reality: a picture-perfect Irish village that holds together only because every person in it keeps agreeing to it. Every adult has a blank chrome sphere for a head, and school teaches a daily catechism of right and wrong. One answer, no reasoning, no choice. Only eight-year-old Aoife notices something is wrong. Watching over her is Cuimhne, a crow who has circled this island for twelve centuries and has seen this done before.

The engine of the book is inheritance. Nobody living chose the agreement they are keeping. These are the descendants of a people whose own laws were torn out and replaced by Na Gaill (the non-Gaelic), and who now hand the replacement on to their children without noticing they are doing it, living automatons. The mind is colonised first, then the land. The animals are the vehicle to tell this story, because they are the clearest surviving evidence of the older world we were made to forget. In short, think: We3 crossed with The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel.

There is no villain in it. The evil is the Everyman: the decent citizen, the upstanding person who loves his dog and designs the machines that dispatch animals, and holds both without conscience because he has drawn a line between what is right and what is wrong. What he is, the village is, and the town, and the country. Everyone can feel the line and nobody will cross it. That is what the book is about: breaking free.

The book moves downward. Through the happy farm, past the hunt and the cull, through the rendering plant, to a sealed steel door and the room behind it where no being has a name, only a number. Each level is a different hypocrisy. At the centre stands the Void, a column of living black smoke with the world-machine inside it. The machine falters and for a few pages the book breaks into full colour — the sea alive, the land green, a red fox free — and then it thins back to grey. The village reboots and runs exactly as before. But Aoife keeps the fox she saw in her mind. The machine is still running when the book closes; what has changed is that it has been compromised for the first time.

The historical spine is specific rather than general. Under Irish Brehon law, harming an animal was a serious offence; bees had their own law tract, the Bechbretha; hounds were held under the Airecht provisions. Those laws were not lost, they were dismantled by Na Gaill and replaced, and the replacement was taught until nobody remembered there had ever been anything else. That is the exact mechanism the book runs on: a native people conditioned out of their own logic and critical thinking.

ARTIST’S STATEMENT

I am originally a stone sculptor. I have spent more than thirty years making public sculpture — figures that towns put up to say who they are and what they honour. Monuments are arguments about who counts. As time went on I decided to pivot to making a difference to the sentient non-human. I have qualifications in Animation, Digital Sculpture, a degree in Ceramics and Contemporary Practice and a Master’s in Fine Art.

CUIMHNE started smaller and truer than it ended up. I have three rescue cats and a stray called Milky that I feed and look after in Ennis, and they were the beginning of it: I noticed how hesitant they were to trust and rightly so,  I questioned what had made them like that. That sparked the idea in me they could be the everyday heroes — not the great man we built monuments to, but the animal others deem past the line. Watching these animals interact with the world is what put the crow and the cats on the page.

Everything is drawn by hand, thumbnail to finished digital proof. There is no AI in any part of it.

PROJECT SPECIFICATIONS

Page count: 101 pages. Trim: standard graphic novel format, to the publisher’s house specification. Colour: black-and-white halftone throughout with red as a single spot colour, plus one limited full-colour sequence of approximately eight pages in Act Four. Status: complete script, panel by panel, with a finished ending; ten pages of finished, fully inked and lettered art; thumbnails broken down for the whole book. Rights: all rights available, unencumbered. Language: English.

AUDIENCE AND COMPARABLE TITLES

Mature readers, sixteen and up. Readers of We3, The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel, Grass, Persepolis and Animal Farm.

We3 (Morrison / Quitely) for institutional animal harm; The Handmaid’s Tale: The Graphic Novel (Nault) for conditioning and conformity; Grass (Gendry-Kim) and Persepolis (Satrapi) for serious political subject carried in a plain cartoon line; Animal Farm for the fable tradition the book sits in.

The book sells through three doors at once. Readers of literary graphic novels come for the Irish-myth spine and the architecture. Readers of political and social non-fiction comics come for the argument about institutionalised harm, which is made through a documented legal history rather than assertion. The animal-ethics readership is substantial, growing, and badly underserved in comics.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Barry Wrafter is an Irish stone carver and public sculptor based in Ennis, Co. Clare, with more than thirty years in professional practice. He holds a Master’s in Fine Art from Limerick School of Art and Design (2026), a BA (Hons) in Fine Art Ceramics and a H.Dip from the same institution, and a Postgraduate Certificate in Digital Sculpting and Modelling from IADT Dun Laoghaire.

His public commissions include works for Kilkenny, Clare, Limerick, Westmeath, Longford, Cavan and Monaghan County Councils, among them The Battle Within, commissioned to honour the Kilkenny hurling team; a statue of Maurice Davin, co-founder of the GAA, for Carrick-on-Suir; Market Day for Ennis town centre; and Portrait of the Past, awarded through national public art competitions.

ABOUT THE DIGITAL ARTIST

[ Pablo Moctezuma — short biography to be inserted here. ]

THE ACTS

Nested facades, each more hidden than the last, and the book moves steadily inward.

One — The Surface.  The bright machine at full cheerful efficiency. The farm is the door, and the heroes surface as eerie glimpses while the surface keeps smiling.

Two — The Tear.  Cuimhne arrives and the lid comes off. The Veil fails everywhere, and the complex is revealed as many doors, not one.

Three — The Nightmare.  The machine fully visible. The Assembly, the bleeding drawings, the empty land where the animals should be — then one room deeper, into the testing wing and Keo’s page, where the line work comes apart hardest.

Four — The Reckoning.  The rendering plant. The Void of screams. Pooky and the crown. The machine cracks and the colour breaks through.

Five — The Return.  What changed and what did not. Then the loop and, for the reader alone, the machine caught in the act of building the morning.

THE CAST

CUIMHNE (KIV-na) — the crow.  The Morrígan’s last operative — not because the others failed, but because they gave up hope and she did not. Twelve centuries watching Ireland’s bond with its animals and nature collapse, patient the whole time. Not patient anymore. A large, hybrid, hooded crow with one detail that stops you: the red eye, lit from within, far too intelligent.

MILKY — the cracked porcelain cat.  Faceless, tall, smooth white porcelain. He is Ireland’s emotional body, everything ever felt about animals and never allowed to be said. The hairline cracks in his glaze glow warm from within, candlelight through a flaw, never the arterial red of the kill floor. His performance is held entirely in stillness. When he breaks, it is all of it at once.

KEO — the systems cat.  Lean, precise, a black-and-white tuxedo. She is the key to everything, very astute and sees the gaps are where the information lives. A laboratory cat in fact, not in myth. She got out, and does not talk about it. The scars on her back look like a serial number.

POP — the open wound.  A small cat in a too-big dark suit, clutching a teddy bear. Too young to have any distance: he feels the suffering of every animal he meets as if it were his own, he lost his sister to human neglect when he was younger, now he holds the bear as if it’s her. He is the book’s argument against toughen up, stop feeling, the alternative is being the Everyman. He barely speaks; when he does, it lands.

POOKY — the imagined king.  A vast fat cat in a black tuxedo and a humiliatingly twisted gold crown, certain he is the most important figure in any room and wrong in a way that makes him accidentally correct. The pressure valve, without him the book is a dirge. He does not strategize; he refuses to behave in any way the system can process.

THE STEEL-HEADS — the villains, who are also everyone.  Ordinary people whose faces have become smooth mirror-chrome spheres. Everything is staged through posture, head-angle, the hands, and what the chrome reflects: a steel-head looking at a child sees that child smeared across its own skull.

THE EVERYMAN — the function, not the man.  Chrome sphere, pinstripe trousers, shirt and braces, noir office look. Everything tidy and perfect is his mantra. He loves his small dog Biscuit with a full-hearted love he cannot manage for anything he deems below the line of love. By trade an engineer: he designed the skin-removal machine at the heart of the kill floor and is proud of it the way any engineer is proud of an elegant solution. He believes it is humane, but humane is the word for humans not animals. He is not a monster — just a high-achieving human being.

THE EVERYMAN’S SECRET — never stated on the page. Biscuit was swept into the testing facility by an administrative error, used and dumped; Mossy found the body in the cold open and replaced him with a near-identical survivor from the same facility. The engineer goes home every night to a survivor of his own work, wearing his dead dog’s collar, and does not know it.

THE SPINAN.  The consultant who charges eight hundred euro a sentence. A slow black vortex where a face should be. He turns slaughter into processing, suffering into welfare parameters, mass death into population-management outcomes. Nature gives him something close to panic: it has no brief and cannot be reframed.

THE NODANS — the workers. Mossy, Ger and Dervla.  Various-sized chrome heads, white dispatch attire. Not cruel. They needed the job; the job was there; by the fourth month they no longer thought about it. There are three we focus on: Mossy, who thinks he is the big man to make up for his lack of brains; Ger, who is broken by the whole process but keeps going like an awoken zombie; and then Dervla, young enough that her body still flinches before her training can stop it. She kept the child’s drawing of the fox.

THE VOID.  Not a person. A tall column of living black smoke standing on a spreading pool of itself, a conceptual art piece; something you would see after you entered the gates of Hell. It stands at the centre of everything, constructing the world — a Tower of Babel with appendages. It does not speak.

THE LOOK

A plain, bright cartoon line carrying a subject that is not bright at all. This is the Trojan horse to get the reader inside. That contrast is the method, not decoration: the drawing lets the reader in early and leaves them nowhere to look away to when the weight arrives. Not a comedy but a satire of our world in microcosm — Pooky and the absurdity of the Nodans are pressure valves, not jokes.

Blood is stylised: graphic red shapes, never wet realism. Big lettered SFX are part of the art — PTUF! PAK! ZZZZT!!! — drawn as object, not typeset over the image.

Black-and-white halftone throughout: a grey, manufactured world with the life drained out of it. Against it, one spot colour. Red is the sky at the wrong hour, Cuimhne’s eye, blood, the glow in Milky’s cracks.

One exception, and it is the most important image in the book: when the world tears open and the living world shows through, it arrives in full colour, the only full colour anywhere and then it is gone, and the grey closes over but there is a spark.

Three registers, one palette

SURFACE.  Act One daylight. Clean storybook line, dense cheerful halftone, Comic Sans on every sign. Sweet, suspiciously so. Red kept to small wrong notes.

TRUE WORLD.  Stainless steel, disinfectant, fluorescent light, refrigeration hum. Heavier blacks, white in volume. Deepest of all, the laboratory white: the dead even white of a room with no shadows and no hour.

MYTHIC.  Cuimhne, the others, the tear. The clean line frays into ash, smoke and halftone breakdown. Red at full intensity.

Deadpan child logic.  Children state the obvious in flat, innocent terms that dismantle everything the adults have built. “Is this the real one or the pretend one?” Used sparingly, it does more than any monologue could.

CONTENTS

Cold Open   ·   Pages 1–3

Act One — The Surface   ·   Pages 4–27

Act Two — The Tear   ·   Pages 28–43

Act Three — The Nightmare   ·   Pages 44–58

The Deepest Room — The Testing Wing   ·   Pages 59–64

Act Four — The Reckoning   ·   Pages 65–80

Act Five — The Return   ·   Pages 81–101

Page 71 is the single full-colour sequence.

 

 

Cold Open

PAGE 1 — On the Way to Work

FIVE PANELS. Pure ordinary. A man, a van, a grey morning, a routine stop. Establish the mundane completely before anything is wrong — the flatter and more everyday this is, the harder the turn lands. We do not name him; he is just a man. (He is Mossy, but the reader has no way to know that, and won't until the prelude.)

PANEL 1   WIDE — DAWN

IMAGE   A back lane behind a row of industrial units on the edge of a town, first light. Wheelie bins, a couple of commercial skips, weeds through the tarmac, a chain-link fence. Grey halftone, the sky washed the faint sick red of the whole book, though here it reads almost as an ordinary dawn. A small works van pulls in. Completely unremarkable.

CAPTION: "There is a lane like this behind every town. You have driven past a hundred of them and never once looked down one. There is no reason you ever would."

PANEL 2   MEDIUM

IMAGE   A MAN climbs out of the van — twenties, ordinary, a chrome head, hi-vis half-on, a flask of tea in one hand. He has stopped to dump a bag of rubbish in one of the skips on his way in to work, routine. He is not looking at anything. He is half-asleep.

MAN (MUTTERING, TO HIMSELF): ...right, right...

PANEL 3   MEDIUM

IMAGE   He swings his rubbish bag up toward the lip of the skip — and stops, mid-motion, because something in the skip has caught his eye. We do not see it yet. We see him: arm still raised, the bag hanging, his whole body gone suddenly still.

PANEL 4   CLOSE — THE MAN

IMAGE   His face. The ordinary morning fog gone out of it. Squinting down into the skip at something he is trying to make sense of and not yet managing to. The flask lowered without him noticing.

PANEL 5   WIDE — THE LANE

IMAGE   Pull back: the man frozen at the skip, the lane quiet around him. And on the chain-link fence a few feet away, where we would swear there was nothing a second ago, a single large crow has settled — too big, too still, watching not the skip but the man. One eye fixed on him, far too steady. He has not noticed it. (This is Cuimhne. The reader has no idea who or what she is. She is simply a crow that is sitting wrong.)

PAGE 2 — What's in the Skip

FOUR PANELS. The find. Restraint is everything — the dog is dumped, not gory; the horror is the wrongness and the two tags. Stage the reveal so the reader's eye assembles it a moment before the man speaks. Treat the dead animal with tenderness — it is someone's, and that is the whole point, even though we never say whose.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM — OVER HIS SHOULDER

IMAGE   Looking down into the skip past the man's shoulder. Among broken pallets and torn plastic: a dog. A beagle. Dead. Not bloodied — just dumped, stiff, the stillness of death. Tan and white, the halftone soft on it. We hold on the shape of it, not on the horror of it.

PANEL 2   CLOSE — THE COLLAR

IMAGE   Tight on the beagle's neck. A worn leather collar — a pet's collar, loved, used — with a little engraved name-tag dangling from it. And clipped to the same collar, incongruous, industrial: a second tag. A plastic lab tag, fluorescent orange (the book's red), a barcode, a long number. The two tags resting against each other in the same tuft of fur. A name and a number on one animal. (Do NOT make the engraved name legible. The reader must not get it yet.)

CAPTION: "Two tags. One had a name on it. One had a number." 

PANEL 3   CLOSE — THE MAN

IMAGE   The man's face, and now it is not confusion — it is recognition. He knows this dog. The colour has gone out of him. A hand half-raised to his mouth.

MAN (BARELY): ...ah no. No, no, no.

MAN (SMALLER): ...not you. You're not supposed to be— how are you here.

PANEL 4   WIDE

IMAGE   The man straightening, looking up and around the empty lane — the specific, awful body language of someone who has just realised they have found something they were never meant to find, and is checking whether anyone saw him. The crow on the fence has not moved. It watches him do it.

PAGE 3 — The Question

FOUR PANELS. Close on the question, reveal nothing. The reader does not learn whose dog it is, how it got here, or what the man decides. We end on his fear and Cuimhne's gaze — and hand straight to Page 4, the cheerful village dawn, with the reader now carrying a small cold weight they cannot name.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   The man looking back down at the beagle in the skip. Then back over his shoulder at his van. Then back at the dog. A man doing a terrible arithmetic at speed. Whatever he is deciding, we are not shown the answer — only that there is a decision, and that it frightens him.

CAPTION: (none — let the panel hold in silence.) 

PANEL 2   CLOSE — THE NAME-TAG, TURNED AWAY

IMAGE   The little engraved name-tag, swinging slightly, catching the grey light — but turned at an angle so the engraving is just out of the reader's view. So close. Unreadable. The single most withheld object in the book. (The artist must make sure we cannot read it. Its turning-away is deliberate.)

CAPTION: "Somebody had a name for this dog. Was saying it, even now. Was not yet afraid." 

PANEL 3   WIDE — THE CROW

IMAGE   The crow drops from the fence to the very lip of the next skip, a few feet from the man, and stands over the beagle, inquisitive — the wrong posture entirely for a bird at a dead thing. The man stares at it. The bird does not behave like a bird. For one held moment, the two of them lock gaze.

PANEL 4   CLOSE — CUIMHNE TO READER

IMAGE   The crow lifts her head and looks directly out of the page. The single red eye. Ancient, unhurried, and now holding a question.

CAPTION (isolated, bottom): "Turn the page — and notice, please, how nice the morning is."

Act One — The Surface

PAGE 4 — The Village — Dawn — [LOCKED — ALREADY DRAWN]

This page exists and does not change. Full-bleed splash. SURFACE register with the first wrong note of red. Notes here are for continuity only. The only new element is the caption text for the empty box, top-left.

PANEL 1   FULL-PAGE SPLASH

IMAGE   Aerial view of a small Irish village at dawn. Rolling hills in grey halftone, a grey church spire, terraced houses, the sky washed a sick-sweet red. A primary school behind iron railings at centre. A caretaker hangs a banner between two poles: CAREER & ERITAGE WEEK — OUR FRIENDS THE ANIMALS (the misspelled ERITAGE stays — it is perfect, it tells you everything about the care taken). High in the red sky, a single small dark bird circles. Two insets sit over the splash: top-right, a tight close-up of Cuimhne banking in flight, one red eye burning; bottom-centre, a low glimpse of the school petting pen — a cow, chickens, a child — with the first spots of red where they should not be.

CAPTION (the empty box, top-left — NEW TEXT): "A village in rural Ireland. The kind that looks like nothing has ever once gone wrong here." 

CAPTION (small, lower, if a second box is wanted): "She was already circling. She had been circling a very long time."

PAGE 5 — Aoife's Morning

SIX PANELS. Small, intimate, SURFACE register. Aoife's room is wallpapered in her own animal drawings. Keep it sweet — the red stays minimal, one or two deliberate spots.

PANEL 1   TOP WIDE

IMAGE   Aoife's bedroom. Walls plastered in crayon drawings — horses with five legs, enormous-eyed dogs, pigs with halos, floating cats, a cow wearing a crown. Eight-year-old anatomy: fearless, full of love, gloriously wrong. Thin morning light. AOIFE (8) sits up in bed clutching a stuffed crow toy. Its button eyes catch the light.

PANEL 2   CLOSE — LAPEL

IMAGE   On her school-uniform lapel, already dressed: a small enamel bird pin. Hooded-crow shape, red enamel. Too old and too finely made to be a school giveaway. We will come back to this.

PANEL 3   SMALL — HANDS

IMAGE   Aoife holds the stuffed crow up to the window. Outside, barely visible against the bright sky: a real bird, circling. The toy and the bird, lined up for one moment.

PANEL 4   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Aoife at the breakfast table. Her MOTHER, a steel-head, at the counter, back turned. An open cereal box: a cartoon winking cow. The TV murmurs — a steel-head politician gesturing at a chart labelled AGRICULTURE.

MOTHER: Eat up. Big day. Career and Heritage Week.

PANEL 5   INSERT

IMAGE   Tight on the cereal box. Cartoon cow holding a bowl of cereal, winking. Slogan: HAPPY COWS MAKE FRESH MILK! This is the cartoon-diagram register's first appearance — the cheerful animation that lies. Note the cow's wink; we will see this exact face again, on a screen, over a real cow, much later.

PANEL 6   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Aoife, spoon halfway to her mouth, staring at the cereal-box cow. Not sad. Not suspicious. Just looking — the concentrated attention of a child who has not yet been told what she is not supposed to notice.

PAGE 6 — The School Gates

FIVE PANELS. SURFACE register. The indoctrination machine warming up. Sweetness with one held-breath moment.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   School gates, 8:45am. Children streaming in. A small rectangular pen in the yard holds two lambs and a rabbit. Sign: SAY HELLO TO OUR FRIENDS! The lambs stand very still — not scared, beyond scared, the stillness of animals that learned stillness is safety, the way wild things do.

PANEL 2   MEDIUM

IMAGE   The main doors. A teacher — MS. BRENNAN, normal-faced, lanyard reading OUR FRIENDS THE ANIMALS COORDINATOR — handing colouring sheets to the children filing past. Each sheet: a smiling cow.

MS. BRENNAN: Good morning! Today we learn all about where our food comes from!

PANEL 3   CLOSE — COLOURING SHEET

IMAGE   Aoife's hand holding the sheet. The smiling cow holds a placard: I'M HAPPY TO BE YOUR LUNCH! The cow has a halo.

PANEL 4   WIDE — SCHOOL HALL

IMAGE   The hall, decked for the week. Laminated posters everywhere: smiling pig / PORK. Smiling cow / BEEF. Smiling chicken / CHICKEN. Smiling fish / FISH. Each animal cartoonishly delighted by the arrangement. Children file past, not looking.

CAPTION: "The posters had been up since Monday. By Wednesday they had simply become part of the room." 

PANEL 5   INSERT — ONE POSTER

IMAGE   Tight on the smiling pig. Round, pink, trotters raised mid-dance. PORK in fat friendly font. A completely normal school poster. There is nothing wrong with this poster. (There is everything wrong with this poster.)

PAGE 7 — The Classroom — The Catechism

SIX PANELS. SURFACE register. The lesson, as liturgy. Call and response. This should read like a hymn that curdles.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The classroom. Twenty-four children at small desks. A fast-food-branded colouring book open on each desk — a cartoon clown arm-in-arm with a cartoon cow on the cover. Ms. Brennan at a flip chart with two columns: PETS and FOOD.

PANEL 2   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Ms. Brennan pointing to PETS. Listed: Dog. Cat. Hamster. Goldfish. Rabbit.

MS. BRENNAN: These are our friends. We love them. We keep them safe. What do we call these?

PANEL 3   WIDE — CHILDREN

IMAGE   A row of children, hands up, bright faces. Aoife among them.

CHILDREN (CHORUS): PETS!

PANEL 4   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Ms. Brennan pointing to FOOD. Listed: Cow. Pig. Chicken. Sheep. Salmon. Same warm tone. Same certainty.

MS. BRENNAN: And these. What do we call these?

PANEL 5   CLOSE — AOIFE

IMAGE   Aoife looking at the word SHEEP. Hand up, but lower, less sure. Last summer she held a lamb. There is a drawing of that lamb on her bedroom wall.

AOIFE (SMALL): ...Food?

PANEL 6   MEDIUM — TEACHER

IMAGE   Ms. Brennan, full warm approval.

MS. BRENNAN: Exactly right! This one is a pet. That one is food. We don't mix them up, do we? Good children don't mix them up.

PAGE 8 — The Petting Pen

THREE PANELS. SURFACE register, dense cheerful halftone. The bright square — the heart of the village — at its sweetest.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The village square at midday, the bright open heart of everything: bunting strung pole to pole, Comic Sans signage (OUR FRIENDS THE ANIMALS!), a low cheerful petting pen dead centre. A dozen steel-head children crowd the rail, delighted, several phones up and recording. Inside the pen, a lamb and a calf stand in scattered straw. A Nodan in hi-vis supervises, a beating stick under one arm. Storybook line, sweet as biscuit-tin artwork.

PANEL 2   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Inside the pen, close: small chrome hands reach in, all delight, the mirror-faces curving with reflected light. The animals are the only warm, soft-rendered, real things in frame — patient, trusting. One child wraps both arms around the lamb's neck and squeezes in a hug; the lamb stands very still, its dark eye calm. For now.

PANEL 3   CLOSE

IMAGE   The lamb's face, trusting, leaning its weight into the hugging child. Behind the pen, half-hidden where two pieces of the bright backdrop meet, a plain unfinished door — bare, unpainted, the one thing in the square the machine has not bothered to dress, because no child is meant to look at it. It is the door the lamb will be led through once Heritage Week is over. Of every face at the rail, only Aoife, at the far end, is looking past the lamb, at the door.

CAPTION: They were taught to love the animals. 

PAGE 9 — The Spinan, Up Close

TWO PANELS. Establish the SPINAN / consultant by image alone. No narration.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   The Spinan works the bright square — clipboard under one arm, moving among the chrome-headed crowd, shaking hands, approving of everything. Where every other face is a polished mirror, his is a slow black vortex the eye of which keeps moving off centre. No one notices. He is delighted.

THE SPINAN: Powerful turnout. Powerful altogether. Keep her lit, keep her moving — that’s the whole trick of it.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   He stops at the petting-pen rail and taps it twice with his pen, satisfied. Behind the satisfaction, the void where a face should be gives nothing back. The same as every man in business.

PAGE 10 — The One Who Didn't Chant

TWO PANELS. Directly after the locked classroom on Page 7. The single child who stayed silent.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The class spilling out into the square, small chrome heads bright and vibrating, drawn together as if magnetised, repeating the morning's lesson to one another, pleased. One child trails at the back, not joining in — Aoife, her face still only half-mirrored, more there than the rest.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife's face more closed while every face around her shines in the same easy shape. She is not defiant. She just did not say it. She looks at her own shoes.

PAGE 11 — The Voice from Above

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   High over the village, in the dark above the light, hidden speakers slung on a gantry the village will never see. A warm recorded voice rolls down over the square and the chrome heads tilt very slightly toward it, soothed, like plants to a lamp.

VOICE ABOVE: ...and a lovely day for it. Smile for the cameras now. Heritage Week is a happy week.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   A balloon slips a child's hand and rises; every mirror-face turns up to follow it, identical, content, magnetised to its drift. Aoife watches the people, not the balloon.

PAGE 12 — Keo

TWO PANELS. First of the animals. Warm, real, three-dimensional against the flat grey world.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   In the gap behind the pen a lean black-and-white cat slips along the base of the bright surround — Keo. Shaved patches grown back wrong in her coat, a faded mark like a number on one ear, a careful, slightly unsteady gait. She is the most solid thing on the page in a world that, the closer you look at it, was assembled rather than grown.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   She stops and looks straight across the yard at Aoife — the one warm thing and the one watching child, holding each other's eyes.

PAGE 13 — The Workers

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   A plain service door behind the bright frontage. Workers in white coats, same chrome heads, file through — Mossy, Dervla, Ger among them. The light past the door is colder and bluer. The bunting stops dead at the threshold, as if the machine that hangs it knows precisely where the part of the day that gets decorated ends.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   One worker — Dervla, younger, you read it in the set of her shoulders —HESITATES, checks a half-step at the door. The worker beside her, Ger, does not. She goes in.

PAGE 14 — The Engineer's Office

TWO PANELS. The Everyman. The room tells us what he is; no caption does.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   A tidy, pleasant office, good light. On the wall, neat technical drawings — elegant, exact schematics of machines whose purpose is unstated and whose shapes are subtly, deeply wrong. On the desk, a framed photograph of a small beagle. The Everyman, good suit, chrome head, works calmly at the drawings.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   His hand rests on the desk beside the dog's photo while the other adjusts a schematic. The drawing and the photograph share the frame. He is humming.

PAGE 15 — A Glimpse of the Line

TWO PANELS. Show almost nothing. Withhold.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Down a long corridor, through an observation window, the line: machinery, white coats, motion — shapes that are alive going in at one end, shapes that are not coming out at the other. Kept in shadow, glimpsed in reflection. We see the workers' chrome backs watching. We do not see it plainly.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Mossy at the glass. For one panel, faint in the mirror of his face, the reflection of what is on the line. He has gone completely still.

PAGE 16 — The Seam

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   At the edge of the square, where the hill meets the sky, the join shows — a hairline seam, a place where the morning has been stitched together and the stitching has not quite held. Villagers pass it without seeing.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   On a wire above it, a hooded crow, one eye fixed hard on the seam, far too intelligent for a bird. The first clear look at her. She does not move.

PAGE 17 — Cuimhne

TWO PANELS. The crow, fully. No explanation of what she is.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   The crow against the false sky, black and exact, a single bright point of an eye the only living thing in the panel. Below her the bright village runs on, oblivious.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Among the whole chrome crowd, one face tilts up and finds her — Aoife. The child and the crow, the only two looking at each other across the square.

PAGE 18 — Pop

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   A small black-and-white cat in a too-big black suit, a worn teddy bear clutched to his chest — Pop — sits very still at the edge of the festival noise. The chrome crowd laughs at nothing, inane internet chat on their phones. This is what they did, this is what they always did, to laugh at nothing and to be part of the group is the most important aspect of person. The worst fate was to not be part of the group, to use your own free will. He is the only one who looks as though the day hurts.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Pop's small head over the bear, taking the whole bright OPEN AREA in and feeling all of it at once, alone in the mass of chrome. Across the square, Aoife sees him too.

PAGE 19 — The Other Children

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The other children at play — bright, happy body language, the way a dog's whole back end wags when it cannot hold the joy in. Little flags waving. They are having a wonderful time and nothing is wrong with THAT.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife among them and BUT not of them, her flag held low, watching the others the way you watch through a window the world falling apart.

PAGE 20 — Milky

TWO PANELS. Milky is cracked white porcelain cat, a completely blank face: no eyes, no mouth, dirt markings, never to change. Hairline cracks glow faint red.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   At the quiet edge of things, a white cat sits very upright — Milky. White porcelain, fine cracks running through him, a low warm light leaking from the cracks. Where a face should be: nothing, smooth and blank. He does not move, and somehow he is the warmest thing on the page.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife crouches and looks at the blank where a face is not — really looks. The glow in his cracks lifts, very slightly, as if it answered. Perhaps the first time anyone has looked at him at all. This is the life of a stray, to be invisible.

PAGE 21 — Home, That Night

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Aoife's small bedroom, the grey of it the same grey the machine lays over every room it does not light for its show. Maybe it is laying down the grey because it can sense a threat. The walls are covered in her drawings — animals, dozens of them, the only things in the room with any warmth left in them. A box of crayons spilled across the floor. She sits among them like the last small fire in a cold house.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   She lifts one crayon out of the box: a red one. Holds it up. The single warm colour in the grey room, balanced in a child's fingers.

PAGE 22 — Mossy Can't Sleep

TWO PANELS. The cold open begins to pay off. Let the images connect; say nothing.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Mossy's room, late, one lamp. He sits on the edge of the bed, still in his undershirt, not sleeping. On the floor by his boot: a worn leather pet collar with a small engraved tag, the collar from the skip.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   His hands turn the collar over and over. Inside his mind, drawn as a faint grey inset: the small dead beagle in the skip and, in a cage beside it, a second beagle, alive, near-identical, looking out at him. A decision sits in his hands, not yet made.

PAGE 23 — The Swap

FIVE PANELS.MAYBE DOUBLE PAGE SPREAD? Wordless throughout. The night Mossy covers it up. No caption, no dialogue, only a man doing a terrible, tender, unforgivable thing in the dark, and a survivor that does not know it has just been given a dead dog's name. Restraint absolute. The horror is the gentleness.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM — NIGHT, THE FACILITY

IMAGE   Night. Mossy lets himself into the testing facility's holding room, the dead beagle from the skip wrapped in his coat in his arms. He should not be here. His body says so. The stylised animal-logos glow faintly on the dimmed screens over the rows of cages in the dark — calm, content little icons, watching nothing.

PANEL 2   WIDE — THE ROW OF CAGES

IMAGE   He walks the row, looking into cage after cage and stops. In one of them, a beagle. Alive. A lab survivor, thin, near-identical to the dead one in his arms: same markings, same size, the resemblance that makes what he is about to do possible. The two dogs, one dead in his coat, one alive behind the bars, framed together.

PANEL 3   CLOSE — THE COLLAR

IMAGE   Mossy's hands, in the dark, unbuckling the worn leather pet collar from the dead beagle — the loved collar with the engraved name-tag and the dead dog's facility tag too. Both tags in his palm.

PANEL 4   MEDIUM — THE TRANSFER

IMAGE   He opens the live beagle's cage and, with a gentleness that is almost unbearable, buckles the dead dog's collar around the living stans-in’s neck, the engraved pet name now worn by a survivor of the very place that killed its namesake. The survivor lets him, trusting, the way a lamb trusts a child. Mossy cannot look at her as he does it.

PANEL 5   CLOSE — THE LOOK

IMAGE   Done. The stand-in, in his arms now, wearing the dead dog's name, looking up at Mossy and the look is steady, and a moment too long, the same moment-too-long the Everyman will fail to notice for the rest of the book. Mossy truly sees her. He realises he has saved no one. He has only made the lie wearable. Hold on the dog's eyes and his bowed head, and end the page there, in silence.

PAGE 24 — The Crow at the Window

TWO PANELS. The first words from Cuimhne — the truest voice in the book. One line only.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Aoife's window at night. On the sill outside, the crow — the red eye level with the dark glass, looking in past her own faint reflection at the child asleep among her drawings.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Her eye, filling the panel — and held tiny in its dark curve, upside down, the whole small sleeping room and the drawings on its walls, but Cuimhne’s eyes saw something different, the red of blood was bleeding down the drawn pages onto the walls.

CAPTION: I remember when there was more than this.

PAGE 25 — The Old Stone

TWO PANELS. The old ways — shown, never explained. The Brehon idea lives in one image, not a lecture.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Next morning Aoife sees Cuimhne, the tilt of the crow's head draws Aoife's attention to the foot of a wall the village has built over: an old carved stone, half-buried, worn — animal shapes cut into it, a hound, a cow, bees, and lines of a script no one alive can read, Sean-Ghailge (Old Irish). Warm-toned, real, wrong in all the grey around it. It reads like an Irish Rosetta Stone — a key to a lost language and a lost way of seeing, from a past that held animals as something other than property.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife's fingers in the cut grooves of the animal-shapes. The crow watching her find it.

CAPTION: There was a law here once. The fine for a king’s hound and the fine for a king’s child were not so far apart.

PAGE 26 — What Cuimhne Remembers

FIVE PANELS. The mythic register at full strength — clean line fraying into ash and smoke at the edges, red at full intensity. Aoife's hand still in the grooves of the old stone; the stone is the doorway into what the crow carries. Wordless but for one line in the crow's own voice. The history is told entirely in image — show it, do not narrate it.

PANEL 1   WIDE — MYTHIC

IMAGE   The grey village falls away. Around Cuimhne the line of the world breaks into smoke and old gold — a memory-register, not the present. Ireland as it was once: a hillside under a true sky, people and animals moving through the same law that held animals sacred. A hound walks at a king's side, and the framing makes them equals — same eyeline, same scale, no leash. Bees, cattle, a salmon in a stream, each rendered with the warmth the dead grey world has lost. Over it all, vast in the smoke, the shape of war and memory — the Morrigan — and at her side, smaller, a single hooded crow.

PANEL 2   MEDIUM — MYTHIC

IMAGE   A wider sky behind her: not one crow but many, a whole wheeling host of birds at the Morrigan's flank, watching over the world. The sky is full of them. Cuimhne is only one among many. Establish the host so its loss in the next panel lands as image, not as a sentence.

PANEL 3   MEDIUM — MYTHIC, DARKENING

IMAGE   The same hillside, the law being unwritten: foreign hands striking through the carved reckoning, the old stones thrown down, a hound dragged from the king's side by a rope that was not there before, the named animals herded into pens and branded — becoming stock, becoming number, becoming nothing. The warmth draining out of the memory toward the grey of the present.

PANEL 4   WIDE — MYTHIC, THE HOST THINS

IMAGE   The wheeling host of crows, thinning. One by one the birds fold into the smoke and are gone — not struck down, simply turning away, unable to endure what is being destroyed faster than it can be mourned. The full sky of panel 2 emptying, bird by bird, until the smoke holds a single remaining red eye. Show the host become one. No words.

CAPTION: The others could not bear to endure. I could. 

PANEL 5   CLOSE — BACK TO THE PRESENT

IMAGE   Snap back to the grey lane: the stone, Aoife's small fingers in the worn grooves, the crow on the wall above, that one eye still on her. Twelve centuries folded down into one battered bird watching one child find one buried stone. Hold on the contrast — the vast smoke-history and the tiny present moment — and let the reader feel the weight without a word laid under it.

PAGE 27 — Pooky

TWO PANELS. The fourth cat, played as a clown. The gravity is hidden — one flat ancient look, easy to miss.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   In the imagined space the cats share, a vast black-and-white cat sprawls like a king mid-feast, Pooky — black tuxedo, a twisted gold crown crooked on his head, ringed by the wreckage of an enormous meal. He is hamming it, a glutton and a pretend fool. Keo, unimpressed; Pop, with happy body language.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   For a single panel the clowning stops — a flat, old, level look from Pooky, straight past the others. Then the feast resumes as if it never paused.

Act Two — The Tear

PAGE 28 — The Cracks Spread

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Around the village the making starts to show its hand: a corner of the sky lifting at one edge like the top sheet of something still wet, a shopfront caught half-finished where the machine has not yet run the detail over it, a beam not fixed in place joist. On a rooftop, the crow, watching the day fail to construct.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife sets her eye to a seam up close. Through the hairline gap, a thin dark line of something standing behind the morning. She pulls back.

PAGE 29 — The Spinan Manages It

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The Spinan at the half-finished shopfront, all reassurance, waving the gathered chrome heads along. Behind him a white-coated crew works fast and quiet at the open join — not painting it, re-threading it, drawing the surface of the world closed over the gap as if darning a hole in cloth, while he keeps every eye on himself.

THE SPINAN: Bit of housekeeping, nothing to be looking at. Place  has never looked better. Grand, grand — on we go.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The crowd's mirror faces turning away, soothed; the join drawn shut behind them; the Spinan's vortex pleased.

PAGE 30 — The Smoothing

TWO PANELS. Show the process. Do not explain it.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   A garlanded archway in the square that the children pass through. A child goes in with a NEARLY-PERFECT polished face and comes out the far side a shade more mirror-smooth — calmer, brighter, emptier. The chrome parents applaud.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The smoothed child's face after: blanker, finely honed, content. At the back of the queue, Aoife, not wanting to go through.

PAGE 31 — Aoife Steps Out of the Queue

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   At the front of the line now, the arch glowing pleasantly ahead of her, Aoife stops — and steps sideways out of the queue. A small thing. A worker gestures her back in. She does not go.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife slips out of the square, away from the arch, unsmoothed. On a spire above, the crow turns to follow her out.

PAGE 32 — Keo's Body

TWO PANELS. Her history is in her body. No caption states it.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Keo crosses to Aoife in a quiet lane, clear in good light now: the patches grown back wrong, the faded number on the ear, the careful off-gait body that was used and got out. And still she comes gently, butting her head once against the child's — a cat's whole word for trust, spent on the only person who has earned it.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife's hand in Keo's fur, resting over an old scar. The cat lets her. Two warm things in a grey lane.

PAGE 33 — Keo, Before

THREE PANELS. Cold, exact — fact, not myth, distinct from Cuimhne's smoke. Aoife's hand resting over the old scar; the scar is the door into this. No caption anywhere.

PANEL 1   CLOSE — THE SCAR

IMAGE   Aoife's hand on the serial-number scar on Keo's back, close. The number legible for the first time. Hold on it — let the reader register that it is a number stamped on a living thing, and let that do its own work.

PANEL 2   MEDIUM — BEHIND THE SCAR

IMAGE   Through the scar, into the white wing, years ago: a younger Keo in one of the numbered housings, the same dead even white, the same clean stylised animal-logos running on the screens over the rows. Not the procedure — only the small black and white cat watching the aisle through the bars, learning the shape of the place, mapping where the gaps are. The escape-intelligence being forged, in the worst possible school. It’s in the elegant way she composes herself, not in words.

PANEL 3   CLOSE — BACK TO THE LANE

IMAGE   Back to the grey lane. Aoife's hand over the scar, Keo permitting it — the only creature she permits access. The cat does not soften and does not explain. But she stays under the child's hand one heartbeat longer than she needs to, then a moment more.

PAGE 34 — The Animals Gather

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The quiet lane. The animals draw in around Aoife — Keo at her side, Pop with his bear, Milky glowing faintly, the crow on the wall above. Pooky watches from the imagined edge, crown crooked. The only warm, dimensional things in the world, gathered round the one child who sees them.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife in the middle of them, small, no longer alone, unafraid. She has got back up.

PAGE 35 — Pop, and Why He Won't Put It Down

THREE PANELS. Tender, small. Pop at the edge of the gathered animals, the bear clutched as ever. No caption. The argument against "toughen up" given a face and a history — shown, never stated.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Pop a little apart from the others, holding the bear, his huge mind and emotions taking in the gathered animals and the fake world at full intensity as always.

PANEL 2   INSERT — MEMORY, SOFT GREY

IMAGE   A memory-inset, soft grey, framed small inside the panel: a smaller Pop in a place that hurt. He lived in an animal shelter once, but his sister did not make it that far; she was knocked down by a car and Pop witnessed it. He used to hold her for comfort. In his time spent caged in an animal rescue shelter. A child's hand pushes a teddy bear through the bars to him. For once, someone was kind to him, but they never adopted him, and then the child was gone. From then on Pop holds that teddy as if it were his sister. The single image that explains everything about why he has never once put it down.

PANEL 3   CLOSE

IMAGE   Back to now: Pop's small face over the bear, holding the whole world in his enormous mind and not looking away from any of it. The most open thing in the book, choosing to stay open to a new positive world and that the power of this group can change things.

PAGE 36 — The Turn

TWO PANELS. The four cats together. The reckoning begins to move.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Something shifts in the four cats. They stand, together, and face the bright village — Keo leading, Pop standing though he still grips the bear, Milky's cracks brightening, Pooky rising to his full vast height with the crown catching light. The crow lifts off in flight.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The crow of reckoning, the four cats turned toward the village like a verdict about to be read out.

PAGE 37 — Pooky, Deposed

THREE PANELS. The clown register — but the gravity shows through, the way page 27 promised. He keeps his one spoken line, because it is character, not narration. No third-person caption.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Pooky in the imagined space, vast and absurd, holding court to an audience of nobody, the twisted crown crooked, the price tag tangled in the gold. He is declaiming, magnificent, ridiculous.

POOKY (booming): A king does not grieve, he reigns. A king is never left — he withdraws. There is an important difference and you would not understand it.

PANEL 2   MEDIUM — MEMORY BEHIND HIM

IMAGE   Drawn faint behind his bluster, the memory it is built over: a smaller Pooky on a doorstep, a door closing, a family's car pulling away, his first family, the one that left him. The image he is shouting to drown out. Show the wound the performance is covering.

PANEL 3   CLOSE

IMAGE   The booming stops for one panel. The same flat, old, level look from page 27 — and now the reader has just seen what is under it. The camera finds the price tag tangled in his crown, held in focus: the mark of a thing that was bought, and sold, and left — not good enough, because he was not a proper pure-bred cat, and that is what the money was paid for. The crown matters because he was an animal kept as a plaything, an object of status for his owner. That object he now wears with irony. It carries the whole meaning; no caption needed.

PAGE 38 — The Festival

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The square dressed for a festival — bunting, a stage, the chrome crowd thick and joyful, a forest of phones up and filming. The Spinan works the edge of the stage. Beside it, a pen of animals, waiting in the kind of stillness that is not calm but the absence of anywhere left to go.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The press of bodies pushes Aoife to the front, close to the stage and the pen, the animals' stare meeting hers between the bars.

PAGE 39 — The Guest of Honour

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   On the stage, the Spinan brings the Everyman up, he is the guest of honour, modest, pleased, an arm around his shoulders, presenting him to an applause. Behind them, under a cloth, the shape of a machine.

THE SPINAN: The man himself. None of it runs without him. Give him a hand.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The Everyman's chrome head tilted in modest thanks; the draped machine at his back; the animals in the pen gone very still.

PAGE 40 — The Command Tent

TWO PANELS. Behind the stage, a works tent: monitors, a wall of small seam-alarms blinking, the management of the Veil shown as a job with a desk.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   A canvas work tent behind the bright frontage. Banks of screens show the village from above — every street a feed, a grid of little red lights where seams are opening faster than the crew can close them. The Spinan stands at the centre, unbothered, a phone to where an ear would be. Around him the Nodans — Mossy, Pat, Mary, Eileen, Paudie — in hi-vis, each angled very slightly away from the others, the body language of people getting their excuses in early. On the main monitor, a loading bar labelled RE-SET sits at 38%.

THE SPINAN: It's not a failure, it's a load condition. Nobody panics, nobody resigns. This is a government-led initiative — there’s no blame to be apportioning, so let’s not go inventing any. Everybody keep smiling for the cameras. The day holds because we hold it.

PAUDIE (small): ...wasn't my section. My section was grand.

MARY (smaller): Everyone's section was grand, Paudie. That's the problem.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   On the monitor, under the Spinan's reflection, the village from above redrawing itself line by line as the bar climbs — streets, roofs, the little square, all of it being run like a frame rendering or an enormous 3D printing machine. For one second the reader sees plainly what the village does not: the morning’s output. The Spinan taps the screen, satisfied, exactly the way he tapped the petting rail.

PAGE 41 — The Cloth

TWO PANELS. Build the dread straight into the locked Page 43.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The Spinan's hand takes a corner of the cloth over the machine. The crowd leans in, phones high, delighted. An animal is led out of the pen toward the stage. Aoife at the front, the one half-polished face that is not delighted.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife's hand white-knuckled on the lip of the stage. The animal's eye. The cloth beginning to rise.

PAGE 42 — Hold

ONE PANEL. A held breath before the demonstration. Hands directly into the locked Page 43.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The whole square caught in the half-second before: the lifting cloth, the leaning crowd, the bright forest of raised phones, the animal at the stage's centre, the engineer beside his work — and one child's face turned up out of all of it, the only face not pointed at a screen. UNSURE IS IT NEEDED

PAGE 43 — The Demonstration — [LOCKED]

PANEL 1   WIDE — TOP TIER

IMAGE   The stage. The cartoon-diagram register on the big screen behind: a smiling cartoon cow with an arrow pointing to a hamburger, a cartoon sun with a cow's face beaming over green hills. On the stage, a steel-head presenter stands beside a cartoonishly blocky cow — porcelain-white with black patches, almost a toy — on a low table. The presenter holds up a captive-bolt device, casual as a man showing a kitchen gadget. A smaller steel-head sits to the side at a little desk. The audience is a sea of dark silhouetted heads.

PRESENTER (BALLOON): And this is the humane bolt, children.

PANEL 2   CLOSE — LEFT — THE BOLT

IMAGE   Hard close-up: the bolt device pressed to the toy-cow's blocky head, fired. A starburst of stylised red. The cow's single visible cartoon eye goes wide. Pure comic-book violence — graphic red shapes, not gore.

SFX (huge brush lettering): PTUF!

PANEL 3   TIER — RIGHT OF THE PTUF PANEL

IMAGE   The presenter continuing smoothly, gesturing with the bolt. A second strike lands — PAK! — red spattering across the white. In the foreground, the giant legs of a steel-head official standing on the stage; in the mid-ground, rows of small chrome audience heads watching, untroubled. The cartoon screen still beams behind.

PRESENTER (BALLOON): See how efficient? You'll all be doing this when you grow up. It's a very important job.

SFX (bold): PAK!

PANEL 4   MID — LEFT

IMAGE   Two or three steel-head children in the front row, one giving a small thumbs-up, reflections of the red stage curving across their blank faces. Behind them on the screen: the cartoon cow tipping cheerfully into a factory chute and emerging as a steaming burger on a plate, little hearts rising off it.

SFX (from the device, jagged): ZZZZT!! RRRRRT!!

PANEL 5   MID — RIGHT

IMAGE   The device biting deeper — a long, jagged electric ZZZZZT!!! tearing across the panel. The blocky cow slumping on the table in a spreading red pool. Behind, the rows of chrome audience heads, a few small hands raised in mild approval, the whole hall placid. The horror is the placidity.

SFX (enormous, jagged, dominating the panel): ZZZZZZT!!!

PANEL 6   BOTTOM — LEFT — THE SCREAM

IMAGE   Extreme close-up of the toy-cow's face — and here the cartoon cracks: for one panel the blocky toy has a real, agonised mouth, teeth, a single rolling eye, red crystallising off it in sharp shards. The line work itself goes wrong — Junji Ito breaking through the Ladybird cartoon. This is the panel that tells the reader the joke was never a joke.

SFX (jagged, trailing): ZZZZZZT!!!

PANEL 7   BOTTOM — RIGHT — WIDE

IMAGE   Pull back to the hall, lit hard from a stage light flaring off the chrome. In the foreground, a child steel-head raises a small hand to ask a question, reflections curved across its face. Beside it, two more blank chrome heads. Calm. Waiting.

CHILD STEEL-HEAD (BALLOON): Is this the real one or the pretend one?

CAPTION (small, bottom corner): "Nobody answered. That, in the end, was the answer."

Act Three — The Nightmare

PAGE 44 — The Threshold

TWO PANELS. After the locked demonstration. The four cats step out of hiding. The crown.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   In the stunned aftermath, the four cats stand at the front of the crowd, no longer hidden — Keo, Pop, Milky, Pooky. Pooky lowers his crowned head and the twisted gold catches a hard, wrong light. Something in the air gives way.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The crowd's mirror faces, for the first time, uncertain — a ripple of a thing they have no comprehension for. Above them the crow's wings open.

PAGE 45 — The Light

TWO PANELS. Not destruction — disclosure. Milky's glow at the centre of the four.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   From the four cats, from Milky's cracks most of all, a light rises and washes across the square. It does not burn. Where it passes, the bright surface of the world goes thin, then clear, then bare, like breath clearing from a mirror. The chrome crowd stands frozen inside it.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife in the light, untouched, head proud. The crow descending toward her through the brightness.

PAGE 46 — The Silent Square

TWO PANELS. The immediate emptiness. Wordless.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The light gone. The festival square, the same and utterly altered: the stage bare, the pen empty, the bunting hanging dead-still. The chrome crowd stands motionless, mid-cheer, with nothing left to cheer.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The open gate of the animal pen swinging, slow. No animal. Aoife alone in the frozen crowd, looking at the empty pen.

PAGE 47 — Cuimhne Rises

TWO PANELS. Wordless and ominous. The crow over the stilled village.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The crow flies high over the motionless square, wings full, her gaze sweeping the whole frozen scene below — the made world, the crowd, the works behind the frontage.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Cuimhne’s gaze turned down at the village, hard and patient. A verdict reached, not yet read.IS IT NEEDED

PAGE 48 — The Pretending Begins

TWO PANELS. The village snaps back. Wordless. (This is the ONLY full reset before the climax — the earlier four-times-repeated resets are consolidated here.)

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Within the hour the machine takes the day back in hand. The light comes up on its frame, the bunting straightens on hidden lines, the crowd thaws and resumes, laughing, filming, content — the whole morning re-run from the top as if it had never stumbled. The empty pen restocked from somewhere, already forgotten.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   A chrome head mid-laugh, bobbing up and down, perfect and smooth, the seam behind it drawn shut. Nothing learned.

PAGE 49 — The Four Remain

TWO PANELS. The cats refuse the reset. Wordless. (Spinan's redundant "re-pin" page cut; its energy folded into the cats holding against the re-run.) 

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   As the village re-runs itself bright around them, the four cats stay — warm, dimensional, unmoved, standing in plain sight in the middle of the restored square while the chrome crowd flows past. The machine cannot lay the morning over them. They will not render.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Milky's blank face and steady glow amid the bright crowd; Pop's small hand on the bear; Keo's level stare; the crown. Four things the engine could not reset.

PAGE 50 — The First Few

TWO PANELS. Wordless.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   At the edges of the restored festival, one or two children stand apart from the bright crowd, faces still half-polished, looking around them as if something has gone missing that no one else has noticed.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   One of them, Aoife, finds another quiet child across the square. A look passes between them. They are not alone in it.

PAGE 51 — The New Shape

TWO PANELS. One spare caption, the last for several pages.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Wide on the village running smooth again above — but the shape of the crowd has changed: a scatter of small still points held against the flow, a couple of quiet children who will not move with it, the four cats among them, the crow a black mark on the highest gantry. The new shape the reset cannot iron flat.

CAPTION: The world closed back over. Not everything went under with it. 

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Close on the crow's gaze coming down over the bright crowd, and the quiet children small and steady within it — the ones she is counting. REPETITIVE?

PAGE 52 — Come and See

TWO PANELS. The crow takes Aoife behind the front. One line, then the dead world goes wordless.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   The crow walks ahead of Aoife to a gap behind the world's bright edge and looks back once, for her to follow. Beyond the gap the light changes — colder, truer.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The crow turns her head back to the child at the threshold, waiting for her to follow. REPETITIVE?

CAPTION: Come down. I’ll show you the rest.

PAGE 53 — The Way Down Begins

TWO PANELS. Wordless. The geography of the book made physical: behind the bright front, the ground slopes away and down.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Through the gap, the back of the world: not a wall but a vast cold interior, the bright village hanging in front of it like a lit shopfront on the face of a warehouse with no end. The floor of the real place slopes away into the dark, and a service stair goes down it. The crow starts down. Aoife follows.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife's small shoe on the first cold step down, the warm bright storyboard-world sealed shut above and behind her. Ahead and below, only the true thing, waiting to be walked through.

PAGE 54 — The Silent Wood

TWO PANELS. Wordless. The descent begins shallow — the country first, the country that is merely empty, before the rooms that are worse. Specific, not total. One detail does the work.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Behind the front, the real land: a wood, full of trees and empty of everything else. No birdsong drawn in the air, no movement. Grey, exact, still.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   In a low branch, a finished nest, neat and perfect and cold. Nothing in it. No bird coming back to it. Pop stands beneath it, looking up and on a far ridge through the bare trees, for half a panel, the silhouette of a hunt frozen mid-gallop where the machine paused it, hounds and horses and a small running shape, all stopped, all grey, the cull and the chase kept here like everything else the village does not watch.

PAGE 55 — The Still Air

TWO PANELS. Wordless.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   A meadow that should be loud with insects in summer light. Flowers stand open and unvisited. The air above them is empty, the stillest thing in the book.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Pooky watches the empty air over the flowers the way you watch a door waiting for someone beloved to come through. Nothing comes through it. He keeps watching.

PAGE 56 — The Empty Land

TWO PANELS. Wordless.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Fields and hedges and a far hill, everything exactly where it has always been but no creature in any of it. Faint in the grass, the worn paths animals once kept, leading now from somewhere to nowhere.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Keo on one of the worn paths, unflinching. She has been inside the rooms where this was decided. She walks it without looking away and ahead of her, set into the slope of the land where the paths all seem to run, a low concrete entrance, a ramp going down, a single sealed door. She stops. The others catch up to where she has stopped.

PAGE 57 — The One That Got Away

TWO PANELS. The one warm, living thing in all the emptied country. Wordless. This is the fox Aoife will draw seen here, for real, before the colour-break, so the drawn fox on her window is a memory of THIS, a thing she actually saw cross the grey land alive.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Before they go down through the door, something moves on the dead hillside, the only movement in any of the empty country. A red fox. Real, lean, alive, slipping along the top of a far bank through the grey, the one animal they never caught. In the whole black-and-white-and-grey of the dead land it is rendered warm and solid the way the cats are, a living thing where there is meant to be nothing and its coat catches the book's red, the single spot of true colour out here, small, far and unmistakable. The group all stop and watch it go. Even the crow turns her head to it.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife, close, watching the fox cross the far bank, fixing it in her mind, the exact image she will carry home and draw in red crayon at her desk. It looks back at her once, across the dead ground, and is gone over the rise. The one that got away, seen by the one child who will remember it.

PAGE 58 — The Dead Water

ONE PANEL. Wordless. The last of the open country before the door.

PANEL 1   CLOSE

IMAGE   On the dry margin, a single small skeleton of an animal, fine as a comb. Aoife crouches over it. The crow beside her. Behind them both, the low sealed door in the hillside, waiting for them to walk through it.

The Deepest Room — The Testing Wing

PAGE 59 — Keo's Door

TWO PANELS. The door the whole book has been about. Keo goes quiet. No caption — her body is the caption.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The low concrete entrance set into the dead hillside. A single steel door, no handle on this side, small wired-glass windows, the dead even white of the room beyond — not cold-blue like the kill floor, not warm: a white with no hour in it and no shadow anywhere. Above the door, clean and wrong, a imprint the machine has run over the concrete: a row of stylised pictogram logos, the flat confident marks of a corporate identity system — a simplified mouse, a simplified rabbit, a simplified beaker, each reduced to a few calm lines, each little animal drawn content, settled, at ease, the way a brand draws a thing it wants you to trust. The clean icon set says everything is in order. The four cats and the crow and the child, very small at the foot of it.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Keo at the door, and the change in her the others have never seen: the level headed leader gone still in a different way, her whole body lowered, the serial-number scars on her back catching the dead white light. She is not reading this room. She does not have to. She knows what it is from the inside.

PAGE 60 — Inside

TWO PANELS. The reveal of the wing. Restraint — show the architecture of it, the cheerfulness over it, not the gore.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The door open. A long white wing with no shadows and no windows, fluorescent, receding further than it should — rows of small steel housings on both sides, each with a number stencilled on it, each with a little laminated card in a slot. Down the whole length, screens run a clean brand identity over everything: stylised pictogram logos, one keyed to each kind of animal so you can read at a glance which housing holds which, a calm settled mouse-mark, a calm settled rabbit-mark, the small content shape of each creature reduced to a confident corporate line and among them the syringe mark, taking its neat little bow. Each animal in each logo drawn at ease, looked-after, glad to be here. No one is watching the screens. The cheerful identity-system plays to an empty white aisle, reassuring a room with no one in it to reassure. On every fourth housing, a camera clipped to a little stand, recording, because here too the work is filmed for productivity.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   One laminated card in its slot, close: a barcode, a long number, a tick-box grid, and printed neat in the corner the stylised little animal-mark for this housing — the same calm, content corporate logo from the screens, the creature drawn settled and well, stamped on the form like a quality seal. No name. A blank where a name would go on any other card in any other place. The single most important detail in the wing: here, they do not get names. They get the number.

PAGE 61 — Milky, Who Holds It All

THREE PANELS. The white wing. Milky among the silent numbered rows.The vessel standing in the place that filled him. No caption. His stillness and the images in his glow do all of it.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Milky in the dead-white aisle, between the rows of numbered housings, the warm candlelight-red glow in his cracks the only warm light in all that shadowless white. The blank porcelain face turned slowly down the rows.

PANEL 2   INSERT — INSIDE THE GLOW

IMAGE   Close on the glow leaking from his cracks, and layered faint inside the warm red light, like images held in old porcelain: a child crying over a lamb while adults laugh; a farmer turning his face away from a slaughter truck; a hand on a pet's body at a vet's table; a dozen small swallowed griefs about animals, across generations, all held in the light of him. Show what he carries, literally, in the glow.

PANEL 3   CLOSE

IMAGE   The cracks in Milky widening by a hairline as he stands in the wing — the place too full of grief, and he the thing that holds grief; it fills him faster here than anywhere. The glow brightening, just slightly. The first visible sign of the break to come. The widening crack is the sentence. 

PAGE 62 — Which Ones Get Names

TWO PANELS. The cut of the whole book, spoken by Pop, who takes everything literally. This is the line the brief always wanted — "which ones get names?" — and it lands here, in the deepest room.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Pop stands in the white aisle holding his bear, looking at a card with a name slot left blank, to Keo, to the long receding rows. The dead white light flattens everything. He feels, as he always does, the whole of it at once, and for once it is too much even for him and he asks the only question his literal innocent mind can form.

POP (small): ...the others got names. The cow at the school got a name on the screen. The dog has a name. Why is there no name on these ones?

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Keo does not look at him. She looks down the rows, at the housing with a faded scratches on it that was hers, that was always been hers, they never bothered to relabel. She answers in the fewest words she has spoken in the book.

KEO: Because a name is a thing you have to answer to. They built this room so they would never have to.

PAGE 63 — Keo's Housing

TWO PANELS. The personal floor of the book. Keo at her own cage. No caption.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Keo stops at one housing among hundreds, indistinguishable from the rest but for the faint scratched marks low on its frame, made from the inside, by a younger animal, over a long time. She puts one paw to the cold steel of it. On the screen above, the stylised syringe mark. The others stand back and understand, all at once, where they are standing.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Keo's paw on the steel, over the scratches she made when she was the number on this door. Held silent. The whole book is in this panel: she got out, and she came back, and she is the only one who could lead them here, because she is the only one who was ever inside.

PAGE 64 — The Mouse

TWO PANELS. Not spectacle, one small life, to make the rows mean something. The reader's investment in one named animal throws the unnamed thousands into relief. Restraint absolute.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   In one housing near the end, the only living thing left in the wing: a single small white mouse, very still, watching the visitors with the flat patience of an animal that has stopped expecting anything. On the screen above it, the stylised mouse-logo for this row, calm, settled, content, the picture of a well-kept little life. The real one and the drawn one, in the same frame. One of them is having a wonderful time.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Pop crouches at the housing and, very carefully, pushes the small teddy bear he has carried through the entire book through the gap in the steel, leaving it with the mouse. The first time the bear has left his hands. Then, just as carefully, he lifts the mouse out through the same gap and folds it in against his chest, half-hidden, where no one will think to look, a cat carrying a mouse to keep it safe. He does not say anything. Neither does anyone else.

CAPTION: (none.) 

Act Four — The Reckoning

PAGE 65 — The Rendering Plant

TWO PANELS. Up out of the wing, the engine of it all. The void.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Past the white wing, the place everything in the book finally drains to: a vast rendering hall, pipes and tanks and a low constant hum, the architecture of disposal. At its centre, on a spreading black pool of itself, the Void,— a tall column of living black smoke, inside that smoke like a Babushka Doll is the machine itself eating up life, a human invention, Einsteins mouse made mousetrap in essence ,man making the machine that will kill nature and himself with it.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife and the cats, small at the edge of the hall, looking at the column of smoke and the machine inside. Even Pooky is silent. The crow settles on a pipe above, her gaze fixed on the Void.

PAGE 66 — The Void of Screams

TWO PANELS. The accumulation. Made now of every kind of hidden death, the lab and the kill floor and the cull together. Wordless.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The column of smoke, close and held within it, faint and writhing and never quite resolving, the shapes of all of it at once: the kill-floor line, the white wing’s rows, the frozen hunt, the culled setts, every room the book has walked through, turning over and over inside the black. And threaded up through the smoke, half-swallowed by it, the working parts of the world destroying-machine itself — gantries, drive-belts, the spindles that run the morning, feeding on the dark. A nightmare Ziggurat.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Pop, who feels everything, has his hands over where his ears would be, the bear no longer with him, and still he does not look away. Keo stands beside him, she has been inside one of those shapes, and does not look away either.

PAGE 67 — Pooky and the Crown

TWO PANELS. The pressure valve pays its debt. The crown, the price tag,what the king's crown has been tangled with the whole time.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Pooky steps forward toward the Void, vast and absurd and, for the first time, entirely serious. He lifts the twisted gold crown from his own head and now the reader sees plainly what has been tangled in it since page 27: a single price tag, the mark of a thing that was bought, not rescued — the price he was ashamed of, the proof he was never the salt-of-the-earth rescue cat but a purchase, an item, a thing with a number on it that was for sale. Worn all this time as a crown by the king who would not admit he had ever been valued.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Pooky holds the crown out, the gold and the price tag together in his huge hands and looks at the Void with a cat judgement stare, held now for as long as it takes. The clown that would be king.

PAGE 68 — The Machine Cracks

TWO PANELS. Not the village resetting — the machine itself, the world-maker, faltering. The climax of the slow reveal.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Above and around the whole hall, for the first time shown plainly, the thing that has been making the world: not a wall of flats but an enormous working mechanism filling the dark over everything — looms, conveyor belts and gantries and printing frames and threaded lines running up out of sight, the entire bright village being constructed continuously by its nodes like cloth still on the frame. And now it stutters. A gantry slips. A run of the world's surface, somewhere above, comes loose and hangs.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Milky at the centre of the four, his cracks gone from hairline to wide, the warm candlelight-red light pouring out of him now with nowhere left to hold it. The blank face turned up toward the faltering machine. In a moment the light will have to go somewhere.

PAGE 69 — The Light Breaks

TWO PANELS. Milky breaks — every suppressed feeling the island has had since the Normans and colonisation rewrote the laws, all at once. Not destruction. Disclosure.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Milky breaks. The porcelain gives way along its cracks and the warm red light he has carried for generations floods out — not fire, not blood, the tender candlelight red and washes up and out across the whole doom machine and the dead hall and the rooms beneath it.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife in the flood of warm red light, lit by it, unafraid. The crow's wings wide above her and embracing her, like a mother protecting her chicks. Everything the book has held back, breaking at once, gently.

PAGE 70 — Milky

TWO PANELS. The vessel spent. One spare line.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   The light easing. Milky, cracked wide and quiet now, the glow banked low in him, settling. He has carried it as long as anything could. The others gathered close around him.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife's hand laid flat on Milky's cracked porcelain side, over the low warm light still in him. He lets her. The warmest thing in the book and the one child who always knew it was there.

CAPTION: (none.) 

PAGE 71 — The Other Path — [THE COLOUR-BREAK — LOCKED PALETTE BREAK]

TWO PANELS. The colour pages in the book. Everything else is grey with red; here, for now full living colour. One spare line. The fox lands HERE — its only full appearance — so the motif is concentrated, not diluted.

PANEL 1   SPLASH

IMAGE   The warm light from Milky does not destroy the machine — it tears a window in the grey and floods the page with full, living colour: a world with the animals still in it, the sea alive and crowded, the land green and handed back, the people fewer. And there, in the heart of the colour, the same red fox she watched cross the dead hillside but here whole and unhurried in a living world that has room for her to be free, head up, unhunted, at home. Aoife stands at the edge of it all, lit in colour for the only time in the book.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife reaches a hand into the colour, toward the fox. It begins to thin under her fingers, going to grey at the edges, like a song she cannot stay inside.

CAPTION: It was real. She saw it. 

PAGE 72 — The Reckoning Lands

TWO PANELS. The colour goes; the world puts its face back on; she carries both. Wordless.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE  They step out from the veil after this. The colour gone, the grey closed over, the village re-running bright and seamless around her once more, the dead rooms sealed again behind and beneath the front. Milky quiet, his glow banked low.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife on the bright street, looking like every other child on it — and not. Inside, she is not one of them anymore. She is carrying two worlds home.

PAGE 73 — The Bus Home

TWO PANELS. Wordless.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   A school bus through the village at dusk, the made up sky winding down to evening on hidden gears. Warm windows, rows of small chrome heads inside, tired and content. Bunting hanging slack.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Aoife at the window, forehead to the glass, watching the lit village slide past and, beyond its edge, the dark that no longer answers. Her head doubled faint in the pane.

PAGE 74 — The Red Fox

TWO PANELS. The spine of the book. Wordless. The grey-and-red fox, an echo of the one true colour fox she saw.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Aoife's bedroom at night, the lamp is on. At her desk she presses the red crayon to paper and draws with great care, a fox: head up, unhunted, the one she saw alive in the full colour exposure. Not the memory of a picture. The memory of a living thing.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   She tapes the drawing to the inside of the windowpane, against the dark village beyond. A small living red on the glass. On the garden wall below, the crow watches her do it.

PAGE 75 — The Fox at Night

TWO PANELS. Wordless.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Deep night. House dark, village dark, the engine turning somewhere beneath it all and on the window, lit faintly from the street, the red fox holds: the one spot of colour and life in the whole sleeping grey.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Tight on the fox on the glass, the dark behind it. Small. Stubborn. Out of reach.IS IT NEEDED?

PAGES 76–79 — Biscuit

Four pages. The moral centre, played silent. The Everyman and the dog he loves above any person.

PAGE 76 — Home with Biscuit

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The Everyman's tidy front room at night, lamplit, the good jacket off. He is down on the floor, undignified and entirely happy, playing with a small beagle,Biscuit. The one place in his life he is unguarded; the chrome head tilts with a tenderness he can summon for nothing else.

THE EVERYMAN: Who's the best boy. Who's the best boy in the whole world. Yes you are.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The beagle, close. On its worn leather collar, the small engraved tag. The dog looks up at the man a moment too long, the way a dog's look should be? not, quite. The Everyman joyful, noticing nothing.

PAGE 77 — The Voice Note

TWO PANELS. The Everyman's tenderness and his blindness in one stroke.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Daytime, the engineer's tidy office, the schematics on the wall. The Everyman at his desk, and on the shelf a small smart speaker. He leans toward it, and for one moment the careful chrome man is entirely undefended, talking to a machine that will carry his voice to an empty front room.

THE EVERYMAN (to the speaker): Who's the best boy. Daddy's nearly home. Two more hours and we'll go to the park.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Back in the lamplit front room, the speaker on the sideboard plays his warm voice into the quiet — who's the best boy and the beagle in the plush bed lifts its head and listens: the worn collar and its two-meaning tag around his neck, the voice of the man whose machine he designed killed the dog it replaced. This beagle does not understand. It only knows the voice is kind. It rests its head back down. The image holds the whole irony; the silence under it is the point.

PAGE 78 — The Film

TWO PANELS. Wordless. The whole horror of the book in one quiet frame.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Later, the Everyman on the sofa, the dog's head in his lap, a sad film flickering grey on the screen. His whole body folds with feeling, a hand to his mirror face, genuinely moved, weeping at a story of a small good thing lost.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The dog is not watching the film. It is watching him. Its head resting on the hand that designed the machine. Held silent.

PAGE 79 — Goodnight, Biscuit

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Bedtime. The Everyman settles the dog into a plush bed and tucks a blanket round it, gentler than he is anywhere else in his life.

THE EVERYMAN: Night night, best boy. Big day tomorrow.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   After he has gone, the dog's eye open in the dark of its bed — and the tag, for the first and only time, fallen face-up and legible: the engraved pet name above a stamped facility number. The same plate the dead dog wore in the skip.

PAGE 80 — The Cage

TWO PANELS. Mossy and the cage he does not open. Wordless.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Inside the works, the cold register of cages. Mossy in his white coat stopped at one of them, frozen as he froze at the skip. An animal looks out at him. The latch is right there. He has only to lift it. He stands. He does not.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Mossy's hand on the cold bars, not lifting the latch, his head bowed. He knows exactly what he is part of, and is afraid, and goes on choosing doing nothing he keeps choosing.

Act Five — The Return

PAGES 81–86 — The World Continues

Six pages. The engine runs on; a few small things are kept back from it.

PAGE 81 — The Shift

TWO PANELS. Wordless.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Dawn at the works. The Nodans clock in, Mossy, Dervla, Ger — white coats, mirror heads, the long same routine. The line starts up behind the hoarding.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Mossy at his station, hands moving, the set of his shoulders giving away the sleep he is not getting.

PAGE 82 — What a Few Keep

TWO PANELS. Wordless.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The village a week on, running exactly as before — pens, signage, routine, nothing learned. Out of the whole bright crowd, one or two children have gone quiet.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   At the edges, these said children now apart from the rest, drawing animals on scraps of paper hidden in their laps. Aoife among them, drawing another variation of the small red fox.

PAGE 83 — The Spinan Keeps the Story

TWO PANELS.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The Spinan at the ribbon-cutting of somewhere new — a bigger building, a fresher coat of paint, a sign bigger than the last — warm and tireless, refreshing the story, the crowd believing it because believing the falsehood is easier.

THE SPINAN: We built this. We believed in this. Now she is giving back to us.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   The crowd's chrome faces all turned toward the Spinan, and in every one of them his own pitch staring back — a hundred small reflections of the man. He is surrounded by himself. He has sold the story so well it no longer needs him to tell it.

PAGE 84 — What the Animals Do Now

TWO PANELS. Not war — care. Wordless.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Keo walks a quiet child to its gate at dusk. Pop sits on a step beside another and from inside his coat he lifts the white mouse he carried out of the testing wing, sets it down gently in the long grass, and watches it go. Then he shifts closer to the child, for the comfort of it. SPLASH PAGE?

PAGE 85 — Over All of It

TWO PANELS. Wordless. The image carries the meaning.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   High over the lit village, Cuimhne on the topmost gantry, her gaze taking in the whole machine running it.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Her eye, close and held small and reflected in its curve, a far lit window with a child's red fox taped to it. The eye keeps the fox the way it kept the room.

PAGE 86 — The Window

TWO PANELS. Wordless.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Aoife at her window in the early light, the red fox taped to the glass by her cheek, looking out over the village that has unremembered everything in a night.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Below her window, on the wall, the crow,not looking up at her but looking out the same way she is, the pair of them holding one thin line of attention open across the waking street while everyone between them sleeps on.

PAGES 87–96 — The Nodans Prelude

Ten pages. The workforce up close — the runway into the next book, the crack opening at the human end of the engine. No uprising. A few who are starting to think with their hearts and minds, to critically think for themselves.

PAGE 87 — The Three

TWO PANELS. Wordless. Three workers, three ways the one job has worked on them.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The locker room at shift's end. Mossy, who looked once and could not look again. Dervla, young enough that her body still tells the truth before her training can catch it. Ger, old enough to have paid the whole price, mistaking the silence it left for peace.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Three lockers shutting; three workers going out into the same grey evening by three separate doors.

PAGE 88 — Dervla

TWO PANELS. Wordless.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   The canteen, after. Dervla alone with an untouched mug, palms flat on the table to hold her hands still, eyes on the far wall, counting something only she can see, until the thing she handled an hour ago lets go of her thoughts.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Her reflection in the dead black screen of her phone — a mirror sphere smaller and more elegant than the rest, and behind it a person still in there, still flinching.

PAGE 89 — Ger

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Ger at his locker, calm and methodical, hanging the coat exactly as he has for thirty years on the same hanger. He clocks Dervla's bad evening and means kindly by it — but what he offers is less comfort than instructions for going numb.

GER: You'll dream about it a while. Then one night you won't. You'll think you've made your peace. Let yourself think you have.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Ger's mirror head, settled, untroubled and the body beneath it gone slack and hollow, worn through from the inside by the very ease he recommends.

PAGE 90 — Mossy, Again

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Mossy's small room, late. He sits on the edge of the bed, the worn pet collar in his hands again — the one he lifted from a dead dog and buckled onto a living stranger so a man he has never met could go on loving a ghost. Two weights inside his mind now: the cage he could not open, and the kindness-shaped lie he carries for a stranger's sake.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   His hands closed around the collar, the thin grey line of light under the door. A man held by a secret he chose to keep.

PAGE 91 — The Silence Behind the Front

TWO PANELS. Wordless. The most important image in the back half — no caption permitted.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   The Nodans walk home through the lit evening village, the bright front holding all the way to their doors. Behind it the made world thins to its frame, and through the frame the emptied country presses up, silent and total, against the back of everything. None of them turns to look behind. They have lost the knack of looking.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Dervla, alone of the three, stops where the bright front gaps and looks through the gap, at the silence kept on the far side. She hears it. She has no word for it yet.

PAGE 92 — The Pause

TWO PANELS. Wordless.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Next morning, on the line, Dervla's hands stop — a half-second past what the work allows,over a living thing. Only a pause. A held breath. The smallest refusal a body can make.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Ger beside her sees the pause. This time he says nothing — only looks, and something old and buried turns over in him, because he was once exactly this, before he set it down.

PAGE 93 — The Briefing

TWO PANELS. The Spinan manages the workforce's conscience. One line of corporate gloss.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   A bright staff briefing, the Spinan at the head of the room, slides behind him, all projected targets, team talk and good news — handing the workers in a trance, the clean words that let them not think.

THE SPINAN: Record quarter, team. And remember — you're not doing a hard thing, you're doing an essential one. Big difference. Back to it.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Mossy and Dervla in the rows, unconvinced; Ger beside them applauding from habit, his hands moving without him thinking.

PAGE 94 — Passing

TWO PANELS. Wordless. The two ends of the crack cross.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Shift change. The Nodans file out of work, as the children pass by on an excursion, and for a few steps the two streams run alongside each other — quiet, passing close and never speaking.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   On the ground between them, dropped, a child's scrap drawing of a red fox. Dervla stops over it. She does not walk on. She picks it up.

PAGE 95 — Dervla Keeps the Fox

TWO PANELS. Wordless. Her arc and the fox converge — where the next book begins.

PANEL 1   MEDIUM

IMAGE   Dervla does not bin the drawing. She folds it once, with care, and slips it into the breast pocket of the white coat — the small, secret,but enormous act of taking a thing back from the machine.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Her hand pressed flat over the pocket, over the folded fox, over the place a heart is kept. On the wire above the yard, the crow has seen it.

PAGE 96 — The Runway

TWO PANELS. Wordless but for the crow lifting.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Evening over the village and the silence behind it. The engine running, the Spinan's lights on, the workers home, the children asleep and scattered unseen through it all, the small kept things: a fox on a pane, a fox in a pocket, a pause on a line, a child gone quiet, a lab mouse set free.

PANEL 2   CLOSE

IMAGE   Cuimhne lifts from the wire into the dark, wings wide, her eye coming round toward us as she rises.

PAGES 97–99 — The Loop

Three pages. The engine does not end; it loops — back to the first morning, identical, running again. Re-draw the opening moments so the reader feels the world start over from the top. On the last panel, for the reader alone, the machine is caught in the act of making the morning, and the dead world behind it is shown at last. Wordless throughout — the repetition is the meaning.

PANEL 1   WIDE (P.97)

IMAGE   The morning craned up over the village at dawn — the exact image that opened the book, but now we are shown the crane. The made sky rises on its frame, the light comes on along a gantry, the hills unrolling like a backdrop from a great spindle below the horizon, the shopfronts slotting in sequence like lego as the machine runs the day in. The set fresh for another show. Indistinguishable from Page 4 to anyone inside it the charade.

PANEL 2   WIDE (P.98)

IMAGE   The village waking, identical to the start: shutters up, the petting pen, an animal led out, the Nodans opening the service door, the Spinan high somewhere with a coffee, faint but now unmissable, the threaded lines and gantries of the world-machine, running every piece of it on cue. All of it, again, and for the first time the reader sees the strings, pistons and robotic arms.

PANEL 3   MEDIUM (P.99)

IMAGE   Aoife waking, the first moment of her day again, the room tidied back to normal overnight by the machine that tidies everything — except, in the corner of the window, the red fox is still there. The one thing the reset could not lift. She does not remember drawing it. She looks at it a while.

PANEL 4   WIDE (P.99)

IMAGE   Pull back from the loop running on below and, for the reader's eyes only, the whole bright re-set village hanging on the underside of the working machine nested in the void of smoke, and behind and beneath it the dead world it is made to hide: silent, total, waiting. The usual morning runs on in front of it. The red fox on the glass, small, the one colour against all of it.

PAGE 100 — Cuimhne

Full-page splash. The eye alone. One word.

PANEL 1   SPLASH

IMAGE   Cuimhne's single red eye, filling the page, looking directly out at the reader. The only colour on the page. The one thing awake in the whole running machine.

CAPTION: Cuimhne.

PAGE 101 — One Door Left Open

ONE PANEL. The close of a complete book. Not a cliffhanger — a held door. The story is whole; the world is not finished with us.

PANEL 1   WIDE

IMAGE   Black. And in the black, very small and very far, two lit windows on the whole sleeping island: one with a child's red fox taped to the glass, and somewhere across the dark country — one more, just lit, where a folded paper fox has been taken out of a coat pocket and pressed to a worker's window for the first time. Two small pieces of hope in all that black. Above them both, between them, the crow, wings wide, flying from original one and turning toward the other. The book is over. She is not.

CAPTION: One I had taken back. The rest was still owed. So I went, in the dark, from the one lit window to the next. 

— END —