Kittul lifted her head. It seemed a little heavy, like she hadn’t fully shaken off the sedation. She shook herself to clear the cobwebs. Instead, the motion produced a tiny jingling sound and a rush of warmth, like a fuzzy blanket on a cold winter day. She blinked, her eyes sliding closed and back open with a smooth, unhurried grace.
The jangling noise bothered her but didn’t scare her. She vaguely remembered something happening at the vet. He’d given her a vitamin shot. She’d blacked out. She thought she remembered something after that, but it was muzzy. A brief, painful pinch followed by a cool, soothing sensation in her nape stood out.
She looked around the room. Zed was nowhere to be seen. A moment of careful listening told her he wasn’t in the apartment unless he was holding his breath. A quick check of the clock showed it wasn’t time for class. That meant she had no idea when he would return; he could walk into the apartment at any moment. Usually that thought sent a frisson of panic through her, but this time felt too relaxed to care. For the moment she had the apartment all to herself.
With that realization, she stood, stretching into her human form. As she shifted, something moved in her upper back. For a moment, it annoyed her, like something stuck between her teeth. The moment passed but left her curious. Reaching around to the nape of her neck, she felt a hard, cold plate dangling there. Her worry hit again, and this time the strange feeling of security didn’t chase her fear away. She padded barefoot to Zed’s bathroom, twisting herself around to see the back of her neck. It took the intervention of a hand mirror, but eventually she got a look at the thing dangling from the top of her spine. It was a simple circular barbell piercing. A small silvery square, glinting with rainbow reflections, dangled from the ends of the barbell. When she moved, it rang slightly, the sound of metal sliding against metal. If she hadn’t been in contact with it, if she wasn’t a Shifter, she would never have heard it.
Kittul’s heartbeat thundered in her ears. Her gut tightened, and her breath came fast and harsh. She froze in place, the metal stud pinning her, piercing her body, marking her as property, forcing her to stillness. She stayed that way for an endless moment, until her own breathing caused the piercing to shift. The quiet slithering ring of metal on metal shocked her, sent her scrambling for the door, scrabbling at the suddenly unlocked handle, throwing her out into the chill, rain-damp air of the foyer.
Without thinking she shifted to her cat shape and kept running. Half a block behind her, she heard Zed’s apartment door click shut. The sound didn’t slow her at all, she fled further and further, taking turns at random, until she found herself in at the dead end of a shallow alley. She huddled behind some boxes, the metal in her neck brushing against the wet cardboard. Her terror fled, and she sank into an exhausted sleep.
***
With nothing distracting her, Karin heard the distinctive chime of something waiting in her inbox. She disconnected from Cat's Paw and brought up her mail. A stack of emails from Vi waited for her. The system filtering her mail marked one of them as a new opportunity for work, as well as tagging it urgent. The rest looked like Vi checking up on her, including two that she’d marked as news about Kent. She’d also tagged the new work as Kent news. Karin assumed Vi had news of work big enough to potentially break her free of her unwanted patron.
Before she could open it, a wave of lightheadedness overwhelmed her. She stared unseeing as the virtual world spun and wobbled. After a few minutes, the sensation slacked off, but didn't go away completely. Her stomach tied itself in a hard knot, and her head ached. She thought about how long it had been since she kept anything down. Her sweat mod burned calories, and she wasn't very heavy to begin with. If she didn't eat for a day, she got shaky. She kept thinking about getting a VR rig with a built-in glucose drip, but when she was hungry she wasn't in any condition to set it up, and when she wasn't she didn't think about it.
A quick check of her chron showed she'd only been under for a few hours. That meant Vi's news was really urgent given the number of messages. Karin levered herself out of her VR rig and connected to her mail with her implant. It wasn't a full sensory rig, but she could listen to messages while she got something to eat.
The message started playing. Karin stumbled to her knees in the doorway to her kitchen. Try as she might, she couldn't force herself forward with Kent's voice in her ears.
"Hallo, Karin. I'm sorry about the deception, but your mailbox eliminates mail from me, so I was forced to break into your agent's email." Karin had no idea how he managed it, but Kent sounded sincerely apologetic when he said he was sorry. He'd never done so before. Maybe his time in jail had rehabilitated him. Also, it was possible her mods allowed for monkeys to fly out of her ass.
"I understand you don't want to speak with me again. If you even listen to the remainder of this message, I will pay all of your bills for the remainder of this year."
Kent at least knew his place in her life. Her empty gut tried to invert itself at his latest invasion of her privacy, but a year's pay might give her enough breathing room to escape him forever.
"I have a matter of some urgency, secrecy and importance that requires an artist of your unique talents. An… associate of mine has the code for an organism, and she desires it to be… what's the phrase? Ah, yes. She requires it to be compiled, translated, and implemented. I believe it will require a coder of your skill to even have a chance to complete this work."
Flattery. Flattery and challenge. Kent knew how to play her, and hunger and exhaustion left her unable to work up a proper hatred for him.
"Attached to this message is the complete code base for the organism. If you choose to accept the commission, I will transfer another year's funding to your account immediately. If you complete the commission, I will set up a trust fund in your name which will pay your bills indefinitely, assuming you maintain your current lifestyle."
Her head shot up. Kent had just offered to free her if she did this for him. It was important to him. Part of her wanted to screw it up for no other reason. Another, wiser part focused her on his offer. The message hadn't self-deleted; it remained in her inbox. She copied it to local storage and forwarded copies to Vivian, her office mailbox, and her old mentor. She had an implied contract, and if he tried to weasel out, she would sic Vi on him.
"On a personal note, I apologize again for placing you in such a state of distress that you feel the need to travel to another reality entirely to escape me. Recent events have convinced me of the error of my ways. Please, accept my apology. If you cannot bring yourself to, at least accept this commission as not only a way to escape, but as an apology. Thanks for listening, Kare Bear."
Kent's old nickname for her set off another wave of nausea. Karin looked around her kitchen, trying to imagine something she could keep down. A faint floral scent wafted through the room, and she staggered back to her VR rig, hunger defeated by trauma. The moment she got into her rig, she hit a store that specialized in VR equipment and spent some of Kent's largesse on an automated glucose drip. Her only way out was finishing this job for him, and thinking about him made her physically ill.
She looked at the delivery options, annoyed that the store couldn't deliver the following day. The best delivery available showed as almost four days. That was labeled as 'next day delivery'. She checked another store, and another, but none of them could deliver any faster.
She returned to her original store and requested a chat with a representative. When the sales rep connected, Karin explained her problem.
"I'm sorry Miss Padgett, but the earliest we can deliver to your location is the seventeenth. If you lived a little closer to one of our warehouses, I could contact a driver and see if he would bring it out personally, but I'm afraid you're a little further than they normally like to travel."
"Oh," Karin took a deep breath, fighting her agoraphobic impulses, "what if I came out to the warehouse?"
The sales rep's voice took on a brittle cheerfulness, "Well, if your need is that urgent, I guess you could get it tonight. I'm assuming you have personal transport? It's after hours, and public transit only visits that area every hour or so on weekend evenings."
"I could rent something. Wait, weekend?"
"Yes, Miss Padgett. It's Saturday the sixteenth."
Karin froze. She'd logged in late at night on Tuesday. That explained her hunger. Now she just had to figure out how she'd lost three days. In the meanwhile, her sudden silence hadn't gone unnoticed by the sales rep.
"It looks like you need this more than you realized, Miss Padgett. Have you had a chance to look through the rest of our line of realspace maintenance products?"
Karin stifled a scream. The poor sales rep was, in her own way, trying to help. "Give me a second?"
"Certainly, Miss Padgett."
While the sales rep waited, Karin scanned the remainder of the catalog and ran a Wider World search on time loss while playing Cat's Paw. Her search came back before she finished shopping. Users reported experiencing a loss of up to four days. Forum comments indicated popular opinion thought they were addicted to the game and exaggerating. Karin logged her own experience, then returned to the catalog.
The next item the company sold stopped her cold; a complete long term VR rig. It had a glucose drip, catheter, muscular maintenance, and a variety of other minor caretaking features. She'd seen them for astronauts, deep sea divers, and others who worked for long periods of time in confined spaces. This one, on the other hand, had the distinctive Cat's Paw logo.
She wavered for a moment, looking at the technical specs. For a second, she thought it had a much slower throughput rate than her rig, but then she realized it displayed petabytes per second, not terabytes like her old rig. It was in every way a nicer rig than hers. It would even be better for working from home. It was nicer than her work rig. She checked the price again and swore. She slipped out of her VR rig, maintaining her connection via her phone implant, but dropping the visual connection. After only a few steps, just enough to put her in her kitchen entryway, she stumbled and dropped to her knees.
"Is everything all right, Miss Padgett?" The sales rep was consideration personified. Karin realized that given her company's line of products, she probably dealt with tenuous connections to reality on a daily basis.
"I'm fine. Could you give me a moment's privacy please?"
"Certainly, Miss Padgett. My name is Linda, I'll put a flag on your reconnection, just ask for me if you get another rep. Did you want me to put your order through in the meanwhile?"
Karin pounded her forehead gently against her kitchen floor tiles. "No. No, I'm considering another product."
"Oh," Linda's voice conveyed just the right amount of sorrow at Karin's change of heart. Karin was really impressed by her phone skills. "Well, if you change your mind, just let me know."
Karin dropped the connection and accessed her inbox and her bank account. She triggered the download of the information Kent had sent her. Within moments, her account registered a six-figure payment, enough to cover her bills for another year. Still gently thumping her forehead against the floor at her own stupidity, she reconnected to Linda.
"Miss Padgett! I'm glad to hear back from you. Have you decided to get the glucose feed then?"
"No. I needed to do a quick check of my accounts. Are you running any specials on the Cat's Paw rig?"
At the mention of the high-end, high-priced VR rig, Linda underwent a transformation from perky salesperson to businesslike financial consultant. "We offer a variety of financing options on all of our complete rigs. The Cat's Paw rig in particular is already discounted, primarily because of the sponsorship deals we get from the Cat's Paw company itself. Would you like me to set up a financing plan for you?"
If you discover this tale on Amazon, be aware that it has been unlawfully taken from Royal Road. Please report it.
Karin's head never stopped its gentle percussion of the floor. It hurt a bit, but less than her own stupidity. "Oh, no. I don't finance things. It's a bad habit. I'll be paying cash. Can I get the same delivery options?"
She had the dubious and wicked pleasure of hearing dead air as Linda stopped, shocked into silence by Karin's proclamation. "Linda? Is everything all right?"
"Oh. Sorry, Miss Padgett. I'm afraid I don't often get folks purchasing full rigs without payment plans. I'll," Karin could practically hear Linda blushing. "I'll have to look up how to enter that in our system."
"I'm sorry to be a bother."
"Oh! No bother, no bother! I ought to remember this from training, but like I said, it's not often someone pays cash for a purchase this large."
"Yeah. Well. My question stands; can I still get the same delivery options?"
"I'm… I'm not certain."
Karin stopped belaboring the floor and dragged herself to the fridge. "Oh. Maybe that's a good thing. I guess I really ought to think about this over the weekend."
Before Karin could pull down a half empty container of orange flavored fruit drink, Linda spoke again, "Actually, I've just checked, we have an installation team available in your area tomorrow. The same team that would have delivered the glucose drip can set up your new rig. Isn't that wonderful?"
Karin finished her orange drink before she replied. The sweet, cool juice coursed through her throat like a balm, and made her dizzy with relief when she spoke again. "Yeah. Yeah, it is. Just great. I'll enter my debit codes and you get that set up, ok?"
"Yes, ma'am."
Karin gobbled a few bites of leftover barbeque while she entered her codes. It had gone all manky, so as she confirmed her address, she dumped it into the compacter. That finished, she crawled back to her rig. A full rig setup required at least a medical technician to implement. She'd talk with him when he got here, make sure she wasn't going to die of malnutrition. Once the rig was set up, she was certain at least that fate wouldn't befall her.
She slipped into her rig and checked the download, still in progress. She sampled the files that had made it to her local system. The data coming across held more than base pairs. It also had a full detailed description of the desired end organism. If she failed now, it certainly wouldn't be for lack of information.
The data wouldn't be ready soon enough to make waiting for it worthwhile. She couldn’t sleep, her VR time left her body completely rested and keyed up. She set an alert for when it was done, set another for when the delivery was scheduled, and logged back into Cat's Paw.
***
Kittul awoke to the tiny sounds of someone sneaking through the alleyway. Feigning sleep, she listened carefully. Someone crept up on her, almost inaudible through the misting rain. The noise came from at least three different places in the alley, a gang of something trying to catch her.
She slid one eyelid open just a crack and peered out through interwoven lashes at the alley. A clutter of six cats, all but one her size or smaller, crept quietly toward her. Her heartbeat quickened, but the strange calm had returned. They had her penned in, but they were trying to sneak up before she woke up. Five ratty looking toms, one scrawny, hesitant queen, they all stalked closer step by careful step.
The queen stopped her advance, her pupils dilating, staring blankly. A gap opened between the little queen and the big tom. Before she could think twice, Kittul sprung, leaping for the gap. Her jump carried her past the tom, and she scrabbled for traction on the rain-slick pavement. The little queen just stared at her as she flashed past. For a moment she was free and running.
A thing of sharp angles and skin landed on her. She yowled with pain as claws dug into her shoulders and hips. She leapt, twisted, and shifted. Her full human weight came down on the big tom, and bones crunched as she hit the ground. The moment the claws let go, Kittul leapt to her feet. She landed facing one of the two toms, who had just straightened from his own shift to human form.
Kittul had no combat training, but resurging terror told her that if she ran, the remaining toms would catch her. Faint memories of a soccer youth league in a former life came to her rescue. Before the tom could get his bearings, she brought one leg around, aiming for an open dumpster against one wall of the alley. Her shin connected with his crotch, and his pelvis cracked at the impact. The tom impacted the open lid of the dumpster, bounced off the wall the lid was leaning against, and then fell to moan quietly nestled in reeking garbage. The lid swayed a moment before it slammed shut atop him.
Kittul never stopped moving. She spun to face the third tom. Halfway through her spin she shifted again, this time to Neko. His fist connected with her shoulder, but her claws tore through his throat. He dropped to the ground, shifting back to his cat form as he did. The shift wasn't enough to heal him entirely; he left a trail of blood as he crawled beneath the dumpster.
“Malice! Grab her!” The big tom’s rasp startled her out of her frozen moment of self-generated horror. She spun to face the rest of the clutter. The other two toms, apparently plain stray felines, had already fled. The emaciated little queen rose from her shift to Neko. The light gray fur that covered her body did nothing to hide the shape of ribs and bones showing painfully through the skin. The darker stripes across her breasts and in the juncture of her thighs mimicked a bikini, but the facsimile of clothes only served to highlight the thin feline features of her face.
The tableau held for a moment, Kittul staring at the wretched little queen. Then the tom moved, his breath hissing in, and Kittul twisted, one hand flying out to backhand the little queen. She heard Malice land, hard, against the wall as she turned to face the tom.
He was trying to shift to Neko, whiskers sprouting, but it wasn’t working. Looking at his wasted frame, watching the bones in his hip writhe back into place, she realized why. He was starving; his body didn’t have enough calories to heal him. He realized that a moment after she did and launched himself at her with a snarl.
She reacted without thought, kicking out with the full power of her compact Neko body. He got his hands in the way, but that only served to smash them backwards into his side. The impact of her foot threw him into the air. He crashed into the wall of the alley hard enough to shatter the façade, then landed in a pile of broken brickwork. She stared, unwilling to take her eyes off him even for a moment, but equally unwilling to close and finish him. A moment later he heaved a shuddering breath and, somehow, found enough strength to shift himself back to his cat form. Struggling to move, he dragged himself toward the mouth of the alley.
Kittul spun to face the mangy little queen, only to find the other Neko crawling toward her, belly scraping along the ground. The strange peace filled her once more, and she watched the little Neko trembling as she moved forward inch by painful inch, never daring to look up. When the tip of one of her upthrust ears brushed Kittul’s shin, Malice froze, her only motion a constant irrepressible tremble.
She was in no mood to deal with this if she even had an idea how. Her voice raspy from adrenaline, she spoke, “What do you want? Malice, was it?”
Malice snuck a look up at her through the corner of one eye, barely raising her head. When she spoke, her came out as a breathy whisper. Had Kittul not been in Neko form, she would never have heard it. “Are you going to kill me?”
Kittul snorted in disgust. “Not at the moment. I…” She broke off when she heard the quiet sound of a human footfall on the sidewalk outside the alley. Less quiet, but menacingly distinctive, the sound of a shotgun shell being pumped into the firing chamber sent a shiver of barely suppressed fear through her. She grabbed at the smaller cat, her words a harsh whisper. “We have to go!”
Malice tried to stand, but her body gave out. She collapsed to the pavement at Kittul’s feet, her body quaking with the effort of breathing. The footsteps got louder, so Kittul scooped the little queen into her arms and leapt for the roof above the dumpster. On landing, she covered the other girl’s body with her own to keep her from making too much noise.
A voice wheedled in the alley below, “C’mere, kitty, kitty, kitty. I got something for you.”
Kittul shivered at the suppressed rage in that voice, and Malice writhed against her. Acting on instinct, Kittul nipped at the nape of the little queen’s neck, pulling the skin taut. Malice went limp, but Kittul heard a tiny whining purr thrilling through the body beneath her.
The roar of a shotgun sounded from the alley, followed by a feline cry of pain. Paws and claws scrambled for the mouth of the alley. The shotgun’s slide worked, thunder rolled again, and the yowl and scrambling cut off with a sickening finality. The quavering voice below cackled, calling down curses on the remains of the cat he’d killed. Kittul and Malice lay frozen until the sound of footsteps faded away.
Moving with exaggerated care, attention focused on avoiding even a single betraying noise, Kittul crept to the side of the roof. The squalor in the alley below masked the violence of the past few minutes imperfectly. As she watched, a single brick succumbed to the endless rain and fell from the facing to lie in a pile of its fellows. Her keen eyes picked out a thin trail of still-warm blood leading away from the pile. A few yards away the trail thickened, and another yard on it ended in a welter of gore. Kittul picked out a paw, a bit of hindquarter, and a tail, but that was all that remained of the big tom.
She turned to tell Malice. Confusion filled her when she saw the little queen. When Kittul realized why the girl was on her knees, face pressed to the filthy tar of the roof, tail lifted to lay nearly flat on her back, she spun about once more, retching over the side of the roof. Innocent flecks of tuna splattered across the lid of the dumpster. Eventually the strange peace won out over the heaving in her gut, and she turned to face Malice once more.
The girl knelt shivering and naked on the wet tar of the roof. She crouched so low the tips of her silvery blonde hair dipped into the muck on the roof. Her pale amber eyes fixed on a spot near Kittul's feet. She spoke, her voice so soft Kittul had to strain to hear her.
"Please. My name isn't Malice. He called me that. My name is Allison. My parents called me Alice, before…"
The little girl broke down for a moment, sniffling. Kittul looked at the little girl again. In the fight in the alley, she'd had no chance to do more than glance at her. Now, with more time, she judged the girl's age as somewhere in her early teens. Starvation and abuse had aged her prematurely, but the corners of her eyes remained smooth. She looked up and met Kittul's gaze squarely, defiance nearly submerged under the despair in her gaze.
"I wanted someone to know my name. To say my name, before…" She broke off again, her eyes sliding shut. Her back straightened, and she turned her head away. "Please. Make it quick."
There was no more room for horror in Kittul. She reached out one hand, claws sheathed. "Alice." The moment Kittul spoke the girl's name, she flinched, but forced herself to bare her throat once more a fraction of a second later. Kittul ran a hand over the girl's brow. She was soaked and freezing, but she wasn't shivering. That was a bad sign.
"I'm not going to kill you, Alice."
Alice’s eyes slid open, her pupils dilated in the dim lighting on the roof. She spoke again, her voice breathy, sliding in and out of audibility. “You’re not? That’s nice.”
She collapsed, boneless, onto the cold tar. Kittul checked her pulse; so weak she couldn’t hear it unless she pressed her ear to Alice’s chest. The old man with the shotgun wasn’t likely to let them in his building. She had to get Alice somewhere warm and get some food in her. Her treacherous mind threw up an image of Zed, but she quashed it ruthlessly. She wasn’t going to be anyone’s slave ever again.
She picked Alice up, cuddled her close, and carried her to the front edge of the building. Across the street she saw an all-night supermarket. Kittul could try to steal some food there if she had clothes. Walking in naked was a sure way to get attention, and Alice couldn’t wait for food. She scanned the parking lot until she found what she was looking for.
Kittul backed to the far edge of the roof, ran, and leapt from the edge of the roof. She landed across the street in the shadow of the charity clothes collection container, a huge metal box with a big deposit tray on one side. Getting out might be tough. Kittul sniffed at it, and the scent of food, some of it going bad, made her decision. She shifted to human, lifted Alice into the deposit tray, snuggled in next to her, and dropped them both into the dark confines of the box.
Musty old clothes cushioned their fall. The darkness inside the box was near complete, and Kittul could barely see to arrange a nest for the little girl. Alice had stopped shivering, and her heartbeat started to falter. Kittul sniffed around the box, seeking the source of the sweet, slightly sour milky smell she’d picked up from outside the donation box. A few moments spent searching found the remains of a fast-food meal someone had dropped in earlier in the night. A sip on the straw showed it was the melted, slightly off remains of a strawberry milkshake.
Kittul crawled back to the smaller girl, food and shake in hand. She shifted back to her human form as she did so. She would lose heat faster, but the other girl needed that warmth. When she burrowed into the tiny fabric nest, Alice's chest barely moved. Kittul tried to figure out a way to pour some milkshake into the other girl's mouth, but in the tight confines of the nest she couldn't find a way. Instead, she took a sip into her mouth, wormed her way over the smaller girl and pressed their lips together.
She had to force the other girl's lips open with her tongue, but the moment the sugary milk hit Alice's tongue, she sucked the rest of the sip from Kittul's mouth into her own.
Relieved at the response, Kittul pushed her down, forcing the fast-food cup between them, overpowering the little girl and making her take the straw in her mouth. An eye blink later, Alice sucked at the cup with ferocious intensity. While she did, Kittul made short work of a few of the fries and half of the chicken nuggets. As she swallowed the last bite, the cup ripped open. Alice licked out the inside of the cup. Given enough calories to do so, her Shifter nature healed her quickly.
Kittul kept her voice soft, "Do you think you can stomach a little food, Alice?"
The little girl blinked up at her. Her mouth worked, frowning as she forced words through an abused throat. “I hate that name.”
Kittul snorted her frustration, “Look, it would help if you’d just pick a name, girl.”
If Kittul’s annoyance affected the little girl at all, it didn’t show. “Allie. I’ve always liked Allie.”
“Ok, Allie. Do you think you can stomach some food?”
“A little.”
Kittul handed Allie a handful of fries and the last remaining chicken. While the little girl gnawed on them, Kittul left the nest and rummaged through the bin looking for shirts and pants. She found two reasonably clean shirts, a pair of short shorts and a child’s skirt. It wasn’t much, but it would keep them from being arrested if Allie couldn’t shift before they left.
Dragging her finds into the nest, she found Allie curled around the mostly empty fry container, asleep. Kittul folded the clothing into a bundle that could be carried by a cat’s jaws. Not easily, but it would be better than nothing. That done, she snuggled around her wayward kitten and fell into a deep, dreamless sleep.