(Copyright Act Admissions/Lanham Act Disclaimers. This piece infringes copyrights owned by Sega and DiC. It is not a product of Sega, DiC, or Archie Comics. All available rights are reserved.)

Terscala, 2 Floreal 3230

Terscala was a city with no business being where it was. Cities in the eastern deserts should cling to the little trickles down the western face of the coastal mountains, then track the seasonal rivers, hunting for water like a repen sniffing out hood-ears in their little tunnels. And the older cities did, even though it had meant the bloody work of muscling out the wolfpacks. Over the past few hundred years, other considerations arose. Fennec Settlement grew because you couldn't bring the coal seams and ore deposits to the workers. But Terscala had nothing but trains and highways as warrant that this dusty, godsforsaken salt flat should sink steel roots to deep into the rock strata below, into rivers tens of kilometers away, sprout stems of steel and leaves of flesh packed into loud suits and insufficiently knotted ties.

But here it was, Mobius's link between wealthy swampland and its dirt-poor, rock-rich east. From the lobby of Kogen Baird GmbH, on the upper floors of the black DES Tower, you could see the city sloping quickly away from the financial district to some condo towers, out to dusty tract housing cut in among here-and-there patches of juniper trees and scrub pine. Ironically, it looked almost organic.

A touch of vertigo dissolved as Baxter stepped back from the window. He'd worn one of his normal suits to the city, and the air conditioning was freezing his sweat-soaked undershirt. He sat down on a black leather couch, behind a knee-high glass table lined with two-fold glossies explaining SHP's wonderful accomplishments in the field of publicly reporting and corporate accounting. Checked his phone again for a message from the Captain, but nothing yet.

"Mr. Posniak?" The receptionist, a mouse with chalk fur, pressed her black headset to her ear. "Take the elevators up to thirty-seven."

Deanna Kozinski was waiting for him by a passcoded door, sunbleached blonde hair carefully restrained behind her shoulders, a smile like muscular paralysis. "Come into my office," she said.

Baxter had never liked Deanna, back at Independence University. He considered himself a rather cold man, when you got down to it, but even he could tell there was something wrong with Deanna's brain. That didn't mean she wasn't worthy of respect. She was good at what she did, even if her lot in life was to make corporations appear as wealthy as possible without actually lying about them. She led him past rows of open frosted-glass cube "offices" to what was a wood paneled conference room looking out, as every vantage in the building did, towards stretching ruin.

"I don't have long to talk," she said. "I've got a meeting with Richard Watership at Ellingson Mineral in twenty minutes."

"Fine," Baxter said. "What have you got for me?"

"Next to nothing," she said. "Most of the names you gave us are privately-held, general purpose corporations. No trades since their inception, generally—"

"Is that suspicious?"

"No. Most corporations issue unregistered stock to a single holder or small group of holders and go without any change of ownership until they dissolve. That's these. Not subject to the Disclosure Act, no public filings, no idea what they do. We pulled the Articles of Incorporation on these, they give the names of initial officers and corporate agents under the Mobian Legal Entities Law."

Baxter took a binder-clipped stack from her and thumbed through it while she talked. There were a couple of names he spotted more than once: Dannon Woundwort, Rudiger Sarkstein, Pawel Kinziak. "These shared officers—"

"A little suspicious. We'd know a lot more if you could get Exchequer Ministry to authorize an investigation into—"

"Deanna, I told you, Exchequer can't become involved." He had told her that, and it was true. Baxter had also strongly suggested to her that he was conducting an internal investigation on behalf of the Mobian Internal Security Office. This was not true. His handler in Lachels, Second Assistant Director of Intelligence, Mobian March Frank Pulaski, had given him a pair of bank account routing numbers, with the implicit suggestion that he should investigate them. Why this had to be done by an intelligence analyst on international loan from Lachels to the Mobian Internal Security Office remained a mystery to him, but he'd turned the screws on his friend Josh Dursine at the Lachels Embassy in Robotropolis until he got information from Lachels Treasury Department that gave the identities of some accounts transferring funds internationally, and their owners. Two of the owners, the revealingly named HDX LLC and HDX Corp., were also in public Mobian databases as having government subcontracts with Steiner/Davion Medical (a sub of Steiner/Davion Holdings that operated a string of Hospitals in Robotropolis, Fortune Station and Terscala; one of the few normal, explicable companies involved). Disclosure docs from the contracting process revealed a potpourri of weird entities with fake-sounding names. That pretty much put him at the end of his abilities, and Dursine had bent the rules for him so much that Baxter was disinclined to push him much further.

This left paying people to find out what was going on. He'd been building a small savings, thinking he might not stay in public service long enough to accumulate a pension. Down payment for a condo, maybe. Or, alternatively, paying a major accounting firm to assemble information on all these companies. Pulaski would show appreciation; Baxter hoped he'd also show a little green when this was over. "So what does this mean?" he asked. "These are all dead ends? What if I were to file a lawsuit—"

Deanna lifted another stack, about as thick as the first. "Take a look at this before you go nuts. We've got a year's financials from one of your targets, Whiplash Corp. Back in 3227 the officers tried to incorporate a subsidiary called Whiplash II and issue it stock. That's totally illegal under the Entities Law—can't have two entities owning each other. Corporate Control people at Exchequer insisted on seeing a year's worth of financials to know what the hell was going on."

Baxter skimmed the first page. . . . to profit by strategic investments in foreign businesses and currency, following a proprietary trading model. Opportunities in the nation of Vorburg will be intensely pursued, as the potential for growth . . . . "What's the short of this?" he asked.

"Look, I got to go."

"Deanna." Baxter followed her back through the rows of low-level accountants, almost all humans, foreigners from Lachels, struggling to flip through the sheets on Whiplash. "This is kind of time-sensitive. This stuff about foreign investement—"

"Baxter, I will talk to you later. Do you know who I've got waiting for me here? Richard Watership is the biggest—"

"Deanna! Are we ready to rock?" Watership was rabbit with milk chocolate fur, aging with the synthetic grace of the wealthy workaholic. He had complemented traditional light mobian dress with a blinding white sportcoat. "Who's this, a client?"

Deanna paused, smiling hard enough you could almost hear bones straining. "Richard, this is Baxter Posniak. He's with the government and he's hired us for some light work on an internal investigation. Baxter, this is Richard Watership, head of our accounts with Ellingson Mineral, Marx Heavy Extraction Industries, and Star Circle Energy."

Very popular man with investors, no doubt. Very unpopular man with mining unions, not to mention the wolfpacks. "A pleasure," Baxter announced, shaking the rabbit's hand as he turned to Deanna: "give me the elevator ride."

Pushy clients seemed to amuse Watership. He just smiled as Deanna kowtowed and they all went to the car and got in. "This foreign investment stuff is probably fine," she explained. "It's the currency transfers that raise a red flag for me. It's easy to intentionally develop big losses to the counterparty, if you want, and still have it look reasonably normal."

"Why would they want to lose money?"

"I want to do more work, do you understand me? Anything I tell you now is entirely speculative—"

"Of course."

She sighed. "There's a chance this is embezzlement, lifting money from this medical contract pipeline and stashing it across the border. In a failed state, where there's no chance of recovering it by legal process. Or they could be laundering dirty money out of Vorburg, but it's hard to tell with just a year's worth of financials from one of the shells. Lots of dirty money up there. Guns, drugs, slaves . . . ."

Baxter whistled.

Deanna jabbed at his chest, bringing a giggle from the rabbit. "Or this could all be entirely legal, okay? I don't understand why you can't just go through Exchequer on this."

Baxter wasn't listening, stuck on the part where someone in the Mobian government was funneling money over the border into Vorburg. Deanna thought that Vorburg was an ideal place to stash money because there was no working legal system. But when there is no working legal system because the nation is in a furious civil war, there have to be safer places to park your money.

Parking money in Vorburg would make a lot more sense to Baxter if you were trying to pick a winner in that furious civil war. And if Mobius was looking to buy a winner, there was no question why Pulaski wanted the situation investigated from the inside. Vorburg was historically the only power on the continent tough enough to stand up to Mobius. The current rapprochement between Lachels and Mobius was rooted in two things: Mobius's current weakness, and the inability of either party to form an alliance with Vorburg and gang up on the other. There was no question of Mobius aiding the ruling Fourth Army. The dominant power in the capital contained the heart of the human supremacists that had supported the most ridiculous excesses of the Great War and driven Julian Kinotbor into exile. If Mobius was aiding the communist rebels or the ultranationalists, that would mean a gradual alliance with between Lachels and the Fourth Army, no matter how grotesque the idea was. The Fourth Army would stop providing their satellite communications monopoly on an even basis; Mobius would go dark. It would—

"Deanna," Baxter said, "Kogen Baird does work for multinationals operating in Vorburg, right? I need to get there."

"Baxter!" she cried as the doors slid open on a cold lobby, white marble walls surrounding the elevator banks. "This isn't just some—"

"No," he said definitively, the rabbit giggling as Baxter trotted to keep up with Deanna's powerwalk. "It's too weird trying to get up there by the normal routes. You people have to be experts. Get me over the border." Baxter was thinking: what does Captain Snively Kolensky do all day when he's too busy to do his nominal job? He was also thinking: the longer this investigation takes, the greater chance that a Great War veteran with anger management issues and family ties to Robotnik is going to discover I am abusing my position and violating international law in order to screw his adopted nation to the wall.

His phone buzzed. Without thinking he grabbed and flipped it open.

"FROM: [S. Kolenksy]

"RE: Fuk

"We fuked up coon is useles wher are you"

"—ren't even listening to me!" Deanna was losing composure: strands of hair were hanging over her shoulders, and she had forgotten to hide her ugly desert-noon squint behind her sunglasses. Baxter had followed them out onto the sidewalk, to a little three-cab stand. "We are getting in this cab! You are going back to your hotel! We will talk about this later—"

"Oh, give him another minute," Richard Watership laughed again. "I'll just take this." He pulled a phone from his pocket, playing a poppy little ringtone. He carefully held it at arms length, aimed at the sidewalk well away from his feet, as he unfolded the clamshell and pressed the TALK button. His grin brought his long ears up dead upright as he caught Baxter watching, mystified. "Just in case a moonhowler ever figures out how to build a bomb that's not strapped to his own chest."

Baxter paused, way off balance. Acorn was alive and hunting Molly Lotor. Kolensky was hunting him. ". . . . What?"

"I know, unlikely. But fools rush in." The rabbit held the phone to his head and flopped his right ear over it. "Hello."

Deanna sighed, sliding her compsatchel off her shoulder. "Richard swears that in the war, Mobian spies would put shaped charges in—"

Richard Watership's head exploded.

It gave the vague impression of a Mobian Candle firework: the black phone flashing white-hot, something like a shower of sparks shooting into the rabbit's fur, over it, around it. And then afterwards the rabbit just standing there, right hand suspended in air, the summer suit charred, the head erased at the neck, Deanna beside, her tasteful dress pocked with little black holes from minute red-hot shrapnel, her head and shoulders drenched in blood, bits of brain clinging to the white jelly of her open eyes. What was left of the rabbit slapped wetly to the cement.

Arooooooo!

Eyes following the howls snapped to see the motorcycle speed off through the downtown. The silver antenna on the radio detonator in the wolf's hand flashed in the merciless sun.

The taxi carried many old scents. Foods: the dusty nothingness of bleached-wheat bread, pungent stink of cheese, congealed grease and the turning of cooked meat, cooked and cooked again. In the back seat, Lupe Loborrero Almatrican sat in a more recent memory of fumbling coitus, breathing the fading desires of a pair of young rats. But all scents—the high reedy stink of the fox hireling piloting the car before her, her own low musk of wolf—disappeared beneath ocean-rot that blanketed the city.

The tires squeaked. "We're here, lady."

Reluctantly, she pulled the lever to release the catch upon the door and pushed it open. It were as though the ocean itself were pouring into the car: cold, damp, so full of life and death as to bury her in a mound of clumped algae and twitching silver fish. She stepped out, black bricks squeaking wet beneath her sandals, and breathed it deep. I will not fear this weapon of my enemy.

"Lady, it's fifteen seventy-two."

Reynard's runner had given her things to hide herself among the people of port Corukas: a shirt of thin fabric clutched tight and flimsy around her middle and down to beneath her hips; white gloves enveloped her fingers like the fog that had boiled through the town that morning: wet with sweat, clumsy and fumbling inside her leather bag. Finally she bit the tip of one of its fingers and dragged it off, then counted precisely the coin, fifteen sovereigns and seventy-two pence, and put it into the red fox's waiting hand. He poked at the pile, sniffed at it, and looked at her with contempt. Lupe's hackles bunched beneath the shirt, but the hireling lacked courage to give her more than an angry face. He worked the machine and it sped into the maze of the black city, leaving her alone on a narrow street of cold, shrunken brick and blank doors of hard, dark wood, scented of salt.

No. Lupe sniffed. Not alone. "One will grow fat," she announced, "breathing the fullness of this air."

Reynard emerged from the doorway in which he had concealed himself from her with disturbing ease. His costume remained similar to that he wore in Fennec Settlement, but he had slung a long cloth over the shoulders of his leather jacket, and he too wore gloves—though with the fingertips cut away, Lupe noted, an admirable invention. "Alpha," he said, folding his ears and fearfully lowering his snout before his eyes snapped up to her, sharp and alert. "I agree. A land very rich in food."

"That is not what I meant," Lupe snapped. She drew off her other glove. "The hireling showed fight to me and fled. I have made an enemy, though I do not know how."

"You're supposed to give them more money than they ask for," Reynard explained. "Much more, or very little more, depending upon how impressed you are with their service."

"And he cannot be bothered to ask for this pay?"

Reynard snorted, running his fingers over his grin. "Citizens of Acorn tend to avoid confrontation." A sniff, and his grin disappeared. "But not you, Alpha. Our people are in here."

She followed him down the narrow street to an even more narrow street, barely an alley filled with the scents of urine and ancient food and wet. The walls pressed her close enough to him that she could see the discoloration and swell beneath the fur behind his right ear: "You have fought."

"The soldiers of the Acorn King's former army. It used to be that if it didn't belong to Robotnik in this city, it belonged to them. Our ally wants what they have, and is taking it with our aid."

Lupe listened carefully for a note of dissent in his voice. They did not see the same value in an alliance with the rebel crime chief Griffith Varitek. More than a year ago she and the entire pack were bitterly insulted by one of the goat's underlings in the desert, after the same underling's incompetence had deprived them of a chance to take the life of the last child of Acorn, her pack's oldest and most bitter enemy, and a fierce warrior belonging to her. While the insult was smoothed over with Varitek's placatory gift of ammunition and plastic explosive, it had left Lupe and Reynard on poor terms. She liked a beta that questioned her decisions, but not one that could not truly accept them once her mind was made. There were many muted growls and dampened hackles, a hurt like a swelling boil, filled with foulness. Lupe had lanced it. One day he gave to her more of his poisoned words, clever and ironic and slinking and bitter, like a dog, and she turned on him. Once she began Reynard fought truly, with his all. But to whatever virtue and shame it brought him, he had never openly challenged her rule. So she stopped, bleeding and covered with bruises, when his left arm was broken and bent behind his back. She formally forgave his disloyalty, putting her teeth to his throat to feel the soft whines in his windpipe.

She wondered now whether Reynard's bones had healed as well as his messengers had promised her. "You have fought poorly?"

He stopped a moment beside an unlighted door, painted to be as black as the brick around it, unmarked and narrow. "The King's Soldiers are starving without their work at the docks. They know we are with the goat. Their leader, a ram called Ari, declares that no wolf is welcome in the city without police to protect it. They are not good fighters, but they are strong, and some are fierce." He snorted, breathing salt and rot: "And this sea makes it difficult to detect ambush."

That was . . . acceptable, Lupe thought. Your wolves grow fearful and weak, her thoughts replied, but this was wrong: in their home they were without equals. This alliance with the goat was a bold move, but would let them finally take back their stolen cities, free their siblings laboring beneath the earth.

You'd better hope it does, then.

The thought could have come from the mouth of her cowed beta, but it was her own. Lupe felt queasy. She nodded at the door. "This place does not belong to the goat?"

Reynard shook his head. "Not to Ari Koren, either. It was tough to find."

They went into the blackness. Every structure in old Corukas had been many things. This had been, most recently, a dry cleaner's, and even stripped to the cement the walls still gave the nose a cruel sting. But she breathed deep anyway, the deep and comforting scent of her pack. (Faint scent of dried blood, of odd clothes, but: the scent of her pack.) They were in audience in a black room that had once held clothing in bags, silhouetted along the walls, leaning and sitting. As she entered heads lowered; she heard whines.

"Richard Watership is dead," she announced. "With our ally's tools we have ripped the life from him on the street before his own house, in the eyes of all. All will know that this is the fate of any who steal the land of the wolves! Death on the street! Death before friends! Death in their own house! None of our enemies will go unpunished!"

No howl. The silence was cool, undisturbed. The pack's victory was not real to them, and she understood this, having only learned of it through a telephone; it was displeasing that their enemy should die while so many of her pack played this unpleasant part across the continent, aiding the ally whose clever bomb had let them take their victory.

"So," she continued, "good news from our home. What is the news of here?"

"Miguel is hurt," someone answered.

Miguel was a pup of twelve years—not one of Lupe's own. Twelve years ago the pack, all packs had been five times decimated by the confused and brutal fighting that swept their lands; one week striking at the underbelly of the Acorns and their war machines, the next bathing one's knife in the strange scent of human blood. With so little numbers her father had given all permission to mate as they would; a time both good and bad.

Lupe sniffed Miguel out and froze. She laid a hand on his face, ran her fingers down limbs that shivered. He was not hurt: no bones broken, no flesh missing. But he . . . every part of his body was soft and tender. She grasped in an instant that something was terribly wrong.

Miguel had not been in a fight. Miguel had been punished. None but she could inflict such an indignity on one of her pack and live.

But what if it was the goat, hmm?

". . . How did this happen?" Lupe asked. None answered. She squeezed the pup's shoulder. "Tell your Alpha who has done this."

"The weasel." His voice was quiet, musty and damp like the air. "I was to guard him from the Acorn soldiers; he is one of our new friends. He had some of the flower. He sold it to people, on the street." The pup bit back a whine, but it wove its way into his words. "I was angry. I struck him and bit him."

The flower, the podscaya bloom, the blessing of the desert. It was sacred. Sometimes, yes, some young one would use it without cause, and usually shiver and scream for a night against unpleasant sights as a result. And perhaps some other pack was degenerate enough for a young male to sell the bloom in Kingsford.

But not the Loborrero pack. "Did you give them the flower?" Lupe asked. Miguel whined, shivered his head no. He spoke the truth. Lupe stood: "Who sold them the flower?"

"When will we repay our new friends?"

Lupe got angry. If she did not, that would have to be answered. "This is a betrayal of my ancestors and my father and I will not let such disobedience persist!"

"But you will let them hurt Miguel."

The speaker was another young male, Jorge. Not a pup, barely, fifteen summers, the child of Miguel (the elder) and Adelia. "I will repay all when the time for repayment has come. Before I will strike against our enemies, I must rule my own pack."

"It is not your pack."

"You're too young to know what you're talking about," Reynard said, quickly, "This is a hard time for all of us, and—"

"He knows what he speaks," Lupe said, her voice placid, hard.

"You are not fit to lead me. You are not fit to lead any of us!" He stepped forward from the rest, amid muttered entreaties and warnings, the rough calluses of his bare feet scratching on the cement. "This pack is mine! My pack will not sell itself like a street bitch!"

Behind her, Lupe heard Reynard step back, leaving her and Jorge alone in the pack's midst. "I will kill you, Jorge. Offer me your throat and sit."

"You will die like the dog you are!"

Lupe leapt on Jorge, with no concern for his age or his parentage or for anything but that she was not a dog. He foolishly plowed his shoulder into her left breast, bruising deep, wrapping his arms about her trunk to press harder. Perhaps he thought this was the best way to fight against her weight; he had little experience fighting with a wolf of her size. She took the blow and with it the poor fool's head, her momentum forcing him to bend. He chose to bend at his knees. She accepted, forcing him to the floor, feeling his thighs shiver with the strain. Fingers raked and tore through the flimsy fabric over her back, ripped at her fur. That was all they could do. Lupe winched her left arm tighter around the upstart's neck, pressed her right between his ears, squeezing him tight against her breast like the pup he was, squeezing the thought out of him—

The male's teeth sank into the soft flesh of her breast.

Dogs, Lupe's father had explained to her as a pup, stop fighting when they feel pain. He was beating her with his open hand. They were camped in the hard lands, licking wounds from an attack on an Acorn convoy. She had been playfighting with Reynard, the pup of Luis and Fidelia, and had lost. What do Almatricans do when they feel pain?

Arms tighter about the head as she pulled it from the floor, bending Jorge at his hips again, resting her weight suddenly on his legs. The right one snapped first, above the knee, and the teeth released her. Good dog, Lupe thought as his agonized yelp filled the darkness. She took her right arm from the top of his head and slid it beneath his neck and up, pulling his wet snout from the welling blood in her chest. His shoulder was bared to her and she bent and bit into the taste of copper, the taut snap of the pup's clavicle against her jaw, the scream against her ear.

She released her bite and threw the head away, hearing the pup's skull knock against the hard floor. The stink of his urine was strong by her side, soaking the heavy cloth pants the Corukans favored. There was no sound but Jorge's terrified, shivering whines. No one spoke or moved.

Lupe rolled to her hands and knees, licking a bit of blood before it could fall from her teeth. She crawled to his head, putting her right hand into the growing pool of blood by his right shoulder. The whining paused a moment too long and Lupe drew her head back as the pup's teeth clacked by her ear; her left hand grabbed tight hold on his snout and pried it back, spreading the fur of his soft throat.

Her teeth found their way through the thick hairs, till they touched lightly against the soft pulse of the pup's life. The flesh between her jaws swelled to let a whine of terror through to his snout. She pressed harder and felt the lifepulse grow strong and desperate.

She sighed, breath hot in his fur.

The pup lay whining as she stood beside him, wiping her snoutfur against her barefurred arm. "Care for our packmate," she ordered. "Set his bones and bind his cuts."

After a minute or two Reynard walked softly after Lupe. She was in the alleyway, right by the door. She didn't know where else to go, lost in this city. Her shirt lay in shreds on the ground and she lapped at the wounds in her breast, squeezing the flesh to bleed them out and clean them.

"You forgave an open challenge," he said.

Lupe licked her teeth, tasting her own blood. She looked exhausted, far more so than a brief fight to the death would have left her. "He is young. The situation is . . . it's strange. Little makes sense here."

"The pack bends its will to Griff Varitek's scum and you forgive your mortal enemies." He folded his ears: "My Alpha, if you want to test any other innovations from the people of Acorn, I am here to listen and speak."

". . . . We are not a people who slink in barrens and salt." The thoughts had tortured her since she was ten years old, since a roil and confusion unlike, so the pack said, anything that had beset the deserts in generations, had come and gone and left her father dead and her people no better off. And no anger among the other free packs, just a sadness that the ten years of fury and blood were departing. Another chance for battle had gone. "We have grown too accustomed to our defeat. We pick every little triumph to the bones until we forget we ever lived along the rivers. Our wrong becomes nothing but an excuse to fight. Until we love nothing but the fighting. And there is nothing but the fighting."

Reynard nodded. "Agreed, Alpha."

"But my packmates will not become this goat's . . . ." Her snout wrinkled against a sudden gust of fish rot from the wharf. "His creatures."

Reynard closed his eyes, thinking. "There are other powers to ally with, Alpha."

She snorted bitterly. "Any that I should like more than Griffith Varitek and his many good friends?"

He rubbed his whiskers. ". . . If I were Alpha, Lupe, I would speak with one that you should like much less."

Cat wrinkled his nose as he came into the dark bar, bare-chested in the warm evening. The heavy scent of beer clung to the air, dug into his brain, tugged at the lynx's memories. Smell that? Smell that? Remember how you treated her?

He still didn't like to think about it. Even though he guessed they were even, now, pretty much—

"Myron!" The badger was still working the bar, a few streaks of gray in the muzzle the only signs that years had passed. The bar was like some sort of alcohol-fueled stasis chamber. "Gods, man, I thought you were dead!"

"Close enough," he replied. He'd been so worried that he'd forget which van he was supposed to be in, get left behind. If he'd been in the right one, he'd be in pieces on the parking lot. Over the bar a silent TV was on a satellite feed from Kimex News. Graphic behind the leopard anchor of what he by now recognized as a Poiccard Imperator light submachinegun. LAB FIGHT. "Can you give me a minute? I'm looking for someone."

Most of them were bottled in one of Sally's safe-farmhouses. Somewhere deep south, that was all he knew. He'd split from them, quickly named a rendezvous point where they could pick him up later, assuming they hadn't been exposed and all killed. Really, he told himself, you should be scared witless right now. But he was finding he had something that was not quite courage, closer to stupidity, the sort of dry, mild interest that had come over him as he leaned around a van to shoot at police, closing his eye as the windshield shattered above him—I wonder if there's specific ways they train people to use cars as cover. I wonder if they consider use as cover when designing a car. They know cops buy cars, right?

But even if he were pissing himself, he'd still have to get to the bottom of this.

Empty booth. Empty booth. He kept walking. Molly's apartment was no doubt being watched. If she was under guard there she would not speak to him anyway, even if there was some way he could sneak in or commando them all, like Sonic would. It was sick that at this point his best hope was to find her here—

Cat's breath caught in his throat.

—find her here, faceplanted on a sticky laminated wood table, little shotglasses marching around her arms like a chalk outline. Many with the milky-gray of her preferred Chocolate Ringtail Cream, but others with the clear, pure burn of vodka and whiskey. Anything.

The lynx sat down across from her. She didn't stir. Maybe she was asleep. "How long have you been here?" he asked.

"Ole damn day." Her fawn snoutfur stuck to the table, marring what of her words managed to find their way out of her brain. "Skiped work. He said to hide. Caysennything wenn wrong. 'Go somewheres 'Lensky can't find you. I've gotta go on a trip.'"

"Who said?"

"Handler." Her fingers tensed and she lifted herself aching form the table, snout twisted and eyes pinched against the nauseous imbalance of the room, and flopped back on the cushioned seat, a little duct-tape stopping its leaks. "He's beady-eyed fucker. Human. Worries bout me lot, but he still doesn't call. Thinks 'Lensky and youall'll kill me."

"But why did you come here, when you knew I used to drag you down here—" Oh gods. He grabbed his snout and squeezed.

Molly pressed her eyes closed, squeezing water into her mask. "Do it."

"Gods, Molly, I don't—"

"Glad you're okay," she said. "I hoped you'd live, so you could be the one to take care of me."

"Molly, I don't want to—"

"Do it!" she cried, slamming her fists on the table. A shotglass spun on its side, trailing syrupy remains. "I killed her." A sob in her chest. "They couldn't do it in the war and in the coup but I can do it! I'm a good little girl. Police always said so when I was in their damn orphanage."

Cat reached out and grabbed her deep black cheekfur in his fist, pulling her eyes open. "She's alive," he hissed. "Just relax, Molly, because she's alive."

Molly reacted with a moment of dull surprise that slowly sunk into a less piercing, more stupefied despair. "Bad coon," she mumbled. "'Lensky'll be angry."

He couldn't bear it. He needed to get out of here. "Molly," he said, "the roboticizer. It wasn't at Gaumont, was it?"

A bitter laugh. Or maybe a hiccup. "Course not."

"But it's real."

"Handler says 'snot. I know better."

"Molly, where is it? Where do they keep it?"

Before the first sentence was over she was shaking her head against his fist, jerking the roots of her fur with the strength of one who doesn't feel pain. "Dunno. They never tell me nothin. I just do what they tell me and they let me live."

"Good," Cat said. And it was, in part. If she'd known the real target, Cat knew he'd have relayed it to Sally. And if he'd done that, Sally would've known he'd found Molly, whether he told her or not.

And when he thought about Antoine, even he was almost serious about killing Molly.

"It's not good," she said, and her drunken eyes found his. "I'll do anything, Myron. Anything to stay alive."

He released her fur. Her head remained upright, eyes gleaming with horror. "Molly—"

"Thass whaddy taught me," she said, a mad smile baring her toothtips. "I'll do anything to live. 'Slong as I'm alive I'll do worse and worse. You've got to do it. You—"

Cat turned from her ran into the night.

Kain Blackwood - 2008