Judy scrambled back into the cruiser. Nick hadn't even closed his door before the tires squealed. "Get on my phone!" she barked, her handpaws glued to the wheel and her eyes to the road. "Call the Chief, put me on speaker!"

From the corner of her eye she could see Nick scrabbling over the touchscreen. The sound of electronic ringing filled the car. Then a click. "Yes?"

"Bogo, go to City hall right now, and place Hoofer and Bellwether under arrest!"

He paused. "What's going on?"

"I scoped out Happytown. It's not a neighborhood, they are going to murder every predator in the city! Take the entire ZPD if you need, and arrest Bellwether and Hoofer! Put up roadblocks, and shut down the railway. No no, physically barricade the rails! No one leaves Zootopia!"

"...Hopps, you better be absolutely positive about this—"

"I swear to God, if you do not believe me, people are going to die!"

Another pause..."Alright," then his voice suddenly sounded far away, "All officers! Code Ninety-Nine, Code Ninety—" A click as he hung up the phone.

"That's state of emergency," Judy breathed. "Thank God he's taking this seriously. Okay, now call Mr. Big."

Again the ringtone. Then a squeaky voice, "Judy, my child, what did you—"

"They're gonna kill everyone," she repeated. "I need you to make sure no predators leave Glacier Falls! Tell Travis to rally people together. Tell Pierce and Lucas I'm gonna meet them at their apartment. And whatever you do, do not let ANYONE leave, or SPEC is going to kill them! "

She could practically hear his eyebrows raising up to reveal his eyes. "I… I will do so. Thank you." Then another click.

Nick put her phone back into the cupholder. Then he let out a sigh. "You know those really boring parts of history class, where they skim over forty or fifty years because nothing really big happens?"

"Yeah?"

Nick shook his head, looking out the window. "I wish I lived in one of those times," he pined.

Compared with their warm exchange leaving the city, the car felt tense and close as they returned. At least it did for Judy; it may have just been her rising pulse, her eyes glued to the road and blissfully unaware of the climbing speedometer. She merged onto the main highway, and got a horn blared at her. In response she turned on her sirens, and rocketed towards town.

As they passed over the bridge, she saw cruisers pulling up on the other side, turning their cars to block traffic. Judy's heart hammered still as she blared up through the city center, past City Hall — ZPD surrounding the building — and bypassed Sahara Square entirely as she veered right for Tundratown.

In fact, she didn't say another word until she got to Glacier Falls. She pulled up to the main gate, and a SPEC officer came up to the vehicle. "Hopps, Hoofer said he wanted to—"

"Shut it. You're under arrest."

The ram's brow rose. "Hold on, you don't have the right to—"

Judy grabbed the front of his shirt and pulled him down to look him in the eye, over-articulating every word in a low voice: "I have read the entire manual, front-to-back, three times over. You do not wanna argue me on what I can and cannot do."

He nodded breathlessly. "O-o-okay…" He didn't resist as Judy cuffed and left him in the booth. Then she motioned for Nick to follow.

"Lucas! Pierce!" Judy dashed through the streets, yelling out at as she neared their place. "Lucas! Pierce!" She hurtled into the lobby, up the stairs. Their door was open. "Guys, did Big tell—"

Her stomach flipped.

A great bloodstain had smeared across the floor; from the darkened color, Judy could tell it had formed several hours ago. Looking again at the front door, she saw the splintered jamb, and a hole in the wall in the hallway. The glass in the kitchenette had shattered from a gunshot.

"Oh geez," Nick looked around with his ears flattened. "Did SPEC arrest them?"

"I'm not sure," Judy knelt at the edge of the stain, her stomach churning. She pressed her wrist to her nose to stifle the smell. Through her squinted eyes, she caught a shape in the tile. "Hey, look…"

A paw had printed the floor in dark crimson. Nick peered at it, his brow raising. "That's not a wolf print…"

"Just what I was thinking. In fact, I think it looks like…"

"...a cheetah?"

"Mhm," Judy nodded, her face turning stony. "And I'm willing to bet it's a cheetah we're familiar with." She looked at Nick. "They came for Lucas and Pierce. We have to go, now."

Nick bit his lip. "I think I'd rather deal with SPEC…"


Judy and Nick stepped up to the same old dilapidated shack from the other night. The morning light made it feel alive, but instead of a comfortable organic sensation, it was a breathing threat. Judy heard hushed voices inside, excited whispers, papers rustling and heavy thudding.

"Nick," she whispered as softly under her breath as possible. "They are in the back room. Front room should be empty."

He gave her a thumbs up as she stepped onto the porch. One handpaw pulled the pistol from her belt, the other paw turned the doorknob and opened the door.

Judy was wrong. The front room had a body lying on the table. It was covered with a white tarp, with red stains in the middle. It also had a lupine shape.

'Oh my god,' Judy just barely kept the words from escaping her mouth. She turned instead to the next door, where she stepped closer. Unfamiliar voices...

"—into the plant, should be easy enough."

"Yeah, once the truck gets here… when is it due again?"

"Any minute," Judy's heart leapt at the voice, "driver said they were fifteen minutes out..."

She burst open the door and pointed her pistol around, even though her eyes snapped first to the wolf. "Lucas, what are you doing here?!"

Judy recognized the cheetah and two tigers. She also recognized the fox, far fluffier than Nick, and with his mouse still in one handpaw, his thumb stroking it even as Judy jumped into the room. And yes, there was Lucas, looking like a teenager who'd been caught out after hours: petulant, yet still defiant.

"Hopps," the cheetah paced over. Judy pointed her gun up at him, even though she only came up to his knee. "You're turning into a regular party crasher."

"Shut it." She turned her head and saw Nick coming in behind her, wielding a slab of rotten wood he'd picked up. "Lucas," Judy locked eyes with the wolf, "on the table… is that—"

"Pierce Cannisson?" The fox spoke up, coming forward. He spoke with a drawl that made him sound both educated and incredibly condescending. He kept his head upright and still as he walked, and the mouse in his paw quivered. "Yes, that's Pierce outside. We would give him a proper burial," his amber eyes glinted, "but your kind have denied us access to a graveyard."

Judy gave the fox an ugly side glance before looking up at Pierce again. "What happened when I was gone? What happened to Pierce?"

"You mean you don't know?" Again the fox interrupted before Lucas could respond. "Here I thought you were part of SPEC! If you're a double agent like you claim to be, you would have known that they were coming to arrest them. Why didn't you tell us Judy?"

"I said 'shut it!'" Judy barked at the fox, shoving her gun in his face. His smirk set her off-kilter though, in combination with his comment. "How did you know I was a double agent?"

"Oh, Lucas told us," the fox slowly padded over and gave Lucas a comforting stroke along his arm. "He told us all about how you didn't want to help predators, how you wanted to wait when you got your little lovebug back," he smirked at Nick. "He told us so many things… like how a special little plant is being used."

"Then you know about the Night Howlers!" Judy tried to take charge of the conversation again. The predators around her seemed to be drawing closer. "Look, Lucas is close to getting a cure! If we can stop Bellwether's plan—"

"We?!"

The fox threw back his head and laughed, revealing that three of his fangs had been replaced with brass. The others joined him: bears, cats, canids, weasels, with laughs ranging from genuine to weak chuckles that got forced into fake laughs. His little mouse pet cringed at the cacophony of malicious laughter.

"Now," the fox chuckled, "you talk about a 'we'? Oh no," he shook his head, "no no no, Lucas told us all exactly how you feel about us. And may I just say the feeling is mutual. No prey allowed. Kind of our point here."

Judy fumed, and racked her brain. "Okay, listen: Bellwether is getting arrested. Hoofer is getting arrested. It's a lot faster than I wanted to move, but this whole nightmare is gonna end. Justice will be served."

The fox huffed, his smirk only strengthening. "Trust a rabbit, holding a gun to a fox's chest, to speak about justice… oh no, a new mayor isn't going to fix anything, and you're an idiot to think it would. We have matters in our own paws."

He began to walk around to the far side of the room, lecturing like a professor to a student. That's when Judy finally opened her tunnel vision and really saw the layout of the whole place. A desk sat covered in papers, and a map of the city hung on the wall. Marker lines and scribbles scrawled across the surface, with sticky notes decorating it.

"Lucas called in a special order for us this morning. The supply of Midnicampum holicithias, that he was using for the antidote? Should be delivered here any minute now, isn't that right?"

Lucas nodded. Judy felt her spine prickle. She had a bad feeling about where this was going…

"You want to know the greatest mistake in mammalian history?" The fox asked with half-lidded eyes. "It was predators ever accepting prey as equals. Ever treating them as equals. About as preposterous as giving constitutional protections to plants. For centuries philosophers bent over backwards to explain their reasoning: why are predator and prey equal? The simplest answer was correct all along: we aren't."

He turned around in front of the map, eyes glinting at Judy as he seemed to swell:

"This is what the Golden Claw believes and what it fights for: the truth that peace with prey can never be achieved. That predators deserve to take the station that nature intended! That to turn our backs on our gifts is to deny our very being!"

Then he swept out his arm, pointing up at the map.

"Today we will go to the historic watering hole, to make history again. We will poison the city's water supply with the Midnicampum holicithias toxin. We will cut off Glacier Falls, then watch as every prey mammal tears their precious city apart. And those that survive, mindless hordes, mindless flocks… just the resources needed to help predators build the world they deserve."

Nick finally spoke up with a very slow, "What the fu—"

"Forget it!" Judy snapped back, her pistol shivering in her grip. "That's… that's crazy talk! You couldn't possibly have enough to poison the entire city!"

"Oh, but Lucas has assured us," he held out a hand, making the wolf stiffen, "that there will be plenty. In fact, with the diluted compound, it'll make the prey less violent. All the better to harness and to catch, wouldn't you say?"

Her voice shook as she tried again to address Lucas. "Lucas, please, you cannot actually believe in this…"

This time the fox didn't butt in. He leaned back and looked up at the wolf. Lucas glanced from the leader to Judy, to Nick, to the cheetah, then off in the corner. He clasped his hands behind his back. "Judy… I'm sorry, but predators will just keep getting hurt by prey. I can't support a system where we keep getting shoved down like this…"

"Don't feel bad Lucas," the fox now cut off Judy. "So many predators think they can coexist with prey. It's a tragedy most of them never wake from their delusion. But at the Golden Claw, we're nothing if not understanding and compassionate and patient."

"Alright, that's enough." Nick stepped forward in front of Judy. "Buddy, I'm a professional con man, so I know when I see one. So let me ask you, what's going to happen in this new world of yours? Who's going to be in charge?"

"Predators," he answered with a smile.

"Yeah, but who among the predators? There gonna be a king, a chief…?"

"All predators will rule together," he assured Nick. "Of course, we in the Golden Claw will help to guide everyone towards that ideal—"

"And there," Nick pointed his finger, "is your fine print. Your terms and conditions. Lucas, I throw my lot behind Judy's 'crazy talk' theory. If you're as smart as you claim, you'll do the same thing. Oh, and by the way," he glared at the leader, "I am not Judy's lovebug."

"Hm, yes, Lucas, please decide," the fox took his mouse in his grasp and began to wave it around. "The rabbit who stood by while predators were murdered, or the mammals who are going to do something about it?"

The wolf glanced back and forth. He could send the trucks away when they came, Judy knew. He could explain it as a mistake. They could salvage the situation, he just needed to make the right call—

"And," the fox spoke up again, "if I may sweeten the deal… why don't we stop by City Hall on our way to the plant? You won't have to worry about broken promises, if you get to see Bellwether and Hoofer destroyed right in front of you. Surely Pierce would want you to—"

"Don't speak for my brother," Lucas snapped. The fox bowed away apologetically as the wolf seemed to visibly struggle. He lifted his paw to his muzzle, and nibbled on a finger.

Bit by bit, he began to step towards Judy and Nick.

The cheetah stood up, offended. "Hey, Lucas, what do you—" The fox lifted his handpaw though, silencing him.

Lucas looked down at the rabbit. "Judy… I…"

She breathed a sigh of relief. "Lucas, thank God, I thought—"

"Get out of here."

Her blood froze. "What?"

"Please. You… you got us this far. I don't want you to get hurt. Get out of Zootopia, save yourself, save your family." He closed his eyes. "Please take this as my 'thank you' for what you did do for me."

"Save myself?" Judy grabbed his leg to keep him from walking away. "Lucas, you think they're gonna stop with Zootopia? You help them get this foothold, they're going to move on. They will come to Bunnyburrow. There will be no safe place."

Lucas glared down at her before turning away. He shook his leg, releasing her grip on his pants leg.

"Thank you, Lucas," the fox grinned. "I knew that you were smart, unlike a certain fox," he glared at Nick.

Suddenly Judy let out a ferocious scream. She pulled out her pistol as she stalked towards the fox. "Get down on the ground now!"

The fox considered it for a moment. "Nah, don't feel like it."

"I will shoot you, I swear!"

"Oh, please. Please shoot me." The fox strolled towards her, like she was flirting with him instead of brandishing a firearm. "Heck, let me help you, poor little bunbuns must have twouble with the big scawy guns…"

He leaned down and put the barrel right on the front of his sloped forehead. Judy watched in horror as his amber eyes sparked, bordering on madness.

"Go ahead. Do it. Blow my brains out, show us how the city's finest police officer treats people! Show us your moral superiority! Show us how much better you are than Bellwether! Go on, we're all waiting! Do it!"

Judy felt her fingers tremble on her gun. She closed her eyes… and lowered the weapon.

The fox put on a smug pout, and crossed his arms as he shook his head. "Weak…" he growled.

A truck's horn sounded far in the distance.

"I believe that's our delivery," the fox pointed as he straightened up again. "Lucas, if you could take care of that? I'll wrap things up here…"

He snapped his fingers. The cheetah and tigers suddenly came forward. Judy tried to jump back, and managed to deliver a blow to the cheetah's face. As she tried to bounce at the others though, she felt a huge paw grab her torso. She writhed and bit at the nearest patch of fur. With a yell she got released, but only for another predator to pick her up. Judy yelled and squirmed.

A blow to the head.

Her eyes went wide. Everything seemed to slow, then fade, then silence.