by Aria Adams
Chapter 12
Hervé
Giving Kitty to Mayda was one of the hardest things I’d had to do in my life. The moment Mayda held Kitty’s leash, I pulled out my tablet and inserted the memory card. I’d hoped for a file with an address, but instead, Mayda had really pulled through. It was a GPS tracking program showing the exact location of Dorèl Shreve.
I watched the dot move down a street. This street. Frowning, I realized Shreve was moving away from the building.
There was only one reason he might have been in this vicinity, and that was to target one of the buildings. Given how many movers and shakers were attending this party, it was likely the resistance had planned an attack on us all. That changed everything.
I turned and pulled the fire alarm. When I looked back, the sudden panic of stampeding people blocked my view. Pushing past people, moving against the tide of escapees, I searched the crowd for Kitty. She had disappeared.
Before I had a chance to look for her, four shadowy men appeared.
“Come with us for safety, sir,” one of them said.
“Kitty’s in there!” I told them.
“Our job is to protect you, sir.” The men had literally no personality or minds of their own. If I didn’t know better, I would guess they were vat-grown automata, the underclass bred to do one job only.
One of them seized my arm. I shook him free, and the second man, when they tried to grab me together, but between the four of them and a tazer, they managed to overpower me and drag my half-conscious body from the building.
Kitty
When the alarm sounded, Mayda dropped my leash and fled. I was left kneeling there, with no instructions, unsure what to do or where to go. Should I wait for my master or leave with everyone else?
“Follow me. I can show you the way out.” Another slave stood nearby. “They’ve forsaken us. It’s part of their stupid bipedal fire safety. ‘Do not stop for personal belongings’. That includes not stopping for us. And slaves have to wait until all the masters have left before they can go.”
This world just got more awful with every passing minute.
“Thank you.” I followed her away from the crowd. A couple of other slaves were wandering aimlessly, so we took them with us, too.
“I’m Najia. Do any of you have a name?” the slave leading the way asked us.
“Slaves have no names,” one of the others replied. “Names are for all the things we can’t do, like making friends, earning credits and being identifiable.”
Najia led us to a service elevator and we were soon hurtling downwards. “Names aren’t given to you by the people who enslaved you. Names are taken, by any slave who chooses one. Masters can refuse to acknowledge our names, but they can’t stop us thinking of ourselves with names.”
Her words made sense. I hadn’t ever really thought of myself as anything other than a kitty, though. Was that my name? My master used it that way.
“Where are we going?” one of the slaves asked. “Will our masters find us?”
“We’re meeting people who will help you.” The elevator stopped and the doors opened beside an exit. Outside, we were in a quiet street. The masters must have emerged on the other side of the building.
“We need to move.” Najia seemed uneasy standing too close to the building we’d been in. She led the way further down the street, and we were still walking when a loud boom was accompanied by a shockwave. It felt like the too-hot air was a giant fist, punching me to the ground. Underneath my body, the street vibrated.
My ears were ringing, and my head felt strange. For a moment, all I could do was lie still and try to breathe. When my body would finally move, I pushed myself up and looked around. The tall building we’d been in was smoking and bits of debris were raining down on the street in front of it.
“Come on. We have to go.” Najia grabbed my arm and pulled me until I started crawling. “Can’t you run?” she asked.
“No. I’m not a biped.”
“You have so much to learn. But not right now.”
We made our way around a corner to where three men were huddled near a vehicle. None of them looked like masters, but they didn’t look like slaves, either. I was very confused.
“Najia. You brought...”
“I brought allies. Slaves that were abandoned by their masters. Someone must have tipped them off because one of the masters pulled the fire alarm and evacuated.”
“Fuck. All that planning for nothing!” one of the males growled. “Get in, all of you, and we’ll explain on the way. You’re being liberated.”
He opened the door of the vehicle and we climbed into the two rows of passenger seats, while the three men got into the front seats. The vehicle began moving and I looked out of the big windows at the city I’d been living in for weeks. It glittered with white lights in the night, as thousands of people went about their lives. Did any of them know what just happened?
Fear gripped my heart and I reached for the door.
“What are you doing?” Najia asked, grabbing my hand to stop me.
“My master! I have to find him!”
“Do you know what happens to wandering slaves whenever a crime is committed in the city?” the man asked.
“No. This is the first time I’ve been out of my master’s training room.”
“Let me fill you in. The enforcers round up as many loose slaves as they can find, they declare them guilty of the crime, and they kill them slowly and painfully while the masters watch.”
His words should have shocked me more, but after what I’d seen this evening, they simply got added to the reasons this city was ridiculous.
“I hate this place. I miss my mama-kitty,” I muttered.
“We want to change things,” the man said.
“We’re part of the resistance,” Najia explained. “Our ultimate goal is to teach the slaves they can overthrow their masters and live freely. Only when there is a revolution of the slaves will the masters stop what they are doing.”
“The workers control the means of production,” the man added.
“What does that mean?” I asked.
“It’s an ancient saying, from Earth, where we all came from before we settled the different planets and changed into different humanoid breeds,” Najia explained. “The saying was from the teachings of Karl Marx. His ideology was the foundation of many revolutions that freed enslaved people on Earth.”
This was all news to me. When master had said we all came from Earth I hadn’t believed him. But there had been slaves there, too? And they had fought until they were free? How had the masters taken control again? I had so many questions.
“When we arrive at our community, in a safehouse, you can see the history books and Karl Marx’s writings for yourself. We believe everyone should be educated.”
“I can’t read,” I mumbled.
“We can teach that, too.” Najia squeezed my hand and smiled encouragingly. “You’re not the first slave who needed to learn. The masters keep us all ignorant of as many things as they can. It’s another way they control the slaves.”
Wow. This was all really heavy stuff, and I felt like the world had suddenly been turned on its head compared to the one I’d been in a few hours ago. But after what I’d seen tonight, I knew the abuse of power by masters had to stop. I just wasn’t sure if this resistance was the answer to it all. I wanted to understand it better before I decided if I agreed with everything they said or not.
Hervé
When the building exploded, something stabbed my chest. I fought the men holding me, using the element of surprise while they stared at the cloud of smoke, and I ran inside. I knew the building was collapsing, far above me, but I had to look for her.
“Kitty! Kitty!” I yelled, kicking open the emergency stairwell. There were some figures further up. I took the stairs three at a time, eyes fixed on the shadowy outlines.
When I reached them, I found one of them was the slave who had won the competition, ear
lier. She was clutching her abdomen and balancing on another slave who was trying to help her down the stairs.
“Is there anyone else behind you?” I asked. The slaves startled at my tone.
“No, master. The others took the back route, or waited upstairs for their masters to return,” one replied.
A cloud of smoke was descending on us, raining little bits of mortar that precipitated the whole building coming down. I couldn’t save Kitty, but I could get these two out.
I threw the uninjured slave over my shoulder and scooped up the injured slave, cradling her in my arms. I leapt back down the two flights of stairs and out of the building.
Enforcers had established a safety zone and were keeping people back. I got across the street and placed the slaves on the ground in time to turn and see the whole building fall into itself, disappearing into an ever-growing cloud of rubble.
There was chaos as some masters and slaves were reunited. Most of the masters waited to see if their slaves had made it out, but some simply left. Hope blossomed in my chest when I saw Mayda.
“Where’s Kitty?” I asked, as I reached her.
She shrugged nonchalantly. “You know the rules. ‘Do not stop to collect personal belongings’. The fire alarm went off and I left.”
“You were holding her leash! Why didn’t you hold onto her?” I demanded.
“I’m sorry. I heard the fire alarm and it worried me. We were very high up and I wanted to get into the elevator as fast as possible.”
I wanted to tear her head from her shoulders. She had put me in an impossible position, where I’d needed to give her my pet so I could get the intel on the resistance that would hopefully destroy them. Now, Kitty was probably dead. No one inside the building could have survived.
My obsession with stamping out every trace of the resistance was burning in my chest. I would find and destroy every last one of them. I would stare into their eyes as the death sentences were handed out in the courts. And I would do it all for Kitty.
I’d known my immediate infatuation with my pet was not normal, but something about her just called to my soul. Bertrand had chosen well. And I’d barely had her long enough to train before she was ripped from me.
The resistance, and especially Dorèl Shreve, were going to be extinguished for this.
Chapter 13
Kitty
We traveled for what seemed like a long time, but eventually the vehicle turned sideways into an underground parking lot before stopping.
“Everybody out,” one of the men said. Najia helped me with the door handle and I climbed down to the concrete floor of the parking lot. Looking around, I saw it was mostly empty.
The men led the way across the lot and down a small corridor. At the end of it, one of them banged on a door.
“Yes?”
“Dorèl Shreve.” The man said nothing else. The door opened and we filed inside. The floor was bare, and so were the walls, as we moved down another long corridor. Dimly, I noticed the sound of the door closing and locking behind us.
The corridor opened out into a room. It was lit with a single yellow luminescent sphere, and there were broken sticks of furniture that looked salvaged from somewhere. A threadbare rug was pinned in place by low, scuffed tables and two couches with ripped upholstery. All in all, the place looked derelict.
“Take a seat, all of you.” One of the men waved a hand welcomingly. I knelt on the floor and goggled when Najia sat on one of the couches.
“There are no masters here,” Najia explained. “Come and sit beside me.”
Hesitantly, I climbed up onto the couch, kneeling on one of the cushions and expecting someone to punish me at any moment. It was strangely squishy under my feet and balancing was more difficult than on the floor.
“All of you are welcome to use any part of our safehouse. Now for the introductions. I’m Dorèl, leader of the resistance. This is Najia, who helped you get out.” She gave a little wave as Dorèl pointed to the other two men who had come with us. Their hoods were down, now, and I saw one of them was a wolf-man while the other was a llama-man. “Canem,” Dorèl said, pointing to the wolf-man. “And Lloyd.” The llama-man waved. “The first thing to do is to pick your own names. Anything you like.”
“Tasha,” one of the slaves said.
“Well met, Tasha.”
“Greta,” the other girl said. I felt stupid that I couldn’t immediately think of a name and my mind began to worry as everyone’s attention turned to me.
“And what’s your name going to be?” Dorèl asked.
I didn’t know. I’d never felt like anything other than a kitty.
“Kitty?” I asked, scared they were going to laugh and tell me that wasn’t a proper name.
“Kitty is your subspecies. Don’t you want a name that identifies you, separate to all the other kitties?” Najia asked gently.
“How about Kitrina?” Dorèl suggested.
“Okay.” It was close enough to Kitty that I could at least remember it, even if it felt weird. I couldn’t just come up with some random name. It was personal. It was who I was, on the inside. And inside, I would always be a kitty.
“Everyone is free to wander anywhere in the safehouse. You should not leave, however, unless you are on a mission. This is to keep all of us safe. Enforcers are searching for us all. Each member of the resistance will be assigned a task based on their skills, or if they have none, based on what they can be taught. Everyone here has a place.”
“There are educated and uneducated slaves, here. If you wish to learn to read, to do arithmetic—numbers—or to do anything else at all, seek out someone who knows how to do that thing. We place great importance on sharing, and that includes knowledge.”
For some reason, the word sharing made me suppress a shudder, even though he wasn’t talking about people being shared in the same way that scared me.
Dorèl kept talking and I tried to pay attention. Self-sufficiency. Growing our own food. Generating our own electricity. It all sounded so foreign and complicated.
“We are moving you to the commune in twenty-one days, once we’ve liberated as many slaves as we can for this cycle of resistance. It is a safe place, where everyone is equal.”
“What about the enforcers? Won’t they try to stop us?” Tasha asked.
Dorèl shook his head. “We will evade them. There are ways out of the city that they don’t patrol. But that is why we have to wait.”
Lying in a bed that night, I tried to put everything together. I’d finished my training and been given a beautiful tail by my master. Then he’d taken me to a place where slaves were tortured and killed for fun. He’d given me away, and then all the masters had abandoned the slaves. I’d barely made it out alive before the building blew up.
Najia and the rest of them had rescued me and brought me here. They said they wanted to help slaves, and they had treated me unlike anyone I’d ever met before, but what was their motivation? I couldn’t help feeling like this whole change in fortune was too good to be true.
More than anything, I wondered what my master was doing. Had he cared that he’d lost me? Being here felt like I was doing something very disobedient, but I had no idea how to find him.
Kitty
“All humanoids are bipedal,” Najia said. It was another of her outlandish statements which I was beginning to realize were usually true.
“How can I walk on two legs?” I asked.
“It’s all about balance. Take my hands.”
Kneeling on the floor, I reached out and grasped her outstretched fingers.
“Now what?”
“Try putting your feet flat on the floor, like mine.”
I did. The back of my calves burned and pinched as I crouched, trying my best not to fall backwards.
“It’s not comfortable,” I grumbled.
“The tendons in your calves need to stretch. It will take time. Try straightening your legs as much as you can.”
Feeling awkward, I un
folded my limbs until I was making some approximation of a biped. My knees were still bent, because the back of my legs were too tight, and I felt like I was going to overbalance at any moment. Why was all the weight at the top of my body?
“Now pick one foot up and move it toward me.”
“This sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.”
“Just try it and keep hold of my hands.”
Scared of getting it wrong, I tentatively did as she said. My other ankle shook violently as I took my first ever bipedal step.
“I did it!” The feeling of success was heady. “But I’m a kitty. How is this even possible?”
“Like I said, all humanoids are bipedal.”
“Which means...”
“Someone is making kittens believe they can’t walk on two legs.”
When she said it out loud, I realized how badly my subspecies had been enslaved.
“It’s so easy for them to control us—to sell us—when we’re on all fours on the floor while they tower over us,” I mused.
“Exactly. Imagine what your planet would be like if all the Felynes could fight back.”
I shook my head at the vision. It was unbelievable. “There would be no kitty farms. No breeders. No handlers. We’d be... doing something else.” I didn’t even know what kitties did when they weren’t being kept in farms.
“You’d be free.”
For the first time in my life, I realized I had no idea at all what freedom actually looked like—or what I’d do with it if I had it. The thought was frightening. It made me want to run back to my master and hide in his training room until the world made sense again. But it also made me angry.
With Najia’s help, I continued practicing walking, although I still wasn’t very good at it, and once my legs were too tired to keep trying, we began working on learning to read. Now that I knew what my body and brain were capable of, I was determined to do these things until I was an expert at them.
