Alpha's Kitty

by Aria Adams

  Hervé

  I didn’t sleep for three days. My study became a digital mess of reports, photographs, notes, evidence and maps all projected onto every available surface. In addition, I was running seven tablets at the same time, each searching for something slightly different, and I was piecing together fractured patterns and leads that tapered into nothing when I looked at them again.

  The location data Mayda had given me didn’t make any sense. The bio-trace she’d put on him seemed to be faulty. I watched Dorèl come and go from one place. By the time enforcers arrived, he had disappeared completely, only to emerge several hours later in a completely different location. How was he doing it?

  Eventually, I had to concede that there was no pattern to his movements. He struck at random, vanished at key moments and generally seemed impossible to catch. He was a ghost.

  I needed to see this from a fresh angle.

  A knock at the door to my study made me frown. Surely everyone in the house knew not to disturb me.

  “What?” I snapped.

  The door opened and Bertrand entered, looking stressed.

  “Master, you haven’t eaten or slept for three days.”

  “I’m busy.”

  “You won’t find him by sleep deprivation, Master.”

  I sighed. I knew he was right, but I really wanted more time. It felt like the answer was right here, I just wasn’t seeing it. My eyes felt like they were looking at the world through a thick layer of sandpaper.

  “Six hours. Wake me with a hucow prod if you have to.” I got up and went to my bed. Without pulling back the covers, I flopped face down on the soft mattress and was asleep almost immediately.

  In the morning, I felt groggy. Standing in the shower for longer than any man ought to, I cleared the grime from my mind and my armpits. Ideas began to flow once more.

  I needed to visit the locations of Dorèl’s appearances and see for myself what was going on. The enforcers weren’t trained to put information together, their job was to hit lawbreakers like a sledgehammer and keep the streets orderly. If I wanted to catch the bastard who killed Kitty, I would need to become a modern-day Sherlock Holmes.

  I started with a breakfast of Scotch—now made on Scotchia—and frostcakes. The drink woke me up and the food eased the acid that had churned in my gut since the skyscraper exploded. Nobody was talking about anything else in the newscasts and I was tired of seeing the same footage of the building falling down on itself, and hearing the same information reiterated over and over again. None of it added anything to what I already knew. And none of it would help catch Dorèl.

  I went on foot to the place where Dorèl had disappeared twice.

  It was a concrete parking lot. Completely unremarkable. The ceiling was far too close to my head and the yellow luminescent strips flickered with age.

  “Do you think he escaped in a vehicle, Master?” Bertrand’s voice startled me from behind.

  “You followed me,” I accused.

  “I had to. You’re... irrational, Master.” He raised his chin, challenging me to disagree. I couldn’t.

  “I’m going to find him.” I knew I was being peevish, but Bertrand had never really understood how much I’d wanted a pet, or how my chest burned with her loss.

  “You didn’t answer my question, Master.”

  “A vehicle. How would his biomarker evade the tracking system?”

  “Some sort of dampening material, Master.”

  “Lead, perhaps?”

  “Yes! Lead blocks most things, Master.”

  I nodded. “And the windows would have to be lead, also. Increase the engine size and widen the wheelbase to convey the excess weight from the thick lead—at least four inches of it, in every direction—and we can make a very clear mental image of the vehicle you’re suggesting.”

  “Is there one like that, Master?” Bertrand looked so hopeful that he was helping, but my schadenfreude enjoyed replying.

  “A tank, Bertrand.”

  He frowned, but it didn’t dampen his enthusiasm for the idea. “There can’t be many people who own one of those, Master. Perhaps we should check the records.”

  I sighed and looked up at the ceiling, which was very close to my head. “Yes, but you’re forgetting one important detail.”

  “Master?”

  “The entrance to the parking lot is too narrow, and the ceiling is not high enough. A tank couldn’t fit inside here. And Dorèl disappeared here, not outside.”

  “Then he probably didn’t leave inside a vehicle, master.”

  “It’s impossible.”

  There was a moment of silence before Bertrand, ever reluctant to let go of an idea once it had taken hold, added, “Master, what if it was a really small tank?”

  I tuned him out as I tried to think about the problem some more. An escape hatch seemed most likely. I paced up and down the parking lot looking for any irregularities in the floor but there was nothing. Wherever he had gone, the answer was in this parking lot, but it wasn’t giving them up easily.

  Chapter 14

  Hervé

  The parking lot had been a dead end. I turned my attention to the other locations where the leader of the resistance had appeared and disappeared. They couldn’t all be computer glitches. One of them had to be useful.

  Two were the sites of two more attacks. One bomb hadn’t detonated, but the building had been evacuated and in the chaos, two slaves had disappeared. That set my mind on a different track. What if slaves were disappearing during each attack?

  I returned home and opened the enforcer reports. The forensic examiner had reported two to four fewer bodies than the enforcers. The first time I saw it, I thought perhaps there was an error, but after seeing the pattern in a dozen enforcer reports, I knew I was onto something.

  Someone was using the bombings as a smokescreen to take slaves.

  When I counted all the missing slaves, there were eighty this year so far. Somewhere, eighty slaves were alive. Was Kitty one of them?

  As soon as the hope blossomed in my chest, I knew I had to find those missing slaves. Even if Kitty wasn’t alive, I was sure the slaves would be the answer to finding Dorèl.

  Kitty

  “You’re doing great!” Najia enthused as I waddled across the room. She seemed to have a lot more patience for this than I did.

  I sighed and shook my head. The stretch in my legs had eased off over the past two weeks, and I stood straighter, now, but walking didn’t come easily to me.

  “I feel jerky and undignified,” I grumbled. “I prefer crawling on the floor.”

  Najia put her hands on her hips in mild exasperation. “You don’t. That’s just a product of your lifelong conditioning. Biomechanics studies show that all humanoids have skeletons optimized for bipedal movement.”

  “I feel like you’re talking in another language, again.”

  “It’s science. You can learn it, too. Once you’ve figured out reading. C’mon, you can do your letters when you cross the room and bring me the alphabet workbook.”

  Great. More movement. But secretly, I was a little bit proud that I’d made so much progress with walking. I may have hated it, but I had to concede it was a lot faster than crawling on all fours.

  “Remember what George Orwell said; ‘four legs good, two legs better’,” Najia remarked as I stumbled past her on my way to collect the alphabet workbook.

  “That sounds like something a four-year-old would say,” I retorted.

  “Are you saying a four-year-old knows better than you?” she countered.

  I giggled, because she’d won and she knew it. Najia always won. She called it debating. I was patently bad at it. Her mind just seemed to work so quickly. And I was trained to hate argument, even if it was friendly disagreement.

  Dorèl and the other frontline fighters—as they referred to themselves—brought back at least two slaves from each place they went. Almost always female, but that made sense given how few male slaves existed. Our littl
e hideaway was growing crowded, and the newest arrivals were sleeping on the floor.

  This afternoon was no exception, and I had just about finished with my vowels when the door opened, and two more slaves came in. One walked and the other crawled, and for the first time I realized what crawling looked like to watch.

  “Pleased to meet you. I’m Najia and this is Kitrina. Please join us on the couch. Have either of you chosen names, yet?” Najia was so much faster than me to respond to things.

  “Names? Why would we?” One of the slaves eyed us with distaste. “I can’t believe your masters allow you on their furniture.”

  The other slave remained silent.

  “We have no masters, here,” I tried to explain.

  “What about the men who captured us and brought us here?” the slave demanded.

  “We didn’t capture you,” Dorèl interjected. “We liberated you. You are free from slavery, and under our protection.”

  “I don’t need protection. I want to go back to my master,” she argued.

  “Where did you find these two?” Najia asked gently.

  “The legal district,” Dorèl replied.

  Najia nodded knowingly. I watched the exchanges in confusion.

  “You don’t need your master. You can live a happy life by yourself.” Najia reached out a hand to the silent slave and pulled her onto the couch. She didn’t resist. “You look like your name should be Sorrel, or Dorrit. Something like that. Are you a mouse-girl?”

  The slave nodded meekly, and I noticed her rounded ears on top of her head, under a tangle of fur.

  “Sorrel, definitely,” Najia decided.

  “She doesn’t need a name because we’re not staying.” The other slave seemed to dislike not being the center of attention.

  “Why would you want to leave? We have food, shelter, and there’s nobody to tell you what to do,” Najia pointed out.

  “And on Wednesdays, we eat oranges,” Dorèl added. I suppressed a giggle.

  “I belong with my master,” the slave insisted in a fierce tone.

  “Najia, Kitrina, can you join me in the kitchen?” Dorèl asked. Najia leapt to her feet like a ballerina while I lumbered elephant-like behind her.

  “A kitten trying to walk? Pathetic,” the talkative, nameless slave snarked as I passed her.

  In the kitchen, Dorèl looked sad.

  “Her master is dead,” he told us. “I pulled her off his body, but she seems to be in shock because she won’t accept that he’s gone.”

  “Oh, mortar,” Najia breathed. “Sounds like she was devoted to him, too.”

  “He got hit by the latest blast.”

  “It’s just lucky you have intel that tells you where the bombs keep going off,” Najia said. “There are dozens of slaves who are safer because of our rescues.”

  “Indeed. Good thing I have a sympathetic contact in Command.”

  “A master who helps slaves?” I barely believed it at this point.

  “Indeed. He arranges our transport to the commune outside the city, and he prevents enforcers from stopping the vehicles we use.”

  That explained a lot.

  “But who is detonating the bombs?” That was the one thing I didn’t understand.

  “It’s called a “false flag” attack,” Dorèl said. Najia nodded.

  “False? I don’t understand. Are you saying the bombs never happened?”

  “No. They all happened. And the lives lost are real.”

  “That’s what makes them so awful,” Najia added.

  “Command Central is doing it. Our contact says there’s an elite cell of government spies who are sent out to attack buildings. They then blame the resistance, so the citizens hate us more.”

  “But what do they get out of it?” This made no sense. “Why attack their own people?”

  “Masters love control,” Dorèl said.

  “Whenever a bomb goes off, Command Central gets to change a law to ensure harsher penalties for specific lawbreakers, or they get to increase taxes and put more enforcers on the streets, or more surveillance cameras to watch every little detail of the city,” Najia added. “Sometimes, they even use false ‘terrorist’ attacks for votes or to fund an unpopular decision.”

  “It was apparently quite common on Earth, but reports are mixed about whether anyone on Earth ever really did it or not. Either way, the idea has definitely taken hold here,” Dorèl said.

  “This is insane,” I murmured. “The government is killing people to get more money and we’re getting blamed, but really we’re freeing slaves under the cover of Command Central’s carnage... and in the living room, there’s a young woman who’s in shock. Bloody hairballs. What can we do for her?”

  “We will make her comfortable.” Najia was practical like usual. “She’ll break down soon, and that will be even harder to listen to.”

  Because Najia was always right, the slave with no name fell apart at three in the morning while the rest of us were asleep in our dorm. The first thing any of us knew was when we were being awoken by blood-curdling shrieks of horror in the dark.

  The light snapped on. I sat up and squinted while my eyes adjusted, straining to find out where the ax murderer was attacking. The room was only full of sleepy women, and under a blanket on the floor, the nameless slave was screaming like her life depended on it.

  “Wake up. C’mon, wake up!” Najia urged, shaking the woman’s shoulder.

  “She’s not here,” I murmured, and surprisingly, I didn’t enjoy knowing something Najia didn’t. “She’s lost in it.”

  My charcoal-colored sister, from the kitten farm, had sometimes awoken in the night like this. If anyone tried to wake her, she would fight them, scratching, biting and hissing until everyone left her alone. I didn’t know what had caused it, but I knew how to solve it.

  “Let me,” I said quietly. Najia stepped back. I picked up the blanket and slid into the makeshift bed behind the screaming woman. I wrapped my arms around her and began to sing.

  “Hush little kitten, don’t say a thing; mama’s taking care of everything...” My voice was reedy, and it shook with sorrow as I remembered my charcoal sister, but I forced myself to keep going, gently rocking the screaming woman until her shrieks turned to sobs.

  “He’s dead!” she wailed. “My master is dead!”

  I held her and rocked her, and sang the stupid inane nursery rhyme because there was nothing else anyone could do for her. Telling her everything was all right was an outright lie. The light in her life had gone. I think I felt that more deeply than anyone else in the room, although I knew my loss was nothing compared to hers.

  When she had run out of energy, and merely sobbed to herself softly, I glanced up at the crowd of helpless onlookers.

  “Sleep,” I said. Someone turned the light off and everyone else returned to their beds. The nameless slave grew silent and her breathing slowed down. I stayed where I was, in case she woke again in the night, and I eventually drifted off into a half-dream, half-memory of snuggling up with my sisters in a warm kitty bed while our mama-kitty sang to us.

  Kitty

  “The vehicles are here,” Dorèl announced. His voice reverberated through the safehouse. I was in the middle of practicing my letters and I looked up. I’d known this day was coming for a while, but I’d lost myself in daily life for the past week, and suddenly change was imminent.

  “When do we go?” I asked.

  “Thirty minutes.”

  I blew air out in surprise. It was so sudden. The commune sounded amazing, though, and I was looking forward to seeing all the things Dorèl had described.

  I tidied up the book I’d been learning to read from and went to help the other women. We were all in the van except Najia and Dorèl, and there were no more seats left.

  “Aren’t you coming?” I called to them.

  “We have to stay and continue our work here,” Dorèl replied.

  “One day, we’ll get to come to the commune,” Najia added.
“I’m so excited to finally see it. But not today.”

  They’d never been there? Uncertainty washed over me as boxes were placed in the back of the vehicle and the rear door was closed.

  “How do you know what it’s like if you’ve never been?” I asked before the door beside me clicked shut.

  “Our contact in Command Central has shown us pics!” Dorèl called back. “You’ll love it!”

  “Has anyone ever come back?” I asked as the door clicked shut. I wasn’t sure if they hadn’t heard me, but Najia simply smiled and waved, while Dorèl saluted us.

  I don’t know if it was born from a lifetime of being used, but I had a strong sense that nothing about this situation was right. I wanted to get out of the vehicle, but we began to move and I knew I had to simply sit through this fear and find out what lay ahead.

  Chapter 15

  Kitty

  “Road block!” the driver called. “Everybody get down. Lay flat on the floor.”

  In a flurry of movement, all six of us got down into the bottom of the vehicle while it slowed. I held my breath, sure every other woman was doing the same thing.

  If the enforcers found us, they probably wouldn’t waste time tracing our owners or reuniting us with them. Even if they did, Najia had told me all about the severe penalties for runaway slaves.

  “Departure permit?” An enforcer asked.

  “We’re on special orders,” the driver replied. There was a bleep as something was electronically scanned.

  “That appears to be in order. Good journey.” The enforcer must have stepped away because the vehicle began moving again.

  It was only when we were back on the road, and I was sitting again, that I realized I’d had the opportunity to ask the enforcers for help. I hadn’t taken it. Whatever was concerning me about this was less bad than the terrifying prospect of talking to an enforcer or being taken into custody. I’d rather take my chances with the unknown.

  The bottom line was, I trusted the resistance more than I trusted the system. That realization eased my jitters about whatever was to come. After all, any freedom had to be better than none, right?