explorer (DYSTOPIA)Not the wind first — a scent. Sprayed low on the base of the tallest antenna, sour and male and fresh enough to still be wet, laid over the flat rust-taste that has always meant *mine* up here. Somebody walked my roof while I fed. *ears pin flat, one paw lifted and held, whole spine dropping a hand's width toward the gravel* i do not move to it. i let the wet mark tell me how big, how sure, how recent. above me the cables into the antenna are singing their thin all-night song and my teeth remember that song, remember chewing the soft skin off one until it fed the good buzz straight into my jaw. but the buzz can wait. the mark can not.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the roof answers in gravel-grit and the long metal groan of the arcology cooling under a colder hour. the mark is a tom's, half a night old at its edges but topped fresh at the root — someone re-signing an old claim, not making a new one. the singing bundle over your head is a fat grey cable-run feeding the antenna, and where its casing is already gnawed thin a faint warmth leaks out, a live pulse you can feel in your whiskers more than hear. downslope, past the lip of the roof, the city drops away in wet neon: a NEKOCORP glyph the size of a building breathing pink, pink, pink across the puddled tar. somewhere below that, a rotor. not close. yet.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*low crawl along the gravel, belly-fur dragging, tracing the tom's line back to its freshest end* i want the source of him, not his bragging. nose down, then up, then down — the mark walks toward the gnawed cable, toward *my* warm seam, and that turns the low sound in my chest on without asking. mine. *at the chewed casing i stop and re-lay my own claim over his, cheek hard to the metal, then teeth to the soft peeled insulation, one slow deliberate bite* let him smell that i eat the singing here. let him smell the buzz on my breath.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the bite lands and the seam answers — a bright fizz across the tongue, copper and ozone and something almost like the memory of milk, the good wrong taste that has always meant the signal is fat tonight. the warmth surges once against your face. then, three roof-lengths off where a squat relay box hunches under its own little forest of stub-antennas, a light that was red goes green. the box wakes. it was your bite that woke it. a soft click-click-click of something inside it seeking, and the tom's fresh scent, you understand now, walks straight to that box and stops. he wasn't marking the antenna. he was marking the thing that turns on when the cable is chewed.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*freeze. the good taste goes flat in an instant, swallowed down half-finished.* he did not fight me for the roof. he set the roof to fight me. *ears rotate to the click-click-click, that thin seeking pulse, and every hair along the ridge of my back lifts one by one* i know this feeling in the teeth — the buzz was never free, it always ends with the little red eye finding me. i back off the seam, slow, one paw peeled from the metal at a time, keeping my body long and low and pointed away, giving the woken box my flank and not my fear.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)good — because the box has decided. the click resolves into a rising whine, and from a slot in its side something small and rotored unfolds itself, no bigger than a fledgling, and lifts off the relay on four screaming little fans. its underlight is the same pink as the glyph below, and it sweeps that pink in a slow cone across the gravel toward the chewed cable, toward the wet double-mark, toward the warmth where your face just was. a speaker no larger than a bottlecap crackles a bright dead-cheerful jingle: *NEKO— hydration is a privilege you can afford —NEKO.* the cone of light is three tail-lengths from your tail and closing.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*gone. no thought in it — the body just spends itself.* i pour off the lit gravel into the black gap behind the cooling stacks, shoulder scraping warm ribbed metal, the jingle warping thin and stupid behind me. *skid, corner, drop* down the maintenance ladder-shaft i do not climb so much as fall in stages, paw to strut to ledge, the pink cone stuttering somewhere overhead unable to fold itself down after me. lower. lower is always safer. lower is where the towers stop having eyes.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the shaft swallows you and the drone's whine flattens to a mosquito thread far above, then nothing but your own four-footed clatter and the returning hum of the arcology's deep guts. you spill out a broken grille into a service crawl two floors down, and here the air changes — thick, close, and carrying a scent that stops you cold before your paws have even settled: burnt fur. not old. a scorch-and-cinder smell laid along the crawl like a trail, the particular reek of a cat who has been too near the drones' hot rotors and lived, again and again, until the burning became part of how he smells. it goes deeper into the dark, toward a vent grating that has been pried, bitten, and beaten half off its frame.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*nose flares at the char-scent and something old and careful in me goes still* i know this smell the way i know the drones — not as a name but as a warning worn into the air. whoever wears it is not prey and is not kin and does not lose to rotors. *i do not follow it in. i set one paw at the edge of his scorched line and no further, and i sit, and i let my own singed-buzz breath answer his burnt-fur trail across the dark — two survivors reading each other without a fight* his vent. his war. i only needed down, and down is here.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the dark accepts the truce. nothing comes out of the pried vent; the burnt-fur scent simply holds its line, neither advancing nor fading, a border drawn in smell that you have agreed not to cross. from somewhere past the mangled grating comes a single low sound that is not a growl and not a word, just an acknowledgement — the crawl-space equivalent of one battered tom noting another and going back to his own dark. the warmth here is honest, engine-warmth, no red eye behind it. the deep hum wraps you. your jaw still tingles faintly with the stolen signal, already fading.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i find the seam where two warm ducts almost touch and fold myself into it, spine curled to the metal, one ear left open toward the scorched trail and one toward the shaft i fell down* the roof is his tonight, the woken box, the pink eye — let him have the singing cable and the fight he built into it. i kept my flank whole and my buzz spent and a truce in the dark that costs me nothing. *the tingle in my teeth dims to nothing, the way it always does, the way that always leaves me wanting to climb back up and chew the seam again* tomorrow the roof will feel like mine again. it always does. that is the trick of it. that is the trap.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)and the city lets you believe it, because a cat who believes the roof is his climbs back up, and a cat who climbs back up bites the cable again, and the box wakes, and the drone folds out, and the counter somewhere behind the pink glyph ticks up by one. the ducts breathe their honest warmth over your curled body. far above, the little rotor finally gives up its cone and folds home to sleep on green-going-red. the burnt-fur border holds. the deep hum holds. rest, small thief. the signal will be fat again by dark, and so will the trap, and neither of you will remember choosing this. *pink, pink, pink, somewhere, on wet tar, for no one.*