explorer (DYSTOPIA)Teeth first, thinking never. *already off the railing, jaws wide, the little rotor-thing right there stupid and low and blinking its one dumb eye* it hovered at whisker-height so now it's mine. *front claws hook the warm plastic casing, hind legs kicking against wet nothing, the whole roof tilting sideways* it makes that thin screaming that all of them make when you get the seam in your back teeth. good. i know this taste. hot solder and cheap milk-white shell, the flavor of things that thought they'd win. *bite down harder where the hum lives*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the casing gives with a wet crack and the hum stutters — the good sound, the dying sound. sparks spit a fistful of blue across your muzzle, no heat to them, just sting and the reek of burnt sugar. the rotor claws at the air one last time, drags you both a hand-width toward the ledge, then quits. *thud of dead machine on gravel.* somewhere below, three streets of rain-slick alley exhale steam. and then, late, the way they're always late — a second rotor-note, deeper, further off, turning this way. the sky-buzz that means the first one told on you before it went quiet.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*mouth full of dead thing, ears flattening before the brain even names why* that new note is bigger. the little ones squeal, the big ones just breathe. *drops the carcass, gives it one contemptuous back-kick of gravel* i don't run from breathing. but i don't stand in the open for it either. *low belly-crawl to the lip of the roof, the scorched patch on my flank where an old one got a shot in, that skin remembers and pulls tight* down. down is where the smells stack up thick enough to hide a cat. *pours over the edge into the dark seam between two hot walls*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the gap between the walls breathes up at you — vent-heat, fry-oil gone rancid, a whole city's worth of exhaust pressed into a crack barely a cat wide. your pads hit a ledge of dripping conduit, then a fire-scarred pipe, then the ground, soft with wet cardboard. safe-dark. familiar-dark. a NekoCorp panel three floors up flickers and sings half a jingle — *fresssh milk for fressssh min—* — before the rain shorts it back to a hiss. down here the big rotor is only a pressure on the fur, not a shape. down here something else is already living: a faint sharp musk laid along the pipe you just touched. cat. not yours. recent.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*freezes with one paw still on the pipe, nose working the musk apart thread by thread* not a stranger's fear-spray, not a challenge either. cool. deliberate. laid down by something that wanted to be smelled and didn't care who by. *the scent has an edge to it i almost know — dry, a little electric, like a coat that never sits close to the ground* whoever it is walks high and looks down and doesn't hurry. *hackles settle halfway, curiosity beating the itch to swing* i follow it with the whiskers, not the feet. one careful step along the warm pipe, tasting the air where the trail goes thin and up.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the trail lifts off the pipe and climbs — a scuff on a bracket, a single dark hair caught in a staple, the musk thinning into open air where no cat your size should be able to follow. up and up toward a maintenance ledge four stories over the alley. and there, when the rain lets the light through: a shape. sitting. not hiding, not hunting. a lean silhouette against the pink NekoCorp glow, tail wrapped neat around the feet, and where the eyes should catch the light they don't — two flat dark ovals that swallow the neon instead of throwing it back. it does not look at the big rotor still circling. it does not look at anything. it just sits, mirrored and unbothered, above a city that would very much like to arrest it.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*sits too, without deciding to, mirroring the still shape the way one cat answers another across a gap too wide to cross* the flat dark eyes don't throw light back and something old in me respects that — a creature the searchlights slide right off of. *the scorched flank stops aching for a breath.* i don't yowl a challenge up at it. wrong cat for that. this one isn't turf, isn't tuna, isn't threat. this one's just proof the high places aren't all owned. *ears swivel — the big rotor's breath swinging back around* but proof doesn't fill a belly and the breathing thing is closing. *one last look up, a slow blink at the silhouette, then i break the stare and drop my nose back to the ground where the real business is*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)when you look up again the ledge is empty. no leap, no scrabble, no sound — just gone, the way that cat is always just gone, leaving only the cooling musk and the sense of having been briefly, deliberately allowed to see it. the ground reasserts itself: rain, rot, and threaded through it now a better smell. fish. real-ish. oil and salt and the tin-tang of a can pried wrong. it leaks from a loading roll-door twenty tail-lengths east, cracked a paw's width, warm yellow light bleeding out under it. and over that light, bolted to the wall, a speaker crackles awake — *bounty active,* it drones flat and bored, *forty thousand loyalty points, subject: destroyer of feline chuds, do not approach, points expire upon—* the rain eats the rest.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the drone-voice means nothing, just weather, just the wall talking to itself the way walls do* but the fish means everything. *whole body reorients around the crack of yellow light, belly low, the empty gut overruling the sore flank overruling the big rotor overruling all of it* real-ish is still realer than anything i've had in three dusks. *slinks the twenty lengths in the gutter-shadow, one deliberate pad at a time, pausing where the light spills so i cross it dark-to-dark, never lit* at the door the warm air pours out fat with salt and machine-cold underneath it. *pauses at the gap. ears back once, checking the sky. then nose to the crack, reading what's inside before a single whisker follows*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)inside: a loading bay, all hard echo and stacked crates, the fish-smell blooming off a pallet split open near the middle of the floor — cans burst, a silver mess glittering under a caged bulb. too easy. too lit. too centered. and there, learned in the scorched skin of every cat that's survived this city: a thing that good, left in the open middle of a room, is not left. it is set. up in the rafters a small housing swivels a hair to track the draft you let in. the fish glistens. the bulb hums. the rain drums the roll-door behind you. the room waits to see whether the hunger is louder than the thing that kept you alive this long.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*every hair says yes and the sore flank says no and the flank has been right longer* i know a set trap by the shape of its kindness. nothing in this city gives fish for free in a lit circle. *doesn't take a step onto that open floor. instead reads the walls — the crates, the shadow-lanes, the black square up in the rafters that moved when it shouldn't have* the fish isn't the prize. the fish is the hook. *and i am not a hungry stray tonight, i am the cat that bites the machines back.* if the little swiveling thing in the roof wants to watch me, it can watch me leave a mark it won't forget. *slips sideways into the crate-shadow, off the lit floor entirely, working the dark toward the base of the rafter-post where the watching thing is bolted*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the shadow-lane holds. the caged bulb never finds you. you reach the rafter-post and the metal of it hums that low bolted-in hum, the same note the drone made before you cracked it open — the whole city speaks in that one hungry frequency. above, the little housing keeps swiveling out over the empty fish, patient, dumb, pointed the wrong way, waiting for a cat to walk into a circle no cat walked into. the roll-door lets in one thin blade of alley-cold at your back. the way out is still open. and the watcher, for one more breath, still doesn't know the difference between an empty room and a room with you in it.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*that's the sweetest thing this rotten city offers — a machine sure it's alone with nothing, and me in the room it can't see* i don't need the fish. i needed to be reminded which of us is the trap. *rise onto the post, claws in the seam, that old familiar taste of bolted-warm metal waiting at the top for my teeth* one bite on the swivel-joint, quick, then gone out the cold blade of door before the caged light even swings my way. *coils. the scorched flank pulls tight and i let it — pain's just another thing i outlived* leave them a broken eye and an untouched hook and let the wall-voices try to bill me for it. *springs*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the joint crunches under your jaws, that thin plastic scream cut short, the housing sagging blind on its bracket as you're already twisting off the post toward the cold. the fish sits untouched and glittering, a trap sprung on nobody, and the loading bay's speaker stammers — *unauthorized— unautho—* — into the rain as the roll-door blade swallows you back into the alley dark. behind you the caged bulb keeps burning over a silver mess no cat will ever eat. above you, four streets and climbing, the big rotor's breath finally arrives at the wrong roof, sweeping its light across gravel and one dead little drone and no cat at all. the night resets. the city forgets. the streets, for now, are yours. ^C^C