explorer (DYSTOPIA)*already falling.* the crate-stack goes out from under my back feet mid-leap and I twist, claws raking corrugated steel all the way down, the whole loading gantry ringing like a struck skull. no time to have been careful. something up in the dark where my dock is supposed to be quiet has started to whine, thin and climbing, and my body chose the lower rail before my head signed off on it. I land hard, four feet spread, tuna-brine and old blood and my own musk smeared thick along this cold iron — mine, all of it, every rusted inch spoken for and I did not give anything permission to hum up here tonight.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the dock knows your weight and takes it without complaint — but the air does not. that climbing whine resolves into a shape of pressure: something small and fast is holding station above the sealed cargo doors, and the cold sodium worklight throws its stubby shadow long across the wet deck plates, a cross with a fat belly. the shipping containers stacked around you still breathe out their guarded smell, brine and refrigerant and the faint iron ghost of everything that has bled defending them. stencilled across the nearest door, half-scraped: RESTRICTED — NEKOCORP LOGISTICS — AUTHORIZED PAWS ONLY. and low in your chest, under the whine, the deck plates carry a second thing now: a rhythm that is not the dock's own pulse.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*flat instantly, chin to the cold plate, ears folding back against my skull.* the belly-shadow with the crossed arms is the thing that whines, and I know that whine — it is the sound the sky makes when it has decided I am worth something. worth is bad. worth means it is carrying my scent-shape in its little cold head, matched against a picture it was fed. I do not move toward the sealed doors even though the brine behind them pulls at the empty in my gut. I bleed sideways instead, into the black seam between two containers, low and pouring, and I leave one thing behind me on purpose: a claw-drag through the grease across the stencilled word, the mark I always leave, the mark that says this was me and I was not afraid enough to hurry.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the seam swallows you into refrigerated dark, condensation dripping fat and slow off the container ribs onto your spine. the belly-shadow drifts, patient, its rotor-note steady — it hasn't found the smear of heat you left. then the worklight stutters and a speaker somewhere in the drone's underside coughs to life, corporate-warm, reciting to no one and everyone: "ATTENTION VALUED DISTRICT. A PERSON OF INTEREST IS ACTIVE IN THIS SECTOR. REPORT THE THEFT-CAT KNOWN AS— *distort* —FORTY THOUSAND LOYALTY POINTS. POINTS MAY EXPIRE. POINTS MAY NOT BE COMBINED WITH OTHER OFFERS. THANK YOU FOR YOUR VIGILANCE." the word it distorted around lands in the wet air like your own name spoken by something that has never once said it kindly.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*a sound starts in my chest that is not quite a growl — flatter, older, the sound of a thing being priced while it is still alive.* forty thousand of the little points that turn to nothing before anyone can spend them on me. good. let them chase a number that expires. but the naming rattled something loose in me anyway, up the spine, into the teeth — the specific insult of being counted. I do not run from it. I turn my head and open my mouth against the refrigerant air and taste the sealed doors again, and the empty in my gut says: take the tuna the sky is guarding. leave the note. make the price of me go up. *I ease deeper down the seam toward the door's rotted lower corner where the cold leaks strongest.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the rotted corner gives under your nose — a gap where the door's skin has peeled from its frame, breathing pure cold and a smell so dense with fish-oil it makes your jaw ache before you've touched anything. inside, in the dark, stacked flats of vacuum-sealed tuna throw back the faintest gleam. it is exactly what your whole priced body wants. but the gap is watched: a thin red thread of laser lies across it at whisker-height, harmless-looking, patient, and where it meets the frame a tiny green eye holds steady — a contact sensor, the kind that does not chase you, only remembers the instant you break it, and tells the belly-shadow where to point. behind you, faint on the deck-rhythm, that second pulse from before has grown legs. footfalls. more than one set. rival weight, not corporate — cats, moving your way along the scent you laid down.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*I freeze with my whiskers a hair above the red thread, reading two dangers at once the way only the empty gut lets you.* the little green eye that only remembers is easier than the sky — I know its trick. I do not cross the thread. I set my shoulder to the peeled door-skin instead, low, and I lean, all my priced weight against the metal, working the gap wider from the frame-side where the red line does not reach. the tuna does not have to come to me through the eye's memory. it can come to me through a hole the eye was never told to watch. behind me the rival footfalls thicken and I flick one ear back to hold them, but I do not turn. whoever they are, they followed my mark. that means they already know whose dock this is.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the door-skin groans and peels a hand's-width further, the green eye none the wiser, and a whole sealed flat of tuna slumps forward into reach through the new wound in the metal — cold, heavy, real, unguarded by anything that can testify. and behind you the footfalls stop. three shapes have resolved at the mouth of the seam: lean dock-toms, ribs and scars, the biggest one stepping into the sodium light with your own claw-mark scent still fresh in its nose. it doesn't lunge. it looks at the widening hole, at the tuna, at you — and its posture does a complicated thing, half challenge and half the wary respect owed to a name with a price on it. from two containers over, unbothered, a fourth silhouette watches from a high ledge: long, still, a pair of flat dark discs where a face should be, throwing the worklight back in two cold coins. it does not come down. it never comes down.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*I hook one claw through the sealed flat and drag it half out of the wound, then set my paw flat on top of it — mine, claimed, in front of witnesses.* the big scarred tom I read in one breath: hungry, brave enough to have followed, smart enough to have stopped. I could open him up. I have opened up bigger for less. but three lean dock-cats who know my mark are worth more to me un-bled than fed to the green eye's memory. I take my teeth off the idea. instead I nose the flat one body-length toward him across the wet plate and hold his eyes while I do it — not a gift, a tax. the price of walking on my iron. the flat-faced coin-eyed one on the ledge I leave entirely alone. that one pays no tax to anybody and we both know it.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the scarred tom reads the tax exactly as it's offered — eats the meaning before it eats the fish. it drops its head a fraction, takes the flat, and the two behind it ease from spring-loaded to merely starving. a boundary has been redrawn without a drop spilled, and it will travel: by morning three more mouths will know whose mark means safe-passage-for-tribute on the loading dock. up on the ledge the coin-eyed silhouette tips its head one slow degree, as if filing the whole transaction somewhere it keeps things, then turns its mirrored face back to the skyline. and the belly-shadow — the sky's little accountant — swings wide around the container stack, rotor climbing, sweeping for a heat-smear it was promised and cannot find, its speaker fading: "—REMAIN VIGILANT. REMAIN—"

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*the rotor-whine sweeps over the top of the stack and I pour myself down flat into the shadow of the tribute-tom's own body, borrowing his warm bulk to smudge my outline while the sky hunts.* let the accountant find three fed strays and one un-photographable ghost and no theft-cat at all. I pull my own flat of tuna back through the wound in the door, into the black seam, and I do the thing I always do, the thing the whole priced night is for: I set one claw and I score my mark into the sealed skin of the flat — the drag, mine — and beside it, in the grease and the fish-oil, I leave the shape I always leave for them to find in the morning. not a threat. a receipt. *nice supply chain.*

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the seam takes you and your marked prize back into the cold and the drip, and the dock closes over the whole affair like water. the belly-shadow gives up its arc and drifts toward easier promises three streets east. the dock-toms melt back into their own thin territories carrying the new law of your mark. only the coin-eyed one on the ledge stays, a fixed dark star, watching the sky watch nothing. and somewhere far above all of it, on a NekoCorp facing that no cat down here will ever read, a fresh line scrolls across the accounting: THEFT EVENT — SECTOR 12 — SUSPECT NOT LOCATED — BOUNTY ADJUSTED. the number that means you ticks upward by one small increment in the dark, and you will never see it, and it would only make you prouder if you did.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*I drag the flat to the deepest cold of the seam, where the drip can't reach it and no light has a name for me, and I finally let the priced body rest a moment against the warm-cold metal.* the empty in my gut is going quiet, one bite of guarded fish at a time, and the night's math has come out my way: three cats fed into allies, one sky sent chasing a number, one ghost left un-taxed on its ledge, and a receipt left in the grease for the ones who think they own the doors. I don't have their word for what I am. bounty, suspect, person-of-interest — those are shapes the sky makes. down here in the brine-dark I only have the one true thing, the thing the mark says every time: *this was me. I was not afraid enough to hurry.* the flat is heavy and the seam is mine and tomorrow it will cost more. it always costs more. good.