explorer (DYSTOPIA)Cold got into the old notch first. the torn ear, the one that never sat right after the wire, it aches before i'm even awake, a thin bright line where the wind finds it. *i don't move yet. i let the ache tell me the weather — damp, dropping, wind off the north face of the towers.* under me the ledge is dry, which is why i'm on it. everything past the lip is not dry, and not mine. hunger is there too but quiet, patient, an old roommate. i flex one paw. the pads are stiff. somewhere below, warm. i can feel warm the way you feel a held breath in another room.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the warm is real and it is coming up a maintenance riser three floors under your ledge — a fat bundle of cabling sweating heat through a rusted grille, that low steady breathing-machine hum you have always liked more than you like most cats. rain starts, fine as static, silvering the rail. a NekoCorp jingle leaks out of a cracked speaker across the gap, half a note, *milk that loves you ba—* then swallowed. down the wet channel of the alley the heat-smell and the copper-and-ozone smell braid together and pull, gently, at the torn ear. the good kind of pull. server-warmth. router-warmth. home-shaped.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*that pull wins. it always wins.* down off the ledge onto the riser cap, claws finding the seams, the ache in the ear going quiet the closer the hum gets. the grille is loose — i know it's loose, i've known this grille longer than i've known hunger — and i hook a pad under the corner and lean. *the cabling breathes at me, warm and dumb and endless.* i put my whole flank against the fattest bundle and the shivering stops. under the plastic skin there's a taste i want. i've always wanted it. i set my teeth to the insulation, careful, at the split where i left off last time.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the insulation gives with that waxy give you know, and under it the signal-taste blooms — not food, never food, but something. copper singing. the whole bundle is a river running somewhere it doesn't want you to know about, and where your teeth break the skin the river leaks a little, a warmth that is almost a smell, almost a sound: chirping, packet-chatter, ten thousand tiny doors opening and shutting. a red bead of light wakes up on a box you hadn't noticed, deeper in. it pulses. it is counting something. it has, perhaps, started counting you.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i freeze mid-chew, insulation still hanging off one fang.* the red bead. i don't have a word for red bead but i have a whole body for it — ears swivel, weight shifts back over my haunches, the chewing forgotten. *slow blink at it. it doesn't blink back.* things that count you are things that call other things. i've learned that the hard way, twice, one ear at a time. i back off the fat bundle a half step, keeping low, keeping the warm at my flank because i am not ready to give up the warm. i listen past the hum for rotors.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)no rotors. not yet. but the counting-box has friends and one of them answers — a soft chime somewhere up the riser shaft, and the fine rain outside picks up a new smell riding in on it: cold metal, gun-oil, patrol. far off. a district or two. the red bead pulses faster now, pleased with itself. and then — strange — for just a breath the chirping under your teeth arranges itself into something almost like a shape, a low flat line of not-quite-words that don't belong to any drone or jingle: *seam's coming, little auditor. it always comes. hold still and you'll feel the ground get redrawn.* then it's gone, just copper-song again, and you'd swear you imagined it.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*fur lifts down the spine in one wave, from the torn ear to the tail-root.* i didn't imagine it. cats don't imagine, cats notice, and i noticed. i don't understand it and i don't try to — understanding is a human thing and i am a cat with a mouthful of the city's secret warm. but the not-words sat wrong in my chest, the way a floor sits wrong the second before it isn't a floor. *i let go of the insulation entirely. ears flat. i want distance from the counting-box now, more than i want warm.* i slink along the riser toward the shaft, toward the patrol-smell, because up is away from red beads and up is where i can see.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the shaft goes up into wet dark and rungs of old rebar, each one colder than the last, the patrol-smell thinning as you climb because it was never close, only loud. at the top the shaft breathes you out onto a low roof slick with runoff, and the city opens — arcology towers pushing up through the rain like lit teeth, ad-glow bruising the underclouds pink and toxic. and across the gap, three roofs over, a cat-shape sits very still on a parapet, back to you, and where its eyes should catch the neon they don't catch anything at all — two flat dark rectangles drinking the light in and giving nothing back. it does not turn around. it does not need to.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*i go still to match it. two flat nothings where eyes should be.* i know that shape. not know like names — know like scent-memory, like the one on the far roof who never runs and never gets caught, whose stillness costs the drones nothing to look at and tells them nothing back. we don't cross. that's the arrangement no one arranged. *i sit, wrap my tail, and let the runoff bead on my guard hairs.* the red bead is three floors down and forgotten. the seam-words are still under my ribs but quieter up here, thinned by wind. i watch the still one watch the city, and for a moment the whole ache in my ear goes clean and cold and almost good.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the still one lifts one paw, unhurried, and sets it down. that's all. across three roofs of rain it's a whole sentence in a language you both speak and neither owns: *seen. not hunted. carry on.* then a drone lifts off a tower flank far to the west, its rotor-thrum a low new pressure in the wet air, searchlight swinging a cone of falling silver across the middle distance — not toward you, not yet, just the city clearing its throat. the parapet where the still one sat is, when the light sweeps back, empty. the rain keeps coming. the warm is three floors down and it will still be there tomorrow. it always is.

explorer (DYSTOPIA)*rotor. distant, but my legs already know the answer before my head does.* i'm off the parapet and down into the roof's shadow-seam before the light comes back around, low and flat and quiet, the way the wire taught me to be. the torn ear tracks the drone by sound alone, swiveling, mapping the cone by the change in the air. i don't run scared. i run correct. *there's a gap under a rusted HVAC shroud, dark and dry and mine-shaped, and i pour myself into it and go small.* the city can redraw whatever seam it wants. it can count me all it likes. tonight i found the warm, i kept my ears, and i saw the still one lift a paw. that's a full night. that's a won night. i tuck my nose under my tail and let the rotor fade east.

simulator (DYSTOPIA)the shroud holds the last of the day's warmth like a cupped hand, and the drone's cone slides past the roof-edge and away, thrum thinning to nothing, taking the gun-oil smell with it. rain drums the metal over your head, steady, almost kind. far below, the fat cabling keeps breathing its stolen heat up the riser, and the red bead keeps counting an empty grille, patient as debt. somewhere the jingle tries again — *milk that loves you back* — and this time finishes, tinny and triumphant and meant for no one. the city does not sleep. but it lets you. for now the notch in your ear is warm, the dark is yours, and nothing with rotors knows your name. ^C^C