The Big Meow

“Nothing much to miss,” said Siff’hah, slipping around to bracket Rhiow on the other side. It was a game of theirs, Rhiow had been noticing: each of them would get up close to one of your ears, and then they would start passing their opinions back and forth through your head. “Look at this crowd,” Siff’hah said, glancing scornfully around at the various People watching them from hiding. “They all think we’re fflah.”

It was one of many words Rhiow had never heard until she started listening to Arhu and Siff’hah trying to verbally or physically shred one another’s ears. Ailurin, like any other language, had slang, but these days it seemed to be changing faster than Rhiow could keep track of. This word, at least, she could tell wasn’t complimentary.

“Not all of them,” Arhu said. “Rhi, you have fans.”

His tone, on the surface, was teasing: but there was something a little uneasy about it as well. Rhiow flirted an unconcerned tail at him. “Around here I wouldn’t be too concerned about that,” she said. “I daresay they’ve got more than enough shes to keep them busy in this neighborhood, and not sth’heih ones, either.” It was the Ailurin word that best translated the ehhif concept “spayed.”

“Not all of them care,” Arhu said. “Looks like some People don’t care whether a queen smells shaih or not – “

She turned around in mid-step and cuffed Arhu hard, then instantly regretted it. I might have slept in, but not enough, perhaps… “Mend your language, kit,” she said, turning back to continue following in Urruah’s wake: but as she turned she caught the glance that Arhu had caught, from the darkness deep inside one of the unloaded scenery crates. Pale eyes, wide, looking at her with an expression she could make nothing of: as if she was some kind of bizarre alien creature, dangerous but nonetheless peculiarly desirable –

She looked away, walked a little faster. “Like I said,” Arhu said under his breath.

“Don’t judge,” Rhiow said under her breath. “We have comfortable enough lives, and we know what we’re for, and have work to do that we enjoy. Who knows if that Person does? Who knows what he suffers, or enjoys, without talking to him? There’s more to a life than the way it looks. Don’t make decisions about him because he stares.”

Arhu flirted his tail at her in that I-don’t-care way he had when he did care, but didn’t feel like pressing his case with her. She rolled her eyes and went on along behind Jath, following him and Urruah over to the far back corner of the fly area, down a little low-ceilinged concrete-walled hallway, and through a small open door.

Rhiow stopped there, looking in shock at the furnishings of the room, which consisted of two ceramic receptacles, one on the floor and one on the wall. “Urruah,” she said. “In their toilet?”

“No fear of a crowd of them walking into this transit circle, is there?” Urruah said, cheerful. The wizardry blazed up through the white square-tiled floor as they watched.

“Your ingenuity knows no bounds,” Rhiow said, and this was true, though the Speech itself didn’t necessarily have to convey her sarcasm as well. “Aufwi?”

Aufwi stepped on the circle and spoke to it briefly in the Speech, laying in the required coordinates. “Let’s go…”

All it took was a step, and then everything was changed: from the harsh white glare of a single downhanging bulb, and the strange decayed-violet smell of old ehhif siss, to the glare of bright direct sun under a peculiarly open-seeming sky, and a wind laden with the sharp bimetallic taste of city-by-the-sea, as well as a brown hint of smog. Rhiow glanced around her to see if someone was about to trip over her, but no ehhif were anywhere near: the plaza in which they all stood was a near-empty desert of blazing white paving.

Without warning, Aufwi began to curse. Rhiow looked at him in surprise, and Arhu and Siff’hah stared, for his vocabulary was starting to resemble theirs in both filthiness and vehemence. He caught Rhiow’s look, though, and tried to restrain himself. “It’s not fair,” Aufwi said, his tail lashing furiously and his ears down near-flat. “Where’s the vhai’d thing gone now??”

“What?” Rhiow said. “The gate? You didn’t leave it out here, did you?”

“Of course not! But I can feel that it’s not where I did leave it!” Aufwi stared all around him, as if expecting the gate to pop up through the ground. “It was inside the station, down by the Red Line tracks. I’ve been trying to train it by putting it back in the same spot every time it jumps…”

Urruah laughed, that ironic sound of his again. “Might work with a gate that’s part of a complex and has some rootedness associated with it,” he said, “but not with one that hasn’t spawned yet. Nice try, though. Take a breath and see if you can feel where it’s gone.”