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“CD-135?” Huang squints and stomps the playground soil as if misplaced memories would dislodge like autumn leaves. “Rings no bells. Must’ve never mattered before. A Messier number like that‘d be good for an idol group though.”
Mao doesn’t laugh. He descends the metal playground steps until he’s at eye level with Huang. “This is a grave matter. Over a dozen cats in Adachi have gone missing over the last few weeks.”
“You’ve gotta be kidding me.” Huang smooths the wrinkles between his eyebrows with his thumb. They reappear in its absence. “Just because you have this animal body doesn’t mean you can yank us around on a whim like this.”
Mao arches his back and hardens his stance. If the impending fight were a rainstorm, the air would be thick with static and ozone.
“Accusing me of acting on a whim? If you think I would do something so irrational, you don’t know me at all. We have data that the syndicate is ignoring: a new cat always goes missing around the time CD-135’s star is active. Sometimes the day before, often the day of. Word has been getting around.”
“Pssh, cats don’t have Mixi. How do they know anything?”
“That false star is where the circlet of Pisces used to be in the eastern sky.” Mao looks into the blue heavens. “Do you remember Pisces? The fish constellation. Naturally, we cats remember it.”
“How much crock can you fit in that little body? Feline astronomy? Cultural transmission among the catfolk? At least try to get me drunk first.”
“How else do you explain a street cat telling me he knows what lancernopt synchrotron radiation is? Or Zurich numbers?”
Huang harrumphs. ”And now you’re telling me cats can read Japanese? Actually, that one sounds plausible. Katakana is child’s play.”
“I believe Mao,” Hei says, scratching behind Mao’s ears without meeting his eyes. “What’s the harm in investigating? Unless Huang has an actual mission for us today.”
“No orders from on high today. I high-tailed it here when Mao called us together with an ‘urgent request’ because I have nothing better to do with my Sunday than hang out with you lot.”
That gets Hei to smile even with his eyes.
Mao’s pupils widen in their purple pools. “I think the syndicate should be very interested in apprehending CD-135. I can tell you why, if you would let me get to the best part: a cat who escaped from her apartment said it had a whole shelf of books on contractor science.”
Yin stands and recites, “Bara no Maurice Collab Event at Golden Hour Café, this weekend only. All eligible visits will receive a limited picture card with one of nine possible characters, while supplies last.”
“That café just so happens to be diagonally across the intersection from where CD-135 is staying,” Mao lobbies.
“Ugh.” Huang rubs his chin and gives the smallest possible smirk. “There’s fish in the Arakawa this time of year. With all the gunk that leaks in there from the gate, I’ll be the next to catch a two-headed sweetfish. There ought to be a place to get a permit nearby.”
“If that’s the pretext you need to come along, then so be it. I appreciate it.”
Once everyone is in the car, Mao enters the address for a complex called Donichi Mansions into the dash-mounted GPS. The drive is uneventful, even if the route passes a statistically improbable number of Pizza Hut locations.
At Mao’s instruction, Huang parks near an empty alley a couple blocks out. Mao yowls from the sidewalk and a crowd begins to form, one dozen then two dozen cats eager to see him.
“Had no idea you were so popular, like some kinda cat playboy,” Huang says. “It’s weird to see you like this.”
“I try to keep it professional on the job, but I’ll have you know I’m somewhat of a dandy among others of Felis catus.” Mao lifts his chin only slightly smugly. “Now, my informant Soseki should be around here somewhere. Ah!”
Soseki is a fluffy orange tabby, shaggy-haired and one or two convenience store onigiris eaten out of the garbage on the side of pudgy. He meows greetings.
“He’s skittish around new people, so why don’t you all scout out the area while I get a sit-rep.”
Donichi Mansions is an L-shaped building about a dozen stories tall. A poster in a ground-level window urges would-be renters to “LIVE THE WEEKEND LIFESTYLE EVERY DAY!”
Across the intersection, a line has already formed at Golden Hour Café. Cosplayers in Rococo dress and stiff wigs hold stuffed elephants, giraffes, penguins, and chipmunks. This event would have been fun for Hei to infiltrate as a part-timer, but there’s no guarantee that CD-135 would have come just because it was close to where she lives. On top of that, the confrontation could have become tediously public. Having to track down that many people for memory erasure— just the thought makes him tired and it wouldn’t have been his job! He concludes it’s better that the option wasn’t explored.
“Hopefully the line will settle down. Since this is the second day, most of the fans will have gotten their fix, right? Were you expecting it to be this popular?”
Yin nods. She had sent an observer spirit before they left.
She recites, “Sub Rosa forums. Thread title: How is the event? User LoveInTheTimeOfCholerbones replied: ‘Omg omg after three hours I got the hidden Tusks of Temptation arc card! See my site for pics! The drink was delicious too. I could feel the passion in that fruit! Just wish the venue had better cell reception for my liveblog!”
“Very little in this world is worth waiting three hours for.” Huang swings open heavy glass doors to the Donichi Mansions lobby. Inside is a faint odor of paint, maybe three weeks dried.
“But what is, is worth waiting three decades for,” Hei volleys. Huang returns a scowl.
A woman with a blunt bob about three-fourths of the way into going gray gets into the elevator with them right as the door closes. After once-over to judge that they don’t live here, she says, “The thirteenth floor walkway offers a good view of the rivers. You and your kids can check it out.”
“Oh! Okay.” Huang fumbles to press the button for the thirteenth floor. “Floor?”
“Thirteen.” Her smile lines deepen as she winks at him.
Huang opens his mouth but no words come out.
“Thank you ma’am,” Hei dons the agreeable mask and mannerisms of his Li persona. “My sister and I were thinking this would be a good place for our father to live as he ages.”
“Aren’t you good kids.” The bell dings and the doors open. “I live in 1301, by the way.”
Huang, Hei, and Yin give a nod-bow as she turns.
“Not a word.” Huang says as red rises from his collar and tea-kettles play in his ears. “Not a goddamn peep from either of you.”
Someone on this floor is practicing the trumpet. A happy tune leaks into the air, no note held long enough to be somber. Before them, the wide channel of the Arakawa meanders languidly between parks on either shore, while the smaller Sumida is more erratic. Hei could get used to the sparkle of so much water. This would be a nice place to live, if the syndicate would foot the bill, and if he wouldn’t have the memory of what they were likely going to do.
“Wait,” Huang realizes. “Mao never said where—”
“No. If she was a contractor, I wouldn’t have let her get that far ogling you.”
By the shadows that pass over their faces, they both imagine an alternate series of events where Hei had to use his powers in the elevator. In that reality, they get stuck between floors and wait hours for maintenance to rescue them.
“Well,” Huang says, deliberately wringing the awkwardness out of a scenario nearing its end, “How nice that my ‘children’ are looking out for me.”
The return to the alley is uneventful. What dozens of cats were there have dispersed, save for one licking clean a tin of sardines left by a restaurant’s kitchen door. She looks up and bobs her head to the side.
Yin finds them first, in a side passage off the alley. Soseki lies on the ground, posture sphinxlike, eyes alert. Mao straddles him from behind, a fold of orange neck between his teeth and arms around his waist.
“The cats are humping,” Yin observes.
Mao looks up and regains his composure as he dismounts. Souseki stretches his front legs but otherwise doesn’t move.
“Mrrrrow?” they both waver.
After nobody moves or speaks, Mao sighs. “I understand if it was uncomfortable to see your team member like that. Um.”
“Um,” Hei says. He wants to see what Mao will say. If he was embarrassed about it being a male cat, Hei would have settled for the explanation that the desires were an artifact of staying in his adopted body for so long.
“Soseki has been ostracized by the other cats since he escaped, and—” Mao realizes he isn’t helping his case and gives a more prickly response. “I spread my legs and lick my asshole in front of you guys all the time and this is what you find awkward?”
“No… Once, I stumbled upon two pale moons aglow at the edge of hell,” Yin mumbles cryptically.
Hei immediately understands exactly which blond telescope enthusiast it was that one of Yin’s observer spirits had caught him with. Revealing that would be a gesture of understanding, an expression of commonality to Mao, but also a blisteringly bright light shone on parts of him that recoil from the output of a candle. Hei is much too private for that; any reaction he has churns like mantle under crust, crushing pressure and glowing heat concealed far below the surface.
Huang pinches the bridge of his nose and drags his hand down over his face. “It’s different now than when I grew up. Yin’s show, all that stuff? ‘Love between man and elephant,’ love between cat man and cat… cat, it’s all on the table. It doesn’t matter what species you are anymore.”
Yin endorses Huang’s attempt at allyship and the thousand foot view of the show’s premise with a nod.
Unstated but loudly thought is that Mao has stumbled into a tentative loophole in the rule against consorting with informants. The rules have been flexible in the past, but the exceptions have been short-lived. Maybe the cat-shaped hole will last longer.
Mao and Hei return to Donichi Mansions while Yin and Huang go their own ways.
In the relative privacy of the elevator, Mao shares what he knows. “CD-135’s name is Kochidori Narumi. Her powers are unknown but presumed deadly. Her remuneration is unknown as well, but also presumed deadly… to cats. Until recently, she was a marine biology grad student at Todai.”
“Why does her name sound familiar?”
“Kochidori, those are the little running beach birds that nest in the sand and pretend to have a broken wing to keep predators away,” Mao notes wryly. “Instead of just having their chicks somewhere else.”
Hei doesn’t know where Mao found the time to learn about birds beyond the sparrows and crows that everybody knows. He understands the birds, if not directly sympathizing with them. Family bonds are where unreasonable actions gather so reliably you can plan for it. Instead of that, he shrugs and says, “Millions of years of evolution led to that strategy.”
“Millions of years, my toe pads!” Mao laughs, pauses to lick his arm, and laughs some more. “I ate one once, before we understood the server connection. Couldn’t say it tasted good, but it was an easy catch.” He gives Hei a smug look to let him know who he has deemed the winner of the conversation.
Hei rings the buzzer for apartment 1305.
Narumi has tired butterscotch-hued eyes, a thick black choker, and a t-shirt for a band called FRIGHT MØLT that Hei has never heard of. Beneath the thorn-spangled logo, three band members wear rubber bird masks over their faces and have draped wing patterns over their arms.
She gives Hei a second to explain himself.
“Hi there, I’m Li. I was here touring units and found this cat in the stairwell. He’s a little tubby, but quite cute, right?” he says innocently, making Mao wave his paws in different directions. “No one has recognized him, so if I make it around this floor, I’m going to keep him for a bit, maybe post cute photos online. Doesn’t he look like he would enjoy wearing traditional clothing?”
No one would believe even the most gentle-hearted stranger would knock 13 floors of apartments for a lost cat, which is why Hei says it. It’s so preposterous to lie about it that it must be the truth.
Narumi cups Mao’s face and rubs his cheeks. “Hi baby! Oh, you are so, so cute,” she coos. “But you’re not mine. What’s your name, I wonder? Momo? Murasaki? Mariano?”
Mao plays along, purring as his head lolls back. It’s great to be a cat.
“Well, if he’s not yours, do you know—” Hei starts.
“There’s no need to keep that up. I know why you’re here. It was bound to happen eventually, right? Come in, let’s talk. Water? Tea? I might have a can of coffee.”
“We’re not here to hurt you,” Hei leaves room for an unspoken yet. It’s entirely possible her connection to cats is teleporting them to far-off animal shelters where they’re incommunicado but otherwise unharmed. Maybe Narumi will be the rare bird of a contractor that doesn’t end up dead after a run-in with the Black Reaper. They aren’t on a mission, after all. No order has been issued.
As Hei works off his shoes, he appraises how lived-in this place looks relative to the pristine state of his own apartment. Bookshelves filled with papers, clothes tossed over pillows with indents where bodies lay against them, a dishrack where a damp towel sags across some plates on their side.
He eyes a bookshelf near the little pile of shoes. “Fourier Transform Applications for Beta Garching Waves,” He reads the neon-green title of a black-covered book. Similar titles are scattered throughout the apartment. “That sounds confusing. Few contractors understand the research behind it. I sure don’t.”
“If it wasn’t for the research, I wouldn’t be a contractor. Do you remember when the Shinagawa Aquarium used electric eels to light up a Christmas tree? I was involved with that. The week before, I had proven that eel models could be used to approximate false star activity. It sounds cool, right?”
The silence lengthens until Hei realizes she expects an answer. “Anyone who deals with contractors would want to exploit it.”
“It may surprise you to learn that I didn’t care about it at all. I just applied for a grant from PANDORA. That’s how I fell into this world. I always thought my life’s work would be reorganizing messy clades of tropical river organisms, but the god who hung the false stars thought differently. After Heaven’s Gate, and especially after Hell’s Gate, funding started to dry up for anything that wasn’t related to contractors in some way.”
She starts to sniffle, but talks through it. “Miu and I were going to move somewhere with a view of the ocean.”
Hei lifts a hand to comfort her, but pulls it back. This sob story is touching if it’s true, but it could be a giant ruse. He still doesn’t know what her power is. Maybe telling the story is part of it, or worse, her remuneration.
Narumi continues, “Then a couple months ago, I was pulling another consecutive all-nighter because deadlines piled up like pancakes— I was so delirious, I thought I accepted my contract in a dream. I only stopped wishing I could wake up out of this once Miu became a contractor too.”
“You’ve mentioned her twice. Who is Miu? Someone special to you?” Mao asks.
Narumi doesn’t startle when words come out of the cat.
“She was my girlfriend, my light, my everything, that other contractors took away from me. We had both moved alone to Tokyo for high school, started dating after meeting in theater club, and stayed here together for college. When I went to grad school, she started working. Do you know what she was doing at work? Looking at how the appearance of contractors affects risk.”
Narumi’s lips press and thin. “Life insurance, actuarial tables, that sort of thing. And then she became the statistic herself. So don’t go looking for her. And if you have to kill me, at least tell someone that she mattered— her family back home didn’t want her, but her chosen family here loved her dearly. I loved her dearly.”
“It sounds like you created meaningful bonds and cared for her very much. How did she die? Contractors don’t kill unless they get something.” Mao is in information gathering mode and Narumi wants to talk. They can both be satisfied.
“My remuneration is to skin a cat, whiskers to tail, with my bare hands. You probably knew it was something like that, since you used yourself as a decoy. It’s a messy process, so I try to find a private place to do it. It’s also hard to find cats when your powers are in the refractory period and the remunerative compulsions kick in. So things are, you might say, premeditated.”
Mao’s claws dig into Hei’s leg. “You contemptible piece of shit!”
Hei restrains him in a tight overhand hug. Mao bites at his wrists. Narumi continues.
“Miu would get cats from our alley and bring them to my jobsites. It was really a last resort, but she understood that this was our life now. She helped me experiment. I didn’t want to hurt anyone unless I had to. I tried killing beetles, fish, hamsters, snakes, birds, but all that did was multiply the death. In the end, we don’t get to pick what the contract forces us to do, so hate me if you want. What I’m trying to say is, I’m really sorry about your friends. They were your friends, right, the ones that went missing?”
Mao’s whiskers twitch. “Not at first. But then a couple weeks ago you took an orange one. He’s— cat’s don’t— ugh, I guess he’s like my boyfriend. He’s a little oafish and easily swayed by leftover onigiri.“
“Onigiri…orange… oh, Simba! I try not to nickname the cats, but I remember him. He was proud but also strangely submissive once I had him trapped. I’m glad he got to live. I hope you believe me when I say that. It was hard when the cats were cute. That day’s job was just across Senju New Bridge. Miu showed up early, before I could finish off the other contractor. She— she could make little pieces of metal move impossibly quickly. A thousand tiny makeshift knives that fly like bullets, if you will. And, well, you can imagine.”
“I’m sorry for your loss,” Hei says. “Did you get to hold her close as she died?” He hopes the odd specificity of the question will carry the rest of his intended meaning, that she would not be alone in her experience.
Narumi’s lip quivers as she nods. She stands, maybe to get water or tissue, then turns towards a black case with silver latches. Tension coils in Mao and Hei’s limbs.
“Um, is it okay if I play my trumpet? It calms me down.”
“Ah, so it must have been you we heard earlier.” Mao says without strain in his voice “Isn’t it an odd thing to stop a conversation with guests to play an instrument? A reasonable person might get suspicious.”
Narumi’s fingers twitch. She folds her hands beneath her forearms. “I’m going to play it. I just need to.”
She purses her lips against the silver mouthpiece. Before she can rasp out a single note, the door yawns open. Another Narumi walks in dressed for a normal day of mid-level management work, except that her light blazer is spattered with blood. Her tired eyes are a bitter coffee brown.
Mao hisses and presses himself against Hei. “You must be the real Narumi. Have you remunerated already?”
“Don’t worry, Black Cat, Black Reaper.” Narumi shows her hands, where red stains trace the arc of her fingernails. “This blood is here because I’ve already paid that price.”
Hei stands, scooping Mao in one arm. “Perhaps we’ve overstayed our welcome.”
He is ignored.
“I told you not to do this, Miu,” real Narumi says, reaching into her pocket. “I told you from the beginning this was foolhardy.”
“Only because you made it that way! I told you to leave so they wouldn’t catch you here. You knew I was going to do this, and you came back for me anyway!” Miu-as-Narumi protests.
“I knew you would try to throw yourself away. How could I leave you behind knowing that you would be so reckless? You brought the syndicate into our home!”
Narumi’s eyes glow. She scatters iron filings from her pocket in a wide arc in front of her, as if sowing seeds and not metallic death. Instead of falling, they accelerate outward into walls, floor, and flesh.
Tiles crack. Plates shatter. Hei’s eyes flash. The air around him glows a livid blue with a shield of magnetic current. Filings collide with the invisible barrier and drop from the air.
Miu has no such defenses. She falls to her knees and clutches her stomach, where a deep cut severs the costumed members of FRIGHT MØLT from their legs. Her hands shine with her own blood.
Narumi kneels and holds Miu’s cheeks. “And now, as you do this, you wear my face.”
Miu leans forward so their foreheads touch. “Damnit, you— this happened because you couldn’t resist coming back for me.” She smiles. “You know this isn’t the ending I would have written for us.”
She reaches for her trumpet. Maybe addressing her remunerative urges would make leaving this world, leaving Narumi less painful. Her choice is sensible for this moment: while the rest of her life puddles around her in an ever-growing pool, she plays a couple measures of Taps for herself before trailing off and tossing the instrument aside.
“To hell with this remuneration business. I’m breaking my contract. Kobayashi Issa wrote, Crumpling the briny shore into wastepaper, plovers fly. I want you to fucking fly, Narumi.”
For all her insistence, Miu flies first. The light leaves her eyes. Her belly no longer rises with breath.
Hei turns to Narumi with fingers curled, ready to use his powers again.
“No,” Mao says. “She did try to kill us, but she’s not a target.”
Narumi ignores them with an observation of her own. “Fitting for the death poem of someone whose power is becoming other people to be a quote and not an original, isn’t it?“
Hei blinks, disgust wrinkling his mouth. “You killed the person who loved you the most, who you were supposed to love the most,” he presses out through clenched teeth, “and now you have the gall to blame her for what you did?”
Narumi examines her beloved’s body like she intends to pickpocket it. “She was a liability. If she was going to die, better she go by my hand than yours.”
“Is it really?” Hei challenges. “You and Miu could have run away together. You could have left Tokyo behind for Hokkaido, Okinawa, wherever you wanted.”
“Mister Black Reaper, we both know that whatever false god is behind these false stars does not let us rest. Miu was never going to last long as a contractor. Her heart was too big for her to be one of us. I’m glad she got to die with it intact.”
Narumi grips one hand tightly with the other. “Now pardon me, I need to go before I can no longer control the urge to flay your friend.” She reaches out to pet Mao, but stops herself. “Don’t worry, Black Cat, I’ll do it somewhere far away from here. Do you know anyone in Gifu? Maybe I’ll go there. It’s land-locked. I’ll hate it.”
She leaves without closing the door. A shiver writhes through Mao’s body, the underside of his integumentaries tingling.
Hei sits down again, his mouth dry as thirst creeps up his throat. Miu never followed through on her offer of something to drink. He rubs the downy fur behind Mao’s ears, satisfied when Mao’s tail starts to whip back and forth.
Mao hops from Hei’s lap to the floor, curving his path to avoid the blood now growing tacky as it touches air.
“By one metric, Narumi killed her girlfriend. By another, she watched herself die and didn’t even close her own corpse’s eyes. How brutal. It makes you understand why contractors are treated as suspect and reviled.” With two baps by a soft paw, Mao lowers Miu’s eyelids.
“She’s just cleaved off the largest part of her heart,” Hei says. “It’s reasonable that she doesn’t want to cry out in front of an audience of strangers.”
Not long after, Yin and Huang arrive, gasping for breath.
“Whole block— a dead zone— couldn’t call— elevator cable cut— fast as we could.” Huang’s round breaths style his explanation into terse lines of verse.
“Catch your breath. There’s nothing to see here but heartbreak and a body,” Mao says. “Here’s what to relay to the syndicate. We encountered two contractors. One, who is now dead, was impersonating the other, who just left for parts unknown.”
Huang takes a minute to survey the damage in the apartment with practiced detachment. He speaks again when his pulse has slowed and his sweat has gone matte. “Before I got winded, I was gonna say that a mole at Pandora told us that CD-135 was a binary system. That info must be worthless now.”
“Maybe we can enlist some eel models to make that prediction. But yes, this non-mission is complete, as far as I’m concerned.” Mao says. “The cats of Adachi will no longer be hunted.”
In his relief there is melancholy, as much as a contractor is allowed. Adachi is safe, but now the cats of somewhere else are imperiled until the second half of CD-135 falls.
As they take the stairs down, Yin describes what transpired at the café. Someone had crocheted Maurice, not quite life-sized but still colossal, and managed to spill not one but two drinks on him at the same time. There were fisticuffs. There were cosplayers making out as a result of said fisticuffs. The scenario thing might have been an elaborate reference to something in the show.
“Five stars,” Yin concludes. “Except…”
“I didn’t end up going fishing,” Huang admits sheepishly. “I went to the event and had a drink sweet enough to give you diabetes by looking at it. And we didn’t get who we wanted.”
They turn their cards in unison. Amélie the Giraffe and Weiskopf the Penguin look flirtatiously up from under a thick gloss finish. A hint of glitter winks in the stairwell light.
“Better luck next time,” Hei says with full knowledge that the pop-up ends at closing time today.
Soseki is waiting unbothered in the car when they arrive, spread long on his side and half-dozing. The windows are cracked open just wide enough that a rowdier cat could fit a paw through. A jazz track with prominent piano plays on the stereo.
“I thought he would like this,” Huang says as if it needs explanation.
Mao beholds Soseki’s indifferent contentment. “This is so thoughtful. Why, I’m surprised.”
Huang spends ten seconds guffawing instead of simply taking the compliment. “I mean, it’s not like I would have taken your boyfriend— uh, tomfriend?— to a crime scene! I’ve been around, I have taste!”
Once they return to the playground, Mao and Soseki leap from the car together. They walk with their cheeks touching, their tails mutually curled, even their whiskers crossed.
“Hey, one more thing,” Huang says. “We brought back some grub.”
From somewhere, Yin reveals a diffuse gold box printed with Golden Hour Café’s sunset logo. She opens it slowly to reveal a beautiful slice of cake positioned sensuously on a strip of glossy acetate collar.
“Pink Elephant Chiffon. ¥635. Raspberry, banana, and cream cheese frosting on the only thing more delicate than a pachyderm’s heart: a lighter-than-air cake,” she quotes.
“I don’t like sweets,” Hei says, not that anyone would accuse him of saccharine overabundance.
“Not for you.” Yin drops to one knee and sets the box on the ground. “For him.”
Mao’s tail rises. He takes a polite nibble and comes away with a moustache of buttery frosting.
“You can have some too,” he meows to Soseki, who obliges. “Try the raspberry. I think you’ll like it, but it’s not for me,” Mao lies through his whiskers. The brazen raspberries, with each drupelet advancing a tart offensive across his tastebuds that can no longer taste sweetness, are his favorite part of this dessert.
Soseki takes a bite and purrs his contentment. Raspberries have been unseated. This is Mao’s new favorite part.