Page 17 of Green City Wars

That’s when it happens, under cover of her babble. A flash of grey, a suggestion of motion simultaneously big and swift. Lulu’s chatter ends in a hoo! Just an astonished bird noise. Skotch is just starting to react. The sense of it, the experience of it, seems to come to him not through eyes or nose or the bristle of his fur but some part of his brain that predates the bioengineering. Raccoons aren’t pure prey. They hang about the waist of the food chain. But being small in a world with wolves and dogs and bears has given him a slice of it, and that’s what’s screaming at him now.

Lulu shudders. Those feathers—a moment ago a serious diplomatic incident to even ruffle—are all awry, several scattered about the floor of the barrel. A single grey paw keeps her pinned. Skotch sees the claws arching from it, extended just enough to prick at her breast. Her eyes are wide. For a moment he thinks she’s died, just the shock of it, but some Strains have this reaction to stress. They overload. They play dead. Not the cunning stratagem of a clever beast, but a blankness rising up from the deep wells of their being to overwhelm every other instinct. Be still. Be dead. Live ones are more fun for them. Maybe they’ll get bored.

A cat. A lean grey cat, here in the rat’s nest. Cocking her head at Mother Murnau—the ancient rodent surely just a chewy mouthful. Not a hungry look, though. A querying one.

“Do I kill her now, or what?” the cat drawls. A slight slur to the words, but words, still. No trained animal. Not a Gehirner, either. There are no Gehirner cats because Gehirner are service animals, the busy workers of the green city’s infrastructure. Who ever heard of a cat doing an honest day’s work?

Skotch hears the faintest of sounds come from Lulu, just a panicky little judder from inside her ribs. The cat’s head shifts to peer down at her, and the tiny bell on her collar tinkles merrily. Didn’t make a sound as the monster approached. Didn’t rattle the slightest warning when she pounced. But she can make it jingle when she wants, knows exactly how to move.

“Tybelle, my dear,” says Murnau, and Skotch can’t quite believe what he’s seeing. The rat matriarch, so calm in claw-swipe range of the cat. And maybe she’s not really that calm. Maybe amongst the anxious rat-stink rising from Eddi and Loui and the rest there’s a tiny streak of Murnau’s own fear. But she didn’t get to sit in the tin cup by not facing her fears, and that’s why her gang has a cat on the payroll. And not just some ragged stray that would be fair game for every gang of Gehirner vigilantes. Tybelle has a collar. A human owns her. The worst thing.

Engineered cats were a fad. Some of those who worked on the Little Helpers were cat people. As in people who liked cats, not cats that thought like people, though the one led to the other. Engineered cats are something of an amateur effort. They make very challenging pets because you can push a lot of boundaries with an enhanced brain and thumbs. Some studies claim some sort of hyper-toxoplasmosis was behind the engineering venture, but since nobody’s really established that even the regular kind has any effect on humans that’s probably just fantasist-talk.

Regular cats are a threat to the unwary Gehirner, of course, but Gehirner are smart and regular cats are, relatively, not. An engineered cat like Tybelle is a holy terror, but without that collar she’d be brought down like a vampire cornered by the torches and the pitchforks. But the collar is problematic. The collar invokes Rule One.

Tybelle is not a part of the Gehirner system. She’ll never pay any mausgelt, she doesn’t need to worry about consequences. She could run riot through the city’s civilian ecosystem on a gleeful murder spree. And if anyone raised a hand against her, well, she has an owner, and the owner would complain. And while outdoor cats are strongly discouraged in Neuwien-Grunstadt, those owners of enhanced pets are often influential people. Nobody wants humans peeling back the surface of the Gehirner world and maybe discovering it isn’t all just obedient simplicity. Easier to let the cat have her tribute of blood.

And the other problem—the one right now most keenly relevant to Skotch—is showcased when the cat flicks the ring on Lulu’s foot. “What do you think?” Tybelle murmurs. “Will I get”—flick, ting—“into trouble?” Flick, ting. “Will your owner”—flick, ting—“complain to mine? Who has the better address, do we think?” Bringing her face—her great green gaze, her fangs— right up to Lulu’s wide staring eye. The pigeon shudders again and Skotch thinks she might just go from feigning death to actually dying of fright, right there and then.

“Listen,” he says, “I don’t have the mouse, Mother. Seriously. I chased him out of that mess up in Ferdinand’s but he found a hole and I lost him. I’m still hunting him, sure, but I don’t have him. What, I’ve got some place I can stow a live mouse, all of a sudden?”

“Unless it’s not a live mouse you want,” Murnau says idly.

“It is,” Skotch says flatly. “That’s my contract.” Probably that’s revealing Uzco trade secrets, but you have to give if you want to get. “You’re worried about him being dead, you look out for a damn stoatweasel called Szerky. She’s after his guts, for sure.”

Murnau looks from him to Tybelle, as though about to suggest a change of cat-toy. “Does the pigeon,” she asks, “have any more to say?”

The terrified wordless rumble in Lulu’s breast suggests the negative. Murnau makes a little twitch of her snout and Tybelle lifts her paw. The faintest scent of blood troubles everyone’s sensitive noses as she cleans her claws. Lulu wobbles to her feet, puts herself behind Skotch, shaking.

A couple of new animals intrude into the chamber: a rat and a mouse, both wearing weird, purple robes, fancy as anything. Tybelle offers her paw to them, and they assiduously clean her claws, file the tips to a new sharpness. Her personal retinue, her Kit Kat Cult, just like most of the kept kitties have around to pander to their every wish. Skotch feels his usual shudder of revulsion at the abject fawning, never quite sure if it’s choice or some parasite-prompted slavery.

A long, whistling breath from Mother Murnau, satisfied that Lulu is well in her place, and her tame killer’s presence is focusing Skotch’s attention wonderfully. “What is Herr Washbear worth, Eddi?”

“Thirty-seven maus, Mother,” the subordinate rat replies promptly.

“So much! Who’d have thought the world had such a use for you, Herr Washbear,” Murnau says.

If this is a prelude to her working out she can easily afford a dead raccoon out of her loose change, then Skotch isn’t going to make it easy. A cat and a raccoon having it out inside a barrel can cause a lot of collateral damage. They weigh in at close to the same, not so one-sided a fight. He stands tall, bristles wide, as much racoon as he can project out into the enclosed space. Tybelle watches him with clear amusement, her tail curling this way and that. Eyes wide, pupils narrow, the arousal of a predator.

“And you, Eddi?” Murnau asks.

“Two maus, Mother,” Eddi says.

“And me, Eddi?”

“Two maus,” the other rat spits.

“And Doctor Meece, our country cousin?”

“One maus, Mother.” The baseline unit of mausgelt, the least of all possible Strains. Low biomass, large litters, swift-breeding. All the measures of a life’s value. How much does it cost to replace this worker. Murder a mouse, in public, in cold blood, that’s what its Gehirner community would demand from you and yours. And, once that moiety is paid, no more. Justice done, the blood washed away. That’s law, amongst the Gehirner of Neuwien. That’s the price, because otherwise it’s feuds and grudges and complicated process and that all gets in the way of making the city work and fulfilling the obligations inherent in Rule One.

“One maus,” Mother Murnau echoes. “Is that just, Skotch? A scientist, a wise rodent. Trained up in the ways of the Farm Projects. Surely that counts for something, in this wicked world?”

Skotch says nothing. He knows it doesn’t. Mausgelt doesn’t deal in imponderables. To every Strain, a value. One maus is what Szerky would have to pay, if they catch her with her jaws clamped in Meece’s throat. Two is what the system would demand if she served Mother Murnau the same way. And if Eddi and Loui and the others went after her for vengeance after the gelt was paid, then they’d be in the wrong. Not that being in the wrong isn’t their natural state most of the time anyway, but Skotch at least appreciates the different flavours of wrongness in those two scenarios.

“Our country cousin has come to the big city,” Mother Murnau says. “He finds all hands turned against him. On the run, frightened, lost. Doesn’t your heart go out to him, Herr Washbear? Our hearts do. Mice and rats are just one big family within the Muridae, after all.”

Skotch knows damn well that rats kill mice for a pastime. No love lost between them. He’s not going to call Mother Murnau a liar to her face, though.