Page 46 of Green City Wars

Then it’s up with the road hatch, bundle Lulu through. Locate the hatch on the carriage underside and slide it open. Bundle Lulu through that, her claws flexing weakly as she tries to help him. By then the carriage is moving off. He doesn’t even have time to close either hatch behind them, but they’re on a timer and will do the work themselves.

Around him, the air sparks. His pelt frizzes with static and the tines of Lulu’s feathers shiver. He scrabbles above them, hoping desperately that they’re not about to bring the wrath of the world down on themselves.

Even though it’s not ever to be used when the carriage is filled with humans—let alone actually underway—it’s still discreet. Positioned under a seat, in fact, so that when Skotch shoves his head up he sees only feet. Enormous human feet, rat-crushers, sandalled or sneakered or wearing shiny faleather shoes. A crackle of shock nips him from the rim of the hatch, reminding him of just where it is and why it isn’t healthy to remain there. Honestly not much choice, but this way he has a chance of getting by unseen.

He hauls Lulu up into the shadow of the seat. The human above shifts—he hears the creak, sees their feet move, one hooked round the other. The air is full of the low thunder that is human conversation. Because it’s mostly the local patois, Skotch catches the odd word that’s said the same way in Tiersprech, even after being adapted for the lowest common denominator of Gehirner vocal apparatus.

He is more than aware that he’s a raccoon, scared, filthy, and exhausted, and none of those is a fragrant thing to be—even to a human nose. All it would take is some offended giant to bend down and look under their seat to see what reeks. Neither he nor Lulu are little mice, to hide behind a seat stanchion.

“Do you even know,” Lulu says softly, “where this tram goes?”

He doesn’t. He somehow hadn’t thought of that. It was just the tram that arrived, and it’s pointed towards roughly the right quarter of the city, but that covers a lot of ground.

“There’s a display somewhere, that says the route and shows a map of where we are,” Lulu says. “These humans don’t know how to find their own apartments without a map or a device or something. He gets lost just going through a door and then coming back out.” And of course this is an area she knows better than he does: how humans work. And to a pigeon, finding your way across the city is something she probably doesn’t even need to think about. Internal compass and the sort of spatial memory that neither Skotch nor a human can imagine. And some of that is kicking in now, perhaps, giving her an idea of direction and distance despite the unheralded way they’re getting about.

He feels the tram take a turn, so that it’s no longer even heading in the proper direction. “I’ve screwed up,” he tells Lulu, but she’s pushing past him. Trying to get an eye past the rim of the seat and the ankles of the sitter. At first he’s going to pull her back, but she seems to have a definite idea, and that’s one more thing than he’s got.

The pair of them end up at the very edge of the underseat, shoved all the way over to one side so Skotch’s tail doesn’t tickle the human’s ankles. Lulu pokes her head out, very carefully, tilting it so one eye peers up. Up towards the carriage ceiling, up along the towering heights of the human travellers, as they read or talk or listen to earbuds or just stare out of the windows. Over those windows are displays, and mostly they seem to be advertising things, but some of them show a tangled multicoloured wiring diagram. Or, Skotch realises, maybe that’s the route. And the carriage definitely has a lot of red to it—just a sort of washed-out rust to Skotch—and one of the routes is picked out in that same shade. Next to it is a moving display that he eventually understands is a map of the city, seen from above, with a blue dot in the centre that is Where They Are. These are all sources of information, but he’s fighting to build them into something useful.

“Does this help us?” he whispers to Lulu.

She’s breathing hard, her upturned eye bulging. For a moment he thinks she’s having some sort of attack. She’s concentrating, though, and it occurs to him that the top-down view of the cityscape the map shows is information she’s very used to parsing. A literal bird’s eye view. Strange, honestly, that it’s become the default of humans, who never normally get to see it.

She shudders, slumps back, takes a deep breath. “Yes,” she whispers. “This can work for us. We stay on for … nine more stops. Then we change to the green line. Then three stops. Then we can walk. I think I can walk that far. To get to the Chapel.”

Skotch huddles close to her. “You sure?” he asks, but if she can’t, at least they’re on his turf then. Ratlabs and their influence left far behind. At that point he can improvise, if need be.

He sags down beside Lulu, and looks across the carriage right into the eyes of a human.

It’s a small human. An immature one. It—she?—he’s not certain of the gender honestly—is sitting on the seat opposite, booted feet off the floor and kicking. She’s looking straight at him, very wide-eyed. A raccoon and a pigeon on their morning commute, what’s the big deal? Or maybe it’s evening. Skotch finds he’s honestly lost track of time, what with all the running and fighting and menaces.

The human child opens her mouth, about to inform the big world about this flagrant breach of Rule One. Skotch—because he’s seen the move used in human media briefly glimpsed from through the crannies of his world—puts a single digit up to his snout and waggles his eyebrows.

The human’s eyes get even wider. It mimics the gesture, finger to its lips. Nods very solemnly. Accepts, without any question, that a pair of animals hitching a lift on this tram obviously have secret business they’re about. Becomes, perhaps, a character in some kind of story it likes, just for a moment. Lulu’s existence makes plain that humans, although they never want to see one, do appreciate stories about Gehirner from time to time.

They manage to get off the red tram. They find where the green tram is going to arrive—it’s all colour coded, which is of limited use to Skotch, but Lulu’s colour vision is literally superhuman so that balances out. They get on the green tram, and at that point maybe they could just have got to the Chapel by more regular means, but by then Skotch feels like there’s some sort of magic going on. He’s been plucked out of the regular Little Helper life. He’s riding the trams like he’s a human and about to go break some stocks or count some ants or whatever it is working humans do. Lulu is definitely fading by then. Spent most of the journey asleep, and only woke when the tram stopped the third time, suddenly panicking that they had to get off. They’re still very visible on the road after it moves away, and Skotch has to carry her into the shadows of a roadside grill, a rainwater sluice. He’d hoped it was one he could lift up or squeeze into, but it’s fixed. No access to the Gehirner world from there.

That’s where Tybelle finds them.

He hears the bell first. Of course he does. The bell that only rings when she wants it to. She’s right above them, sitting on the rim of the grate in plain view. Then she bends over, presents them with her upside-down face. And cats don’t actually grin, but there’s more than a hint of Cheshire about Tybelle’s expression right then.

“Fancy running into you here, Herr Washbear,” she says.

She pours herself down until she’s on her paws and facing them. A handful of rodents come with her, all of them wearing voluminous purple robes, some with pink bows at their necks. Votaries, a full half-dozen of them. Her Kit Kat Cultists, bound to the personality of their feline overlord. Skotch guesses that maybe some rats and mice have a whole weird thing for it, to be pinned under the paw of a predator that probably won’t actually eat you. Safety in the shadow of death. Or maybe it’s a sex thing, Skotch isn’t judging.

Maybe judging a little.

And he can’t run. Or actually he could absolutely run, just bowl the rats over and flee, and maybe get away. And leave one prime pigeon luncheon for Tybelle to tuck into.

He can fight, of course. As noted, raccoons kill cats sometimes. Only not this tired old raccoon and not this cat, he reckons. Like he found out last time, they knew what they were doing when they engineered Tybelle to be able to survive in a Gehirner world. Or, rather, they didn’t, because when they toughened up her genome they thought it was just to keep her safe from the nasty animals. The ailurophile geneticists didn’t think about the reverse interaction. Meaning their new Smartkitty 3.0 is more than suited to the role of killer for hire to a bunch of rat gangsters.

“You didn’t see Mooshkins,” Tybelle said, “but she saw you.”

And there had been a couple of cats, on the green line. They’d been in carriers. And they’d definitely smelled him, but all they’d been able to do was make a bit of fuss over it. He hadn’t even thought. Certainly hadn’t thought one of them would get on the phone to Tybelle the moment its owner got it home.

“Let me guess,” he says, “Mother Murnau sends her regards.” Putting Lulu behind him, squaring up to her.

Tybelle examines her claws. “Isn’t the pigeon going to fly, leave us to do this one-on-one?” An exaggeratedly wide-eyed look. “Oh no, did something happen to her? Is she grounded? How terribly sad, Herr Washbear. To have the gift of the sky taken from you.”