Also, even though Roberta had expressed no interest in getting a cat beforehand, she wanted to share Berkley. She would hoist Berkley by his little shoulders and carry him up to her bedroom, then close the door. Patricia would hear a pitiful groaning, even over Roberta’s loud music. But the door was locked. And the one time Patricia told her parents she thought Roberta was mistreating the cat, they referred back to the “no cat-related emergencies” clause. All Roberta would say was, “I’m teaching him to play the bongos.”

Patricia wanted to protect Berkley from her sister, but he hissed if Patricia even came close. “Come on,” Patricia kept pleading in her human voice. “You have to let me help you. I don’t want anything from you. I just want to keep you safe.” But the cat fled whenever Patricia approached. He’d taken to hiding in a million nooks and crawl spaces in the spice house, emerging when his bowl was full or he needed the litter box. Roberta had an uncanny ability to know when Berkley was out, and astounding reflexes for scooping him up.

* * *

ANOTHER DAY, ANOTHER Improvement. After lights-out, Patricia heard yowls that started high and got lower and more tragic, coming from Roberta’s room.

The next day, after school, Laurence came over to Patricia’s house, where he’d gotten used to the musty aromas of old seasonings. The two of them sat in the front parlor, where you could still see the outlines on the wall where spice bins had once hung, and worked on a solution to the problem of Berkley.

“If we could capture the cat, we could rig some kind of protective exoskeleton,” Laurence said.

“He’s suffered enough,” Patricia said. “I don’t want to torture him any more by prodding him and attaching some kind of gear to his body.”

“If I knew how to build nanomachines, I would make a swarm of them follow him around and form a shield when he was in distress. But my best attempts at nanomotors were sort of, um, lazy. You wouldn’t like lazy nanobots.”

They caught a glimpse of Berkley in the unilluminable darkness of the spice house’s upper attic, behind a great support beam. A glimmer of fur, a bright pair of eyes. Another time Berkley ran down the stairs, just as they threw themselves in his path. The two children wound up in a bruised heap at the bottom of the stairwell.

“Listen,” Patricia said from the bottom of the stairs. “Tommington was a good cat. I didn’t have anything against him. He was just doing his cat thing. I never meant him any harm, I swear.” There was no response.

“Maybe you should do a spell,” said Laurence. “Do some magic or something. I dunno.”

Patricia felt sure Laurence was laughing at her, but he didn’t have that kind of guile. She would have seen it on his face.

“I’m serious,” Laurence said. “This seems like a magic kind of problem, if there ever was one.”