“Anyway,” West was saying, popping open another beer as her weird-ass cat continued staring out at the night, “I’m chasing him south on Seventy-seven at about ninety miles an hour? Can you believe it? He should be in jail right now, you ask me.”

She took another swallow of Miller Genuine Draft, wondering if she should eat something. For the first time since she’d had the flu several years ago, West was not hungry. She felt light and foreign inside, and awake. She thought back on how much caffeine she’d had this day, wondering if that might be the problem. It wasn’t. Hormones, she decided, even though she knew that the beast was no longer raging and in fact had been quiet most of the day, on its way back to its cave until the moon was in position again.

King Usbeecee was a potentate of few words, and Niles had to watch carefully to hear what the King was saying. Sunrise and sunset were the King’s most chatty times, when windows flashed white and gold in a firestorm of pontifications. At night, Niles mainly studied the red light winking on top of the crown, a beacon saying to him, repeatedly, wink-wink-wink. After a barely perceptible pause, three more winks, and so on. This had gone on for weeks, and Niles knew that the code was directing him to a three-syllable enemy, whose armies this very minute were marching closer to the Queen City that the King ruled.

“Well, since you’re so friendly,” West said in a snippy tone to her cat, “I’m going to do laundry.”

Startled, Niles stretched and stared at her, his eyes crossed as a similar firestorm flared inside his head. What was it the King had said? What, what, what? Earlier this evening, when Niles had been watching the King send him signals with the sun, hadn’t the King flashed an agitated pattern, light going round and round the building, back and forth, back and forth, very similar to how the owner’s big white box worked when she did laundry? A coincidence? Niles thought not. He jumped off the sill, then the counter, and followed his owner into the utility room. The fur stood up on his back when she dipped into pants pockets, pulling out money before wadding clothes and dunking them into the machine’s basket. Other flashes of insight exploded in Niles’s brain. He frantically rubbed against his owner’s legs and nipped her, sharpening his claws on her thigh, trying to tell her.

“Goddamn it!” West shook the cat off. “What the hell has gotten into you?”

• • •

Brazil lay back in the sleeping bag on the floor of his new one-bedroom unfurnished apartment. He had a headache and couldn’t seem to get enough water. He’d been drinking beer for two days, and this frightened him. His mother had probably started exactly the same way, and here he was following her path. He knew enough from all the interest in genetics these days to deduce that he might have inherited his mother’s proclivity for self-destruction. Brazil was deeply depressed by this realization. He was ashamed of his behavior and knew for a fact that West had only humored a drunk kid, and the performance would never be repeated.