“Yes?” I call.

“Hello, Bob. Got a minute?” It’s Pete. He spots Andy: “Oh, hello.”

I give up any thought of getting any actual work done, shut down and save the VM, and push my keyboard away. “You might as well both make yourselves at home. Pay no attention to the hairy squatter, it’s going to the Cat and Dog—”

“Oh hello,” says Pete, kneeling and peering under my desk. “Aren’t you a fine one?”

He is answered by a curious chirrup. I glance at Andy.

“Has it been positively vetted?” he asks.

“Very droll.” The vicar is allowing his index finger to be sniffed from the shadows.

“I’m serious,” Andy adds. “Strange animals, lurking around our back door, waiting to be taken in—could it be bugged?”

“What, you mean like the crazy CIA project from the sixties? Electric Kitty? No, Acoustic Kitty?”

Andy shrugs. “Or like our paper clips. Destiny-entangle it with a littermate, keep littermate in a summoning grid, anything one cat hears the other cat hears also. You just have to figure out a way of making it sing.”

“Well that’s a—”

Pete stands up, holding a buzzing black furball. He looks at me accusingly. “You are not going to take Spooky here to a cat shelter! You are going to take—er—her home and give her the love and affection she so obviously deserves.” He scritches the little monster under its chin: it buzzes like a badly grounded transformer.

I close my eyes for a moment and open my inner eye. I stare at Pete, and the thing in his arms. Human. Cat. Human. Cat. No doubled vision: it’s a cat, singular. A solitary diurnal ambush hunter with good hearing and binocular vision and a predilection for biting the neck of its prey in half while disemboweling it with the scythe-like claws on its hind legs. Basically it’s a velociraptor with a fur coat and an outsize sense of entitlement. Right now it has convinced Pete that it is harmless, but I know better: just give them thumbs and in no time at all they’ll have us working in the tuna mines, delivering cans from now until eternity. (Hey, wait a minute, doesn’t this one have thumbs?)

I open my eyes again. “Andy, it’s just a cat, not a Black Chamber spy wearing a furry suit. Pete, we can talk about what to do with Spooky later.” (I can tell the name’s going to stick: What else do you call a stray cat that decides to adopt a secret intelligence agency?) “Drag up a pew and I’ll give you an update on the meeting.” Pete, despite his extremely probationary status, has got clearance for OPERA CAPE by default, if only because it would be impossible for him to mentor Alex without it, and Andy was in on the original Code Blue.