“I can walk!” I say, trying to shrug off their grip. But they keep their hands on my shoulders, perp-walking me out. I feel like a criminal. Jinx, where are you?

Hope drifts further and further away as we reach the huge, wide-open lobby, its once comforting plant-and-light-filled interior now a place of dread.

But Eric stops a few feet away from the front doors, and the security team stops too. I crane my neck to see what’s happening.

And that’s when I see him: Jinx, standing in the middle of Moncha HQ atrium. The cat baku looks so small among the huge surroundings, but his presence is big enough to stop us all in our tracks.

I just hope he’s brought his army.

“Oh good,” Eric growls. “You brought that thing straight to me. Now I don’t have to go looking for it to destroy it.” He snaps his fingers. “Security, get that baku,” says Eric to the guards behind me.

>>Are you ready?

Ready.

“Jinx, do it!” I cry out loud.

He sprints toward us, and I stumble backward. My arms flail in the air, swinging like a windmill, throwing my captors off balance. Then the atrium is a flurry of commotion as we’re surrounded by a sea of cats—a mixture of real and baku—all of them under Jinx’s command. They pour out of the walls, having hidden in the nooks and crannies meant for bakus. Jinx melts in among them, disappearing as they swarm the lobby floor, crawling over the sofas and jumping over railings, surrounding the feet of Eric, Monica, and the security team.

The security bakus are instantly confused. They can’t attack the real creatures because of their built-in safety systems, but they also can’t seem to tell the real Jinx from the doppelgängers. They are able to find the other cat bakus, and they disable them with a swipe of their paws. But there’s still too many.

Even I am taken aback. When Jinx told me that he would be able to confuse Eric by bringing other cats into the building, a cat army, I was expecting three or four other cat bakus—nothing like this. I certainly didn’t realize that while I was away, Jinx was able to befriend real cats—the ones that haunted the parks of the city, the descendants of pets that people used to keep before bakus became the norm.

Eric is aghast. He tries to shield Monica from the wave of cats, but they’re covering her now, crawling up her arms and legs. She stays stock still, unperturbed by this strange encounter.

But Eric can see one particular cat aiming for the leash at Monica’s ear. He lunges toward Jinx, but I jump into action too. I barrel my way through the cats and into him.