“Wait. You did what?” I looked over her shoulder—spread across the table were the building plans Chip had printed for me. “You went through my pockets?”

“It was sticking out, dude. Besides, you and I have no secrets now.” She shuddered. “Except that food; close your mouth while chewing.”

I did, managing a necessary swallow.

“This is the basement of my building, right?” Lace continued. “No, don’t open your mouth. I know it is.” She stabbed at one corner of the printout. “And this is the rat pool below the health club. Did you get these plans from city records?”

“Mmm-hmm.”

“Very interesting. Because they don’t match reality. They don’t show a swimming pool at all.”

I swallowed. “You know how to read blueprints?”

“I know how to do research—and how to read.” Her fingers traced a grid of little squares that filled one corner of the page. Next to it, the words Storage Units were neatly written. “See? No pool.”

I studied the plans silently for a moment—remembering what Chip had said the day before. The pool was a few yards deep, just deep enough to reach the Underworld. Because someone had added a swimming pool, Morgan had been infected. Then me and Sarah and Maria …

“A simple little change,” I said softly. “How ironic.”

“Dude, screw irony. I just wanted you to see how clever we journalism students are.”

“You mean how snoopy you are.”

Lace just grinned, then ran her eyes across my crumpled clothes and up-sticking hair. “Dude, you are bed-raggled.”

“I’m what?”

“Bed-raggled. You know, you’re all raggled from being in bed.”

The gears in my head moved slowly. “Um, isn’t it bedraggled?”

“Yeah, no kidding. But my version makes more sense, you know?” Lace checked the time on her phone. “Anyway, I’ve got to run.” She swept up her bag from the table and headed for the door. Opening it, she turned back to face me.

“Oh, I don’t have any keys to this place.”

“Right. Well, I might get back pretty late tonight—I’m already behind schedule today.” I cleared my throat, pointing at the fruit crate by the door. “There’s an extra set in that coffee can.”

Lace stuck her fingers into the can, rummaging through laundry quarters until she pulled out a ring of keys.

“Okay. Thanks. And, um, see you tonight, I guess.”

I smiled. “See you tonight.”

She didn’t move for a moment, then shuddered. “Wow, all the discomfort of a one-night stand, with none of the sex. Later, dude.”

The door slammed shut as I stood there, wondering what exactly she’d meant by that. That she was uncomfortable with me? That she hated being here?

That she’d wanted to have sex the night before?

Then I realized something else: I had trusted the biggest secret in the world to this woman, and I didn’t even know her last name.

“There’s actually a form for that?”

“Well, not for cats specifically.” Dr. Rat tapped a few keys on her computer. “But yeah, here it is. ZTM-47/74: Zootropic Transmission to New Species.” She pressed a button, and her printer whirred to life.

I blinked. I had imagined a citywide Watch alert, an extermination team scrambling and heading for the West Side, maybe even a meeting with the Night Mayor. Not a one-page form.

“That’s it?” I asked.

“Look, it says, ‘Process immediately’ at the top. That’s not nothing.”

“But…”

“What are so you worried about, Kid? You secured the site, didn’t you?”

“Um, of course. But does this happen a lot? A whole new species getting infected?”

“Don’t you remember Plagues and Pestilence?” Dr. Rat said, disappointment on her face. “That whole week we spent on the 1300s?”

“Yes. But I don’t consider once in the last seven hundred years to be a lot.”

“Don’t forget werewolves, and those bats in Mexico last century.” She leaned back in her chair, staring up into the mysteries of the squeaking row of rat cages.

Dr. Rat’s lair sort of freaks me out, what with all the rattling cages of rodents, the brand-new textbooks and musty bestiaries, and the shiny tools lined up to one side of the dissection table. (There’s just something about dissection tables.)

“You know,” Dr. Rat said, “there might even be some history of a cat-friendly strain. The Spanish Inquisition thought that felines were the devil’s familiars and barbecued a whole bunch of them. Their theory was that cats stole your breath at night.”

“I can see where they got that one,” I said, remembering how often I’d woken up with all fourteen pounds of Cornelius sitting on my chest.

“But it’s paranoid to focus on a handful of transmissions, Cal,” Dr. Rat said. “You’ve got to keep your eye on the big picture. Evolution is always cranking out mutations, and parasites are constantly trying out new hosts—some kind of worm takes a crack at your intestines pretty much every time you eat a rare steak.”

“Oh, nice. Thanks for that image.”

“But most of them fail, Kid. Evolution is mostly about mutations that don’t work, sort of like the music business.” She pointed at her boom box, which was cranking Deathmatch at that very moment. “For every Deathmatch or Kill Fee, there are a hundred useless bands you never heard of that go nowhere. Same with life’s rich pageant. That’s why Darwin called mutations ‘hopeful monsters.’ It’s a crapshoot; most fail in the first generation.”

“The Hopeful Monsters,” I said. “Cool band name.”

Dr. Rat considered this for a moment. “Too artsy-fartsy.”

“Whatever. But this peep cat looked pretty successful to me. I mean, it had a huge brood and was catching birds to feed them. Doesn’t that sound like an adaptation for spreading the parasite?”

“That’s nothing new.” Dr. Rat threw a pencil in the air and caught it. “Cats bring their humans little offerings all the time. It’s how they feed their kittens; sometimes they get confused.”

“Yeah, well, this peep cat looked healthy. Not like an evolutionary failure.”

Dr. Rat nodded, drumming her fingers on the top of PNS’s cage. She’d already drawn the rat’s blood and attached the test tube to a centrifuge in the corner of her lair. It had spun itself into a solid blur, rumbling like a paint mixer in a hardware store.

“That’s not bad—given how many parasite mutations kill their hosts in a few days. But evolution doesn’t care how strong or healthy you are, unless you reproduce.”

“Sure … but this brood was really big. Thousands of them.”

“Maybe,” she said, “but the question is, how does this new strain get into another cat?”

“You’re asking me?” I said. “You’re the expert.”

She shrugged. “Well, I don’t know either, Kid. And that’s the deal-breaker. If the new strain doesn’t have a way back into another kitty final host, then the adaptation is just a dead end. Like toxoplasma in humans, it’ll never go anywhere.”

I nodded slowly, wrapping my brain around this. If this new strain couldn’t find a way to infect more cats, then it would die when the peep cat died. Game over.

I looked hopefully at Dr. Rat. “So we might not be facing a civilization-ending threat to humanity?”

“Look, cats would be a great vector for the parasite to jump from rats to humans, I’ll give you that. A lot more people get bitten by cats every year than rats. But it’s much more likely this is a one-off freak mutation. In fact, it’s even more likely you just got spooked and didn’t know what you were seeing.”

I thought of the rumbling basement, the awful smell—maybe that had been a hallucination, but the peep cat I really had seen. “Well, thanks for the pep talk.” I stood. “Hope you’re right.”

“Me too,” Dr. Rat said softly, looking down at PNS.

I pulled the ZTM-47/74 off the printer. There would be many more forms to fill out that day; my writing hand was sore just thinking about it.