The Coon just kept washing. He had a good vocabulary-better than mine, I bet, that giant head of his leaves plenty of room for brains-but he didn’t like showing it off. Especially not in front of dogbait like Hacky. Why show off when you’re the king?

“You’ll find out what it means,” I told him. “And back off from my tail, Hacky. I won’t say it again.”

He flinched. “Sure-sure, Drags. I don’t mean nothin’ by it, you know that. You know I’m not gonna start somethin’. Not with you.”

“Which is why I haven’t eviscerated your face, you follow?”

“Sure-uh, yeah, I mean, I think so-”

“Shut up.” The Coon stood up and stretched, looking toward the rim of Knifewall. “There goes Skids.”

Knifewall is three or four times taller than my best jump, and that’s just the stone part; even if I could get up there-which would be damn hard for me in itself, what with my tail how it is-I’m still way too big to slip through the tangled coils of knife-wire that added another good leap’s-worth on top. Skids, though, was small as a kit, and a scrawny one at that; some Siamese blood on his dam’s side kept him trim and quick. He was agile as a wolf spider and could run faster than most cats can think. He’d clawed his way up the pale shrapnel scars that pocked the outside of the wall and now delicately threaded his way into the knife-wire until he could see over the lip into Inside.

“Ohhhh, yeahhhh!” he howled. “Oh, damn my balls! It’s her! It really is! Oh, wowww!”

That was too much for the mob. They all started singing back to her.

Come out here, kitten! I’ll keep you warm! Hey, baby, if you’re that hungry, I got somethin’ to feed ya! We’re right outside, sweetheart-come on out and join the party!

“Her?” Hacky looked confused. Or maybe just stupid. How do you tell the difference? “Her who?”

“The Persian.” The Coon shook himself, and stretched again, and started to saunter off toward the river. “I’m gone.”

“The

Persian? For real? The Persian’s out?” Hacky had his tongue half out of his mouth, flemming as if she were presenting right in front of him. “Is it true what they say about Persians? You think?”

I got up. “Coon-you’re leaving? Are you non compos?”

“She ain’t even in heat.”

“Sure she is, Coon,” Hacky said, still flemming so hard he was starting to drool. “Persians is always in heat. That’s what they say. Ain’t that what they say, Drags?”

“No objections here, if you’re going, but I admit to feeling, well-” I didn’t have a handy mouthful of word, but I didn’t need one. The Coon knew what I was talking about.

“Don’t like crowds, kit.” But if that were the real reason, he’d have stalked off without bothering to answer. Looked to me like he was trying to talk himself out of something. Or into it. “And this ain’t my territory.”

“Feculation, Coon, it’s nobody’s territory.”

“Not cat territory. You know whose it is.”

“I do?”

“You if anybody.”

“You mean Bullets.” Just saying his name gave me a low, slow shock that started from the back like I’d got my crippled tail dipped in icewater. I had to sit down and think a second or two to figure out how I felt about this.

“Bullets?” Hacky had gone all hushed and wide-eyed. “I heard he was dead.”

“He ain’t.”

“Okay,” I said. “So it’s Bullets.”

“You did that pretty good, kit. Almost like you ain’t scared.”

“It’s been a while.” I mostly ignored the frozen ache from the base of my tail. “Is he still a bachelor?”

“Nope.” The Coon’s eyes slitted, as if he were thinking of ripping me one for suggesting he’d so much as ruffle his scruff over a bachelor. “He’s gone alpha. Mobbed up.”

“His own mob? Oh, that can’t be good,” Hacky moaned. “Hey, Drags-wasn’t you the cat who-”

“Yeah, that was me.”

“And he’s the dog that got you by the-”

“Shut up.” This from the Coon. He gave me a look that from another cat, I might have thought was sympathy. “You’re thinking, Drags. I can see you thinking.”

“I’m thinking,” I agreed. “I’m thinking sunshadow’s growing. I’m thinking Bullets and this new mob of his’ll be on the hunt by half-light. And I’m thinking that this is not necessarily a bad thing. For us.”

“For cats?” Hacky looked as puzzled as a kitten chasing his first spotting laser. “I don’t see it.”

“Not for cats,” the Coon said slowly. “He means us as in us. Just us.”

I cocked an eye up to where Skids was snarling a string of curses as he tried to back out of the tangles of knife-wire. “I mean,” I said, slicking my right paw to smooth behind my ears, “that these gonad-brains have less chance of getting the Persian to come outside Knifewall than I have of dancing on the moon. I mean that when Bullets gets here, any cats stupid enough to still be mooning around this area will be on a balls-first trip down a dog gullet.”

“But you know something?” Hacky said hopefully.

“I know Knifewall.”

The Coon started to look interested. “You’re from in there, ain’t you?”

“Yeah.”

The Coon favored me with the kind of look a few hundred birds and rats in the Zone had seen with the last light of their eyes. “You know how to get Inside?”

“Sure.” I slicked my left, too, and swiped my other ear. “Wanna come?”

”You got it, right?” I confess to being a bit nervous. It was getting dark, and I could still hear the gun fight going on over toward Leaper’s Bridge. “Both of you?”

We were at the fringe of the mob gathered at Knifewall’s sweep-fence, which was as tall as the wall and had gaps in it just big enough for the humans to poke guns through if they felt like it, too small for a cat to squeeze through. But from here, the mob could see her, all stretched up to scratch the door of one of the Inside buildings, and they were going wild.

Hell, I was too. Long and plump and white as the moon, a giant cuddle-pillow of silken hair… but the sensuous ruffle and play of all that hair let you see a hint of the real muscle underneath. Sweet steaming dog turds, she was a beauty!

So I’ve always had a bit of a thing for Persians. So what?

Everybody has a thing for Persians.

But she was on the far side of Knifewall’s sweep-fence, and the humans standing Inside didn’t look like they were inclined to open that fence for us any time soon.

I’ve never figured out why humans like sweep-fences (and sweep-doors) better than flip-doors or lift-doors; if I were a Making-Things creature instead of a Killing-Things creature, I’d make drop-doors, where they’d just slide right into the ground, and come back up to close. That’s the only safe kind, because by the time they’re up far enough that they might catch your tail, they’re too high to jump up on anyway. But whatever.

”You just got to understand humans,” I said, once I got my breath back. “That’s the thing. You got to know how they think.”

“Humans think?” The Coon sounded scornful, but he was listening.

“Sure they do. More or less. Look at the stuff they build-”

“Scat, Drags, termites build. Humans just have more complex instincts, that’s all. Everybody knows they don’t really think.”

“Yeah, the Coon’s right,” Hacky chimed in. “That’s just-what’s the word, Drags? You know, the one where you think regular animals are almost like cats?”

“Ailuromorphism. But it’s not. I didn’t say humans are smart as cats-they’re no smarter than dogs, if that. If they were smart, we’d be working for them instead of the other way around. Look, I know humans. I used to have some of my own.”

Hacky’s eyes went wide. “You useta be a house cat? What happened?”

I tilted an ear toward Knifewall. “I had a house on Knifewall’s Inside. Got hit by a flying exploder. Just an accident-houses get hit by flying exploders every day, especially Inside, because of all the Same Clothes People. You know how Calico People and Same Clothes fight all the time? Well, some of the Calicoes’ exploders can actually throw stuff through the air. You’ve seen ’em. They can throw stuff a long way-and sometimes what they throw is another exploder, and they’re usually throwing them at the Same Clothes. That’s what hit my house. Killed both my people. Their whole litter, too.”