Chapter Text
Newton’s first law states that if a body is at rest or moving at a constant speed in a straight line, it will remain at rest or keep moving in a straight line at constant speed, unless it is acted upon by a force. [1]
Gale
Gale Dekarios struggles against the wind as he walks.
It is mid-October, the peak of the Northeast’s cherished autumn, where the weather balances on that knife edge between beautiful and bitter. Wind tugs at his skin and burrows between the gaps in his clothing. His cheeks are stinging from the hurried walk from north campus - it is nearly 8 PM, his agreed-upon meeting time with Astarion, though he doesn’t know why he bothers to rush.
Astarion appears only at night, and is never on time. The man is allergic to punctuality.
The wind relents as Gale falls in behind a crowd of business school students shouting over each other on the sidewalk up ahead. They are boisterous and fit, and wear light puffed vests despite the five-point-five-repeating degree Celsius weather.
Fahrenheit, he reminds himself, as he has for the past nine years, ever since he stepped off the plane from Heathrow and set foot onto this endless continent. Forty-two degrees Fahrenheit. And dropping.
He funnels in behind the students, passing through a door that looks like the entrance to a nuclear bunker and down the stairs into the humid, dimly lit embrace of the Pembroke College grads-and-staff bar.
The Graduate, it is called, a tongue-in-cheek nod to the clientele as well as the 1967 film that preceded its establishment. It was redecorated a few years back at the urging of the student body, the black-and-white posters of Dustin Hoffman glaring down at the enticingly extended leg replaced with anodyne beer placards and cutesy metal signs, a motley assortment of Northeast paraphernalia. It is far from Gale’s preferred ambience for enjoying an evening libation, but all Pembroke staff are granted membership, and drinks are half the price here as anywhere else in Tolland, New Hampshire.
Granted, Pembroke staff make up a full forty percent of the small population of Tolland, so the bar is always packed. Gale shoulders his way past the business school kids - in their early twenties, most likely, but kids to his aging eyes - and a throng of what appear to be literature instructors wearing head-to-toe black and bored expressions, to make his way to the corner table Astarion has already claimed.
“You’re early,” says Gale, as he doffs his coat and collapses into a seat across from his friend. The chairs at The Graduate are wood, slatted and shiny, and to Gale’s eyes share a suspicious likeness with the seats from the students’ cafeteria. “You’re never early.”
“I had a bad date,” sniffs Astarion, who has already ordered two glasses of red wine and put down half of the first. Gale is unsure if the second is meant for him or his pale companion. “I used you as an escape hatch.”
“Glad I could be of service, even in my absence,” Gale says as he tentatively reaches for the second glass. But his friend doesn’t bite, and he relaxes as the first rich notes of cherry hit his tongue.
They drink in silence for a moment, Gale’s eyes traveling over the gathered crowd. The pair are seated in a cozy corner with their jackets hung along the wall behind them, Gale’s sensible peacoat beside Astarion’s stylish leather bomber. The two make an odd couple, Gale’s scruffy shoulder-length locks and square-rimmed frames, Astarion’s sleek ensemble and glittering red gaze. But Astarion is one of the only friends Gale has made in his eight months living in Tolland, a junior professor of the history of law with a sharp tongue and a wicked sense of humor.
Astarion is also one of the only friends Gale has kept following the supernova explosion of his recent breakup, and he is grateful for the professor’s company.
They chat and drink, Astarion spinning anecdote after amusing anecdote about his over-entitled students and hopelessly lovelorn suitors. Gale listens, and laughs, and tries not to think about the ache in his chest.
“So what about you, darling?” Astarion asks after a stretch of silence. He has loosened the top button of his shirt and tousled his silvery-blonde hair as they talk, managing to appear both ageless and devilishly rakish. The steam on Gale’s glasses has only just begun to settle from the humid heat of entering the bar, and he wipes them on the hem of his shirt before he speaks.
“I find myself missing Cambridge, these days,” he says, his eyes drifting to the simple, smiling faces of the drinkers gathered around the edge of the bar. There was a marvelous wine bar around the corner from his old apartment in Kendall Square, all iron and marble and walls lined head to toe with bottles, and he misses the feeling of being amazed every time he tastes an offering. The wine here is bitter, laced with the astringent pucker of tannins, and there are only two varietals to choose from.
“You’re delusional,” Astarion scoffs. “Boston is awful.”
“Oh, I don’t know about that.” Gale taps the side of his glass thoughtfully. “It reminds me of London.”
Astarion cocks an eyebrow. “What, full of frigid people and even frigid-er weather?”
“Frigid-er is not a word.”
“You’re a research librarian, Gale, not a walking dictionary,” says Astarion.
There is silence, and Astarion’s eyes take on a faraway look. In the Christmas-light glow of the bar they have a ruby gleam, bright with longing.
“I miss New York. Now there’s a city. Anything you want, any time of night, at your fingertips in minutes. Alive, pulsing, throbbing. The beating heart of this sad little country.”
“You’re from this country, Astarion.”
“I know. And I hate myself as much as I hate it.”
Astarion lifts his glass, and they both drink. Gale feels his tongue tingling, the twinge in his heart loosening into something more open and aching. “At least you came here of your own volition. I left Cambridge because she got the job here. And then the job turned into the dream job. And now…” He spreads his hands, indicating the entirety of the tiny little town in their sweep. “Here I remain. And so does she.”
As if summoned by the words, a rush of icy wind sweeps down from the stairs, and in a swirl of black trench coat and fluttering hair Mystra Ariel Manx breezes in. She looks beautiful, and untouchable, as breathtaking and distant as the steep peaks of the White Mountains at sunrise.
Gale feels a sensation within his chest like a rubber band snapping. It stings, but does not fade.
Mystra is followed by two of her fellow ECS professors. Lorroakan Selemchant accompanies her to a center table, while Rolan Fechner breaks off to make a beeline for the bar, elbows out and nose high in the air as he bulls his way through for beverages. Mystra takes off her jacket, and Lorroakan hangs it on a hook on the wall. His smile is outlandishly smug given the simplicity of the task performed.
Gale tosses back the rest of the wine in a single gulp, tannins be damned.
His attention is drawn back by the sound of Astarion’s slim fingers, drumming against the tabletop. His friend looks pointedly down at the empty drinks.
“Next round is on you,” says Astarion.
Gale sinks lower in his seat, wondering if he can escape to the exit without catching the attention of the newly inhabited table. Given the physics of the maneuver - the distances, the angles of the observers’ visual fields, the quantity of visible light - he estimates his odds to be low indeed. Perhaps he can wait here until the danger has passed, frozen in sight like a rabbit beneath an owl’s unblinking stare.
They can’t plan to stay for more than an hour or two, surely.
Astarion rolls his eyes.
“It’s a tiny town, Gale. You’ve got to face her eventually.” He rises with unnatural grace and gestures towards the bar. “I’ll come with.”
“... I have a sinking suspicion that you are only in this for the entertainment value.”
Astarion shrugs his narrow shoulders. “Like I said, small town. I’ve got to get my kicks where I can.”
Gale resents the nudge, but Astarion is right. His professional path still crosses Mystra’s on occasion, and it would be rude not to acknowledge her - or her recent news, with which the entire campus is abuzz. Better to do so now, with warm liquid courage coursing through him, with his friend by his side, than to face her alone on the quiet streets of town.
Gale rises, and with a whispered prayer to a forgotten god he makes his way towards her table.
As he approaches Mystra where she sits engrossed in a conversation with Lorroakan, her sleek hair framing her luminous blue eyes, he is reminded of a black hole. An infinitely deep gravitational pit, one with slippery sides. Venture too close, and you inevitably fall in. And nothing - not light nor heat nor electromagnetic waves and certainly not the erratic beating of your own broken little heart - is capable of possessing enough energy to escape it.
“Mystra.”
“Gale.” She looks up at him, the diffuse light playing over her skin. “It’s been a while. You look well.”
Her voice is always so steady, so even. She told him she no longer loved him in the same coolly detached tones that she used to tell him that the cat had been fed. He does not look well, he is painfully aware, but one would never know it from her tone of voice.
He steadies his own and says, “I just wanted to say congratulations on your tenure. Well earned.”
There is a hint of a curve to Mystra’s lips. “It’s a start.”
“Well-earned is an understatement!” exclaims Rolan, who has returned from the bar with beverages and apparently made quite a dent in his own already. “The paper on principal-agent information asymmetry was masterful.”
Gale has read the paper in question, and he reluctantly agrees with the junior instructor. Mystra is an expert on information asymmetry and misaligned incentives.
“Indeed,” he says, sanding the edges from his voice as he speaks, “your grasp of the subject matter is on full display in your latest work.”
He hears a soft snort from Astarion, who is standing cross-armed a pace behind.
Any reply from Mystra is forestalled by Lorroakan, who swallows a sip of his whiskey and says, “I’m sure Harvard will be taking a second look now that you’re a tenured professor.”
Mystra toys with her own glass - a white, chilled, and no doubt bone dry.
“Yes, I don’t expect to be here long,” she says. “You’ll be taking over my Modern Mathematical Statistics course before long, Selemchant.”
“... Harvard,” repeats Gale.
Mystra says nothing, but she meets his eyes. Their surface is as glassy and sparkling as a still lake. Saying nothing, reflecting everything.
He used to wake her in the morning just to stare into those eyes, to admire them, to lose himself in them. To watch them flutter and close with pleasure, and open again filled with love - or what he thought was love. He now suspects it was merely gratitude for the transaction, recognition for a job well done. A symmetrical exchange of hedonic utility.
Little did he know that those eyes were looking out onto his ruin, an event horizon beyond which he could not see.
“... in Cambridge,” he adds.
Lorroakan’s laugh is small and mean. “Yes, Gale, Harvard. Three miles northwest of Boston? Established 1636?” The corner of his mouth twists upward, already reveling in his own forthcoming wit. “I suppose two Master’s degrees do not equal a PhD.”
“Ooh, nice one, Selemchant,” Astarion says. “How many years of higher ed did it take you to come up with that absolute zinger?”
“Harvard is staffing up in computational artificial intelligence,” Mystra says by way of explanation. “The timing wasn’t appropriate a few years ago, but with the infusion of funding to the department I’m sure new positions will be opening up.”
“Yes,” says Gale, “and closing down for librarians.” It is an old argument, the sharp edges worn down by a thousand touches. Gale is an academic research librarian, with a specialty in astrophysics, and many - including those wielding the purse strings - would argue that his job can increasingly be replaced with exactly the type of artificial intelligence that Mystra has built a career researching.
“Don’t blame me for your lack of foresight,” she said, during that final bitter fight. “You made a mistake, a crucial one, and now you must live with the consequences.”
Gale rubs his chest, hoping his heart will remain stable through this interaction.
“You’re a dying breed,” Lorroakan snipes. “A computer could do your job.”
“Technology may assist,” says Gale. “But it takes human ingenuity to untangle the threads of knowledge and weave them into a coherent whole.”
Mystra merely looks at him, glacial and cold.
“You should take Tara back,” says Gale, one parting shot before he beats a hasty retreat to the exit. “She’s a wreck.”
“I no longer have time for a pet,” she says.
He hears the words beneath the words, and the dismissal in her voice.
“Come on, Gale,” Astarion breezes past. “Let’s find another spot. This one is full of big heads and soft bodies.”
Gale allows himself to be drawn out into the night, dazed as a sleepwalker. The frost in the air matches the icy slide of the knife between his ribs. It is a new moon tonight, the usual curve of the Earth’s faithful satellite drowned out by the day’s sun. He bows his head to the wind and cold, and his eyes stay trained on the spinning earth beneath.
Gale shuffles into the kitchen the next morning, greeting the day with a stifled yawn. His rented townhouse is located near the northwest edge of campus, towards Ledlock River, on a quiet street lined with slender, gold-leafed trees and in close proximity to the campus library. The place is small and spare, but the ceilings are high and the street beyond is wide enough to allow bright eastern light to filter in through the kitchen window at this hour.
Gale bends to lift Tara’s stainless steel water bowl from the floor, ignoring the twinge in his knees. He crosses the kitchen to the sink, catching sight of his face in the oval mirror hung beside the door as he does. He looks haggard, perhaps a touch hungover, crescent moons beneath his eyes the color of bruises and the creased line of the pillowcase trailing down his left cheek like the tail of a streaking comet.
He glances away from the sight, his eyes pausing on the painting of a five-crossing torus knot hung above the kitchen counter. It is a simple shape, elegant, the round folds of the string resembling the path of electrons spinning around an atom’s center. He has carried it with him from place to place ever since he first found it in an antiques shop in Oxford, one of his most beloved - and longest-lasting - possessions.
The sight of it calms his tired mind.
The artworks on the walls of the apartment are neatly hung, the books lining the shelves in the attached living area lovingly organized - those that remain, anyways, gaping holes marking the spaces where The Ethics of A.I. and The Divine Human and the slim blue spine of The Bell Jar once rested. But the rest of the apartment has started to fade and fuzz, sliding slowly into entropy much like its owner. Gale typically keeps his living space meticulously organized, but these past few months the labels on the spice jars have faded, the stove coated with a thin layer of grime. The perfectly aligned containers of cereal and snacks in the pantry are now a jumbled mess, placed without attention to their angular position.
Gale rummages through them until he finds a fresh tin of cat food, and tears off the lid.
“Tara! Breakfast!”
There is no response.
Odd, he muses, as he decants the chicken-flavored mush. Usually Tara shoots out of the shadows and over to the bowl like a cheetah on the hunt, but today there is neither shadow nor whisper of her presence. Only the faint musical chatter of the birds from beyond the windows, welcoming the bright autumn day.
“Tara?” Gale glances from side to side. “Tara!”
He searches the apartment, lifting coverlets and shifting piles of books and boxes, searching for the telltale glint of reflective eyes and the hair-raising hiss of complaint. Panic begins to rise in his belly, like a bad meal that won’t stay down.
He tries to remember where he had last seen her. He had taken a while getting in the door last night, dropped his keys on the way in and fumbled around on the ground as he picked them up. Perhaps she had snuck out then?
He searches the apartment again, more thoroughly this time, deploying a sweeping gridlike pattern. He is certain the place has been thoroughly scoured by the time he straightens up and rubs his chest.
Tara is gone.
After searching the neighboring streets to no avail, Gale heads to Kenney Park. It is the closest green space to the apartment, and he often walks there or brings a book to sit at one of the benches in the bloom of spring. There are no rats in Tolland, a town too pristine and wooded to provide them habitable accommodations, but he reasons that Tara might have caught sight of a squirrel and followed it back to its hunting grounds here.
He combs the park in the same systematic manner - north to south, west to east, as though he is slowly working his way through the pages of an item in the rare books collection. He pays careful attention to the tunneled curves of the jungle gym slides, and the evenly spaced plantings of trees ringing the sports field at the center.
In the southeast quadrant of his search he spots her - a curling tail dangling high up in a tree. It is an oak, perhaps, or maybe a maple. He is more of an exoplanetary specialist and does not recognize this particular genus. She is lying on her belly on a branch, looking for all the world like the Cheshire Cat smirking evilly down at Alice, only with mangier fur and wilder eyes.
“Tara!” Gale shouts. “Get down here!”
His shout draws a few curious stares from the other denizens of the park - a muscular jogger in unseasonably short shorts, a mother with a stroller, two students with backpacks on their way to morning class.
He drops his voice and turns his gaze back to the tree.
“Tara, come down this instant,” he hisses. “You’re an indoor cat, remember? You’ve merely been seized with delusions of grandeur.”
Tara’s tail swishes. Even at a distance her smug feline face conveys immense enjoyment.
“I’ve got breakfast at home,” pleads Gale, attempting a different tack. “The good kind, not those dry kibble bits you detest. I promise you may have extra if you come along.”
A meow drifts down from above. She is so high up he can barely hear it, but it sounds unimpressed.
Gale stands back and looks the tree over, assessing the situation. It has a tall, imposing trunk, with too few low-hanging branches to make climbing feasible.
Besides, he is ill-suited to such endeavors.
He circles the tree, crosses and uncrosses his arms, and waits. Ten minutes pass, then twenty. Anxiety is rising in his chest, and he can feel his heart fluttering and pounding, the telltale catch in his throat. His arrhythmia, flaring up from the stress of the situation.
He cannot wait forever.
At long last he yields to the inevitable. He pulls out his phone and searches for the number of the fire department.
Stupid, stupid, he berates himself. Why must I be so stupid?
He presses the number, and the phone begins to ring.
Aoife
Aoife leans back onto two legs of the folding chair, fanning her hand before her face, a shield held out between her and her foes.
“Give me your sevens,” rumbles Halsin.
Aoife works a card out and slides it across the table. The table is cheap plastic, a foldout, and the card judders across the polyethylene top.
“We could play another game,” she says, as Halsin frowns down at his hand. The fire chief is a slow, methodical card player, and his ever-present look of bemusement has made him a surprisingly strong competitor in poker the few times they have attempted to teach Minsc the rules. This is not one of those times. “There are other games, you know.”
“It’s Sunday,” says Halsin, as he lays four sevens atop the table and pats them like a proud father does a child’s head. “We always play Go Fish on Sunday.”
Aoife sighs and turns to the shiny mountain of a man seated to her right.
“GO FISH!” Minsc booms delightedly. His voice echoes in the cavernous station room, ricocheting off planes of red-painted steel. They have just finished the morning rig check, and are playing a round of cards to postpone the day of inevitable drudgery interspersed with spiking adrenaline that awaits them here at the station.
“… I haven’t asked yet.”
“Minsc is merely saving you a step,” the man replies.
“Give me your queens, Minsc,” says Aoife.
“Ha HA!” The tattooed man pounds his fist against the table, and the steel legs nearly buckle. “Did you hear that, Boo? The lady wants my ladies! Too bad there are none to be found here…” The fist becomes a finger gun, jammed into Aoife’s face. “GO FISH!”
A squeak sounds at Minsc’s booming shout, and a twitching, wet little nose peeks out from the pocket of the flannel draped over his navy blue Tolland County Fire Department t-shirt.
Aoife shakes her head as she draws a card from the pile at the center of the table.
“That thing is a violation of so many health and safety standards I honestly don’t even know where to begin.”
Halsin smiles and exchanges a look with his brother-in-arms. “Good thing the DC didn’t see anything, then.”
Halsin is the Department Chief of TCFD, and has been for over a decade. He is a family friend, a friend of Aoife’s father when he was alive and head of Pembroke’s campus security. Minsc is the older brother of her high school friend Immith, and she has known him since she was twelve years old. Immith went to state school, just like Aoife, but unlike Aoife she managed to stay away. She moved to Burlington after graduating, and works a monotonous and well-paying marketing job from her three-bedroom house near the city proper. Her brother Minsc never got quite so far, and bounced from one odd job to another before Halsin saw his potential - or took pity on him - and took the man under his wing.
The man, and his pocket hamster.
Luckily for Minsc, Halsin loves animals, and is forever keeping strays.
Aoife has known Halsin and Minsc for what feels like forever. Just as she knows every street, every tree, every paved pothole and early-morning diner and overpriced café in Tolland, New Hampshire. Being around them feels comfortable, just another aspect of the interminable pull of inertia exerted upon her by this town.
And these days this town is feeling small indeed.
The game comes to a close. Halsin has won, and they dutifully remove his name from the cooking roster for the day. None of them has much money to bet with, but it is a quiet town in a damp, cold part of the world, and time is a resource they have in spades.
“Another?” asks the chief.
Minsc eyes him warily. “Boo advises against it. You are as formidable in mind as you are in muscle!”
“Go Fish is a game of luck, not skill, Minsc,” says Aoife, smiling. “And mine’s run dry.”
She stands and crosses to the synthetic sag of the couch along the far wall and picks up her book where it rests atop the beat-up coffee table. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke. It is her second time through. The story is haunting, and evades the mind’s attempts to grasp it. In the spare and lyrical prose there is an uneasy quality Aoife can’t quite pin down.
Aoife loves stories of magic, well written and told. There isn’t enough magic in the world these days - or if there is, it has yet to make its appearance in her life.
She opens the book to where she left off. The narrator has just begun reading a journal entry, a biography:
When she was a teenager she told a friend that she wanted to go to university to study Death, Stars, and Mathematics, Aoife reads. Inexplicably the university didn’t offer such a course, so she settled for Mathematics. [2]
Death, Stars, and Mathematics. This is an elegant combination of terms, a hint at the cosmic unknowability that accompanies the seeking of knowledge, and Aoife chews the sentence over in her mind like tough meat before moving on.
She manages only a few more pages, up to the next entry in the narrator’s journal, when the two-tone blare of Halsin’s pager goes off. Someone speaks, garbled with distance, and Halsin holds the radio to his ear and nods.
“You may find this hard to believe,” he laughs when the voice goes silent and the green light blinks out. “But we have ourselves a RES-CAT.”
“Hide your whiskers, Boo!” Minsc places a protective hand over his chest pocket.
Aoife puts the book down, already reaching for her turnout coat. “What’s a RES-CAT?”
Like fire departments across the country, the TCFD uses standard acronyms for call signatures - FIREA, FIREB, MVA, RES. This last stands for Rescue, an unspecified rescue that does not fit the typical categories - structure fires, motor vehicle accidents, confined space rescues. She has never heard this particular modifier, though, and her heart begins to race with the flood of adrenaline that comes before a ride-out.
“A cat up a tree,” clarifies Halsin, and the adrenaline simmers as Aoife groans.
“To glory! Or glorious death!” says Minsc.
“Let’s settle for saving the cat,” sighs Aoife, and she shrugs on the coat.
“Do you know how many people live in this town?”
Aoife stands with her arms crossed, staring at the owlishly handsome academic who called in the stuck cat. He has a trim beard bracketing a proud jaw, and stylish square-rimmed glasses, and she guesses that his hands are as soft as his wavy brown hair. He looks weary, nervous, like he is running on caffeine and fumes. A breeze stirs the strands of hair escaping her braided bun, though the air is not yet biting beneath the bright October sun. From far above she can hear a faint meowling sound.
“Eight thousand four hundred, give or take,” the man says promptly. “Nineteen percent of Concord, one percent of Boston, one hundred percent tiresome.”
Aoife is taken aback by this answer, which she would not know so precisely if she did not need to give this speech to overzealous callers ten times a week, but she does not let it show.
“That’s… weirdly accurate.” The corner of his mouth tugs in what might be a smile, or possibly just a nervous tic. Her eyes narrow. “And do you know how many fire stations there are?”
“Well, I suppose it depends on whether staffing is based on geography or population,” the man muses.
She notices that his hand has fallen from his chest. Oddly enough he seems calmer under her withering gaze and barrage of quasi-rhetorical questions, as if he has been waiting for someone to pose a deductive puzzle to calm his nerves.
“I would conjecture a single fire station for every five to ten square miles, or alternately one per ten thousand residents or so. But in such a rural and sparsely populated area a geographic designation would be prohibitively expensive, and wildly resource-inefficient. So to service a population of eight thousand?” He cocks his head, his pointed star earring winking silver at the motion. “I imagine there is just one.”
“There’s just one.” Aoife glances around. The crew rotates primary duty while on call, and she is up first for the day. Halsin and Minsc are standing a few paces back, Halsin beaming under the light of the sun and Minsc staring goggle-eyed up at the trapped cat and whispering something into the bulge in his turnout coat. “This is a municipal resource, and a precious one. We have critical calls to attend to, you know.”
The stranger looks chagrined, but she sees the spark of something in those deep brown eyes.
“Well, then, what are you doing standing around explaining that to me?” he retorts.
This is in fact quite rude. When said in a British accent, however, it sounds witty and arch.
“Education is part of my job,” she replies, and stomps over to her companions. “Asshole,” she mutters under her breath as she approaches the engine. “Halsin, let’s get the ladder.”
“As you wish,” the chief says. He winks at the stranger before turning to fetch the equipment.
Aoife can hear their voices murmuring and then fading as she ascends the aluminum ladder.
“How the hell did you get up this high, kitty cat?” she mutters to herself as she climbs. She is strong, with a keen sense of balance, but the cat has climbed at least two stories into a massive white oak. “You must really hate your owner.” She pauses, glancing down to where the bookish stranger stands staring fixedly up at her. “He probably bores you to death with population statistics while you’re trying to chase mice, so honestly I don’t blame you.”
When she finally reaches the cat she pauses, considering the situation. She pushes herself up and reaches out to grab it. The creature hisses in response, snapping at her outstretched hand.
“What the hell!” Aoife yanks her hand away, grateful she thought to pull on gloves before climbing the ladder. “I’m the rescue party, you little asshole.”
She tries again, and this time sharp feline teeth sink into her gloves. The leather is thick, but supple, and she can just feel the bite as she withdraws her hand again.
She is certain she must be imagining the sound of laughter wafting up from below.
“So that’s how it’s gonna be, huh?” Aoife frowns and grips the top rung of the ladder, staring daggers at the cat. “Look, I don’t want to be here either. We can do this the easy way, where you get a nice trip down the fire ladder in style, or… ” Aoife reaches out and shakes the branch the cat is resting on - a gentle vibration, not nearly enough to dislodge it, but enough to swing those gleaming yellow eyes in her direction. “The hard way. And if we do it the hard way… ” She glances down. The man below looks small, and frail, standing far below on the green stretch of grass. “Well, I hope your owner is good at sports where you catch things.”
The cat’s eyes appear to widen, and it blinks.
“Thought so,” says Aoife smugly, as the creature inches towards her, spine arched and eyes slitted. “Let’s get this over with, shall we?”
The cat allows herself to be carried without further complaint. At the bottom of the ladder Aoife hands the cat over, the owner scooping her up gratefully into his arms with a scolding stream of chatter. He checks her ears, her paws, her tail, tutting disapprovingly at the little beast as she is subjected to a thorough inspection of her health and well-being.
“She’s fine,” says Aoife. “Other than being a hellion, that is.”
The man lifts his gaze. He looks less nervous, now, faded into something more akin to embarrassment.
“Thank you, for retrieving her. I, er, forgot to mention that Tara can be a bit… selective.”
“You mean she thinks fingers are snacks and people are evil?” says Aoife. “I got that. Along with a possible case of rabies.”
In her experience cat people are terminally delusional about the personalities of their pets. Every cat owner since antiquity has held firm to the belief that their cat is perfect, exquisite, an ideal specimen of the species, superior to the pets of others in every possible way.
Dog owners, on the other hand, will tell you that regardless of size or intelligence their dog is a big dumb idiot, and this will without exception be accurate.
The man clutches the cat close, as if for comfort. “Well, yes, that too.” He sighs. “Tara is my ex’s cat, to be perfectly honest. She used to be a sweet little thing, but she seems to have taken the breakup… rather poorly.”
Aoife notices for the first time the lines under his eyes, the grinding tightness of his square jaw. The wan tint of rich olive skin gone pale from a lack of sunlight.
Perhaps the cat is not the only one doing poorly in the aftermath.
Her scowl softens, and her voice with it.
“Do you work at Pembroke?” she asks. “Do you live around here?”
He nods. “I’m a research librarian. Astrophysics. I live around the corner, on Hillside Street.”
“Okay. That’s not far.” Aoife knows the street - wide and leafy, a few blocks southeast. “Can you make it home okay?”
He nods again.
“All right. Make sure she gets home with you.” Aoife eyes the cat suspiciously. “Stay out of trouble, little monster. And definitely stay out of trees. Or next time it’ll be the hard way.”
The cat yawns, showing a curling pink tongue and pointed canines. When her lips settle back in place they are curled into a smug smile.
The man turns to go, and Aoife watches as he disappears around the street corner, two yellow eyes winking from within his arms.
“All right, crew,” she says as she climbs back into the truck and tugs off her gloves. “What’s next?”
Citations
1. Encyclopaedia Britannica - Newton’s Laws of Motion ↩
2. Piranesi, by Susanna Clarke↩
