Wildcat

by Rebecca Hutto

  “Why? W-why would you do this?” she asked.

  “It was either this, or letting you die,” Hye replied. “I’m sorry we couldn’t save more of you.”

  “No, no. You . . . you gave me new legs after my other ones got crushed. That’s not easy. It can’t be. Why? Why would you help me? You don’t even know me. Tahg, we’re not even the same species.”

  Ember gazed down at the paw that used to be white, and flexed her toes. Even when splayed apart all the way, no claws came out. She clenched her jaw tighter and tried to ignore the nausea nipping at her insides.

  ‘Guess I won’t be clawmarking anymore. Not that I could clawmark right now anyway, even if I still had my claws.’

  Michelle tapped on a thing wrapped around her wrist, then spoke. The wristband spoke after her, “We helped you because that’s what people do here. They help animals in need. Not usually me specifically, but you were a special case.”

  Hye stepped closer to Michelle. “Also, I don’t mean to sound dark, but that procedure you just underwent involved entirely new medical technology. We needed an example of how effective it could be. Then you came along with near flawless timing. I’ll admit, I got pretty excited.”

  Ember’s eyes narrowed. “Oh. So you just needed me to experiment on.”

  “No, that’s not what I meant,” he said. “The timing just happened to be beneficial for everyone.”

  “Dark was right,” Ember whispered. Her throat still burned for water. “You’re only in it for yourselves.”

  Hye and Michelle exchanged a glance. Hye said something in his own language. Another human called out. He turned to Ember. “Sorry, I have to get back to work. Michelle will finish setting everything up for you,” he said.

  Hye strode away, farther into the Center.

  Michelle watched him leave for a few moments, then slow-blinked. “We all have our reasons, sweetie,” she said through her translation device. “Not all of them are selfish. Dr. Sagong’s are not, and I don’t consider mine to be either. That tech inside your body right now is going to save lives of every species, and you’ve just proven it works. I wouldn’t have spent two years making it if others didn’t need it. To see it finally doing what it was meant for after all those late nights, to see you alive against all odds, it is exciting.”

  Ember sighed. She covered her nose with a paw and breathed out through her nostrils. The prosthetic not only felt the skin of her nose and the fur around it, but the warmth of her own breath, and it did so with a precision she couldn’t remember her old limbs having.

  “This only took two years to make?” she asked.

  Michelle chuckled. “Your bionic skin? No, that was easy to make eighty years ago. My challenge was to create almost an entire body that could be printed to order, and do everything someone’s original parts could. Then, if anyone were to lose or badly damage any part of themselves, someone could fix them right up, and even make improvements.”

  Ember lowered her paw. “H . . . how long has it been?”

  “Since what?”

  “Wolf Trail.”

  “Sorry, I don’t understand what that means,” Michelle replied.

  Ember closed her eyes. “Hit. Since I got hit by the thing.”

  “Oh. It’s been five days. You’ve been out a while. Now, before you ask anything else, how about I get you set up? Did Thai boot and autotest?”

  ‘Thai? What?’ Her mind wandered back to the strange voice she’d woken up to. ‘Oh. So I didn’t imagine it.’

  “I think so.”

  “Good,” Michelle said.

  She tapped the black band around her wrist. A glowing square appeared in the air a few clawlengths away. Ember’s eyes widened as she touched a tiny circle on the projection. The glowing square changed colors.

  “Thai will be your new assistant and monitoring program,” Michelle continued. “She will help control and customize your prosthetics. She can also answer questions, check weather, and I-M anyone with a connection. That means you can more or less talk to anyone else, no matter where they are, so long as they have a device or A-I implant of some kind. Think ‘Thai, link with device.’ ”

  Ember licked her lips nervously. ‘Thai, link with device?’

  [syncing]

  [sync successful]

  [You are now connected to “Chell’s Glowy Wrist Phone.” To disconnect at any time, say “disconnect.”]

  The voice spoke inside her head. It seemed to be everywhere at once—pure sound without a source. “Whoa, okay. So, er, it says I’m connected with your glowy wrist thing.”

  Michelle laughed. “I know. I honestly forgot I’d named it that. Wait a bit while I get this ready.”

  Like subconscious thoughts, images appeared in her head, images matching those displayed on Chell’s Glowy Wrist Phone. Most of the images were symbols she couldn’t understand, and they kept coming as Michelle pressed her fingers against the light.

  “So those are like clawmarks, right?” Ember asked.

  “Clawmarks?” Michelle said. “It would depend on what clawmarks are.”

  “They’re symbols that mean different words or sounds. I know your kind has them, because Dark took a lot of inspiration from humans.”

  Michelle stopped touching the light projection. Her hands dropped to her sides. She said something too quietly for her phone to translate, then covered her mouth. “You have a written language,” she said, more loudly this time. “So how do you . . . how do you know about Dark? Word of mouth? These clawmark things? Is he somehow still alive?”

  “He died eighty-four winters ago. I learned about him by studying history, and it’s very interesting. I could recite some, if you want. Wait, what does it matter to you?”

  “History? You keep records of history? Oh. Oh, this is big. It matters because people have made some mistakes. Big mistakes that will affect you and any appala anyone finds after you.” She stood up straight and closed the clear panel. “I . . . I have to go. I’ll be back soon.”

  Without waiting for a reply, Michelle ran off in the same direction Hye had gone. The screen at the back of her mind disappeared.

  [device disconnected]

  Ember couldn’t stop a tiny twinge of disappointment from creeping in. She liked the little symbols. They were familiar and comforting, yet new and strange at the same time. Even though they had only been present for a minute at most, her head felt empty without them.

  ‘Okay, that’s not important right now. These new legs seem to work about the same as the old ones, so if I can just figure out how to get out of here, I should be able to go home. This can’t be too far from it. And once I make it back, everything will be okay.’

  Yegor’s face popped in front of her.

  “ACK!” Ember jerked back, then groaned. “Ow. Why do you keep doing that?”

  His paws were hooked into the holes in the moving panel again. Ember felt the urge to shove them out and watch him fall, but it would hurt her to do so, and he might be able answer some of her questions.

  He smiled. “Sorry again. So, how does it feel to be part robot?”

  “Purple,” she said.

  “Oh, okay. I’ve never felt purple. Wait until you get an ETAg. I’m sure they’ll give you one. I’ve got one. Watch this. Thai, what will the weather be like tomorrow?”

  “Tomorrow will be partly cloudy with a twenty-five percent chance of scattered snow drifts,” the piece of metal hanging from his neck replied.

  “Oh. So that’s what it does.”

  “That’s just one of the things she can do. You can ask her almost anything.”

  “How about ‘why did Michelle leave after I brought up the History Tree?’ And ‘should I be concerned?’ ”

  “She can’t answer those questions, but I can,” he replied. “See, you’re special, like me. Only you’re even more special, because you’re a purebred Appala. I’m only half. Because of what you are, the bad people might try to take you if they find you. I think she wants to use
your mentions of a History Tree and such to try to prove you shouldn’t be taken away.”

  “Bad people?”

  Yegor frowned. “You really don’t know what’s going on, do you?”

  “No, because no one will explain it to me.”

  “The humans that created the Appala Cats are all long gone, but the place, ARC, is still around. The people who work there want us back.”

  “What do they want to do with me?”

  “Sell you to a celebrity. Make you a war spy. Study you. Have a celebrity study you, then train you to be a war spy. You never can tell what they want, but it’s never good. They probably won’t kill you, though. It’d be a waste of money. Fortunately, you’re with the good people right now. Unfortunately, the good people get paid by people helping the bad people, and if they don’t let them know you’re here, there will be some big problems.”

  Her stomach tightened. “So they can’t bring me back home?”

  “Bring you back like this? You can barely even stand up.”

  She clenched her teeth. “What does a resident feline therapist do?”

  “Uhm, I, uh, talk to patients and keep them calm. Why?”

  “You’re not very good at it. If that was your real job, you’d have been dropped already. Why are you really here?”

  Yegor flattened his ears. “Because if I weren’t here pretending, I’d probably be dead. Look, I might not be as smart as a purebred, but even I can figure out these guys don’t want another species running around, being equals with them on their own planet. These humans might be good, but in the end they’re not all that different. You think those neat big hands of theirs are clean? Michelle hasn’t, but Hye and the other doctors have killed domestics. Out of mercy, yes, but they do it. Call it ‘putting to sleep.’ ”

  Ember winced. The colors of shock and fear came back.

  “Hey,” he said, “don’t worry about it too much, my genetically enhanced friend. They won’t kill us, but in their eyes, we’ll always be mistakes, so we all have to be fixed. No more appala kittens for you.”

  He snorted. The panel fogged up around his nose. “My paws are starting to hurt. I should go.”

  Yegor dropped back to the ground. As his pawsteps faded, he growled. “Wouldn’t want to scare the patient.”

  Chapter 9

  Ember

  While Michelle attended her strange, humanly business, Ember examined her cage. It wasn’t large, about the size of her parents’ den, but without anyone else to share it with, the space didn’t feel cramped. In one corner, she discovered a large, rectangular bowl filled with tiny white rocks. Nearby, closer to the moving panel, a second, smaller bowl greeted her with water. She managed to drag herself closer without too much pain. It wasn’t the Kivyress, but it quenched her thirst all the same.

  As she lapped her fill, she tried not to think too deeply about Yegor’s foreboding mews. Too much speculating without enough facts could send her into another panic. Yet she couldn’t help but wonder what it all meant.

  ‘No more Appala kittens? If he’s telling the truth, and I can’t have kittens anymore, what will that mean if I do go back?’

  Ember licked the odd, grey skin of her foreleg. Grooming tickled now that she could feel each little spike of her tongue.

  ‘Hyrees will obviously be disappointed. Will he want me still? The colony would shun him even more if we stayed together. Especially now that I’m whatever this is. What if he—oh no. What if he tries it again? I can’t stop him this time. What am I going to do? What is he going to do? He promised he’d never do it again, but he’s broken promises before, and that’s the problem with him. Why is he so unpredictable?’

  She gave up on grooming, and instead rested her chin on the cold metal supporting her. ‘Calm down, Em. It’s probably selfish of me to think he’d kill himself because of this. He knows it was stupid the first time. He won’t do it again. At least, I hope not. Of course, if he were to die, I wouldn’t have to worry about—Ember, stop! What is wrong with you? What is wrong with me?’

  She sighed. She couldn’t even force herself to feel guilty, or imagine the shade of dark orange that usually came with it. Her insides felt numb and detached, as if nothing beyond her own head mattered. As if the uncertainty of her family’s fate didn’t matter. As if she could sleep soundly never knowing who lived or who died. Yet if she never saw them again, how would their deaths affect her? She could keep them alive in her imagination, or kill them all and move on, but without them, what was there to move on to?

  She snorted. ‘That Yegor cat was probably just trying to mess with me. And Hyrees is probably fine. Now, find something more interesting and less heartless to think about.’

  After what felt like an eternity of letting her mind wander, Michelle returned to finish Thai’s setup. She relinked Thai to her wrist phone, then gave Ember words or sentences to repeat in her head until the AI recognized her thoughts.

  [setup complete]

  [Hello, Ember. I am Thai, your new personal assistant. Is there anything you would like me to do for you?]

  ‘This is creepy. I know you’re inside of me, but do you really have to sound like it? Then again, it would probably be even more unsettling if you sounded like you were somewhere in front of me. Or behind me. Wait, why do I need an assistant? When I’m not trapped by the creatures of my nightmares, I can usually tell what the weather is without asking someone. Or in this case, the voice inside my head.’

  “There. That should be it. Now that that’s done, I can send the scan over, and your prosthetics should take on your original colors,” Michelle said.

  “What do you mean?” Ember asked.

  “To print everything to fit you, I needed to scan you with a special machine. It looks at you and sees everything about you that needs fixing, even the damaged parts inside of you. Then it sends the information to something called a computer, which figures out how to put you back together. It also caught your fur colors. Those are important to do this.”

  Michelle tapped at the light square again, and Ember’s legs changed colors. Ember stared in awe as her toes morphed from from their bland dark grey to a familiar brown and white.

  “Oh. They changed colors. How did they do that?” Ember asked. She examined the new tones of her prosthetics with analytical eyes. They weren’t perfect; the browns were too dark and the whites too bright. Without fur, the color transitions looked blurry and unnatural, but when she imagined the dull grey they’d been moments before, she almost smiled.

  “Using technology modeled after lizard skin,” Michelle replied. “Now, how about you ask Thai something? We might as well make sure she, uhm, it works.”

  ‘Okay then. Thai, are there any mountains nearby?’

  [Yes, you appear to be within the Appalachian Mountain Range. The nearest named peak is that of Little Toad Mountain.]

  “That mountain is actually where you were found,” Michelle said.

  Ember grimaced. ‘Oh, right, you’re still connected, aren’t you? Can you read my thoughts? I don’t want you to read my thoughts. Thai, disconnect.’

  [device disconnected]

  “So you do know where I’m from,” Ember said. ‘Wait, if they know where I’m from, they can find the colony. What if they attack the Glade? Did I just get everyone taken? If I did, what am I going to do now? Calm down, Ember. That’s what you’re going to do. Maybe these humans really are nice. Calm down, and pretend like it’s nothing.’

  “This means you can bring me back, right?” she asked. “Also, Little Toad Mountain? You humans couldn’t have come up with anything better than that?”

  Michelle swiped away her phone screen and straightened herself up. “There’s probably a really interesting story behind why someone chose that name, but what that story is, I don’t know. History was never my area of study.”

  “But you can bring me back, right?”

  Michelle sighed and shook her head. “I’m sorry, sweetie.”

  Cyan flashed
through her mind. “What? Why?”

  “I don’t think I can explain it in a way you’d understand. Just know that I want to help you, but things aren’t always that simple.”

  Her heart thumped against her chest. Ember splayed, then curled her right paw over and over. The hisses and whirs of the robotics created a tune only she could control, with every note calculated to sound random. It offered some comfort, but not much. “Y-you’re not going to look for my family, are you? Don’t take them, please. I couldn’t live with myself if I found out they’d all gotten captured and experimented on because of me.”

  Michelle tilted her head. “Captured and experimented on? You really do keep records, don’t you? But no, I’m not going to look for your family.”

  “Are the bad people going to?” Ember asked.

  “Oh, I get it. You’ve been talking with Yegor, haven’t you? What did he tell you?”

  “Uhm . . .” She hesitated. Michelle didn’t seem like the type that would hurt or yell at someone if they didn’t do or say what they were supposed to, but her judgments weren’t always the most accurate. ‘Truth, Ember,’ she thought. “Well, he kind of implied I couldn’t have kittens, I think, but the way he said it was vague and weird, so I don’t know for sure.” She bit her tongue. “He also said there were bad people who wanted to have a celery train me to be a spy. Or something. It didn’t sound good.”

  “A celery, huh? Well, he was right about some things. You can’t have kittens anymore, but that may be your way out of here. There are people, the ones Yegor likes to refer to as ‘the bad guys,’ who might come for you in a few days. Because of your condition though, they probably won’t need you. If that’s the case, you can come home with me and finish recovering.”

  “But do I get to go back to my real home?”

  “I don’t know, sweetie. I don’t know. Like I said, it’s not that simple.” Something beeped on her wrist phone. She looked at it for a moment, then swiped the screen away. “Sorry, I have to go. If you have any questions, you can either call me using Thai, or you can ask Dr. Sagong if you see him. Okay?”