Whiskers's Arc

Chapter 1 of 2

Whiskers crouched on the mushroom cottage roof and watched the warden's lantern move through the trees. He had three minutes, maybe four. Below him, a crowd of tenants he had spent all week organizing was still arguing at the mossy table in the yard, passing around the list of grievances he'd written for them. If the warden reached the yard before they signed it, every name on that paper would belong to the wrong side of the ledger, and Whiskers would be in a cage before sunrise. He was a cat boy with angel wings, dressed in black, and he hated that strangers on Zadar 1 kept mistaking the wings for a promise. He was not a savior. He wanted the throne of this world, and he wanted it so he could drag the ledger out and burn it. The neighborhood he grew up in had taught him how the sorting worked. He had been sorted wrong his whole life, and he had stopped waiting for anyone to correct it. The warden's lantern cleared the last row of trees. Whiskers dropped from the roof, landed in the doorway of the cottage, and shoved the door open. Inside, a huge cat with purple horns and slime-slick fur lifted its head from the hearth rug. He had been feeding it scraps for a month for exactly this favor. "Yard," Whiskers said. "Loud as you can. Don't bite anyone." The horned cat trotted out and roared. The tenants scattered from the table. The warden shouted and swung the lantern toward the noise, and in the second his light was off the yard, Whiskers snatched the grievance list off the table, folded it into his jacket, and shoved the nearest tenant toward the tree line. "Go. Sign it tomorrow. Different house." The tenants ran. The horned cat crashed through the hedge and vanished. The warden was left in an empty yard with a scared animal's tracks and no witnesses. Whiskers watched from the air, wings working hard, the list safe against his ribs. He saw the warden bend down, pick something up from the dirt, and hold it to the lantern. It was one of Whiskers's own black feathers. The warden turned it in his fingers a long time before he tucked it into his coat. He had gotten the list out. He had kept his people out of the cage. But the authority on Zadar 1 now had a feather, and a feather on this world was as good as a name. Whiskers landed on a branch and pulled the list from his jacket. Twenty-two signatures. Not enough to rule anything yet. Enough to be hunted for. He looked back toward the glowing cottage and started counting who he needed next.