Tom In Suit had not slept in six months, and the ending of his symphony still would not come, capiche? He sat at the piano inside the empty concert hall he had claimed for himself, a grey cat in a grey suit, staring at a page of music that stopped mid-bar. The horns were done. The bass was done. They matched the car horns and low thunder of Brainrot City outside the tall doors. What came after those two sections, he could not hear. He had decided, alone, that this score would be the city's official anthem. Nobody had asked him to. Nobody had told him to stop. The manuscript on the stand was thick as a brick. Six months of ink had warped the paper. Coffee rings marked the margins. Crossed-out staves ran black in places, and clean notation returned only on the first pages, where the horns and bass sat neat and balanced. After that, the writing broke apart. The last page ended on a held chord and a question mark he had drawn with a shaking paw. He stood up. He walked to the tall front doors and pushed one open. The city hit him at once: horns stacked on horns, a bass line rolling under the pavement, voices shouting across the block. He listened for the ending. He had listened this way a hundred times. The same loop played in his head, the same horns, the same bass, and then silence where the finish should be. A polished chrome car rolled past the steps. Its horn cut clean through the noise, one bright note, held longer than the others. Tom froze. The note did not belong to what he already had. It sat above the horns. It sat outside the bass. It was a third color, and he had been deaf to it for six months because he had been inside the hall, not on the street. He ran back to the piano. He struck the note. He struck the chord under it. He struck the next one, and the next, and the ending unrolled under his paws like it had been waiting behind a door. He grabbed the pen. He filled the empty staves. He wrote past the question mark. He wrote to a double bar line and drew it thick, capiche? He set the pen down. The manuscript was finished, but his paws were shaking, and the ink on the last page was still wet. The score had to be performed to become the anthem. That meant players. That meant an audience. That meant a marquee outside this hall reading his street name in lights, and he had spent six months speaking to no one. He looked at the closed doors and understood the next problem had already arrived, capiche?