Touchstone 1 - Stray

with Jeh from Second Squad, so I shelved the idea for the moment. Jeh is so comfortable and relaxed that I didn’t mind her coming too, though having to be escorted about does mean that shopping is always going to feel like wasting someone else’s time to me. We were just at the big doors which mark one of the exits out of KOTIS, and are one of the few places which are actively guarded by greensuits, when an alarm (bip-bip-bip) sounded. Actual noise, not just in the interface, which is really rare here. The emergency space of the interface abruptly filled with ‘Lockdown’ and ‘Incursion 1’ messages. And the doors to ‘outside’ began to close.
    I’d really love to know what would have happened if I’d been up on the roof when the lockdown started, but I’m hoping no-one else thinks of that because then they’d probably tell me not to go out there all the time. As it was, Ketzaren and Jeh both froze and looked really surprised for a second, then went very alert.
    “In here,” Ketzaren said, pointing to a waiting room area just to one side of the entrance. She and Jeh had flanked me, looking all dangerous and prepared despite the nice dresses. Jeh touched me on the shoulder as we moved, and said: “Nothing in my range,” when we stopped in the centre of the room. They stayed on either side of me, scanning for movement.
    “Is Ionoth in KOTIS?”
    “Not confirmed yet,” Jeh said, but then the message change to ‘Incursion 2’. “Confirmed now.”
    Then there was an exceedingly tedious period where Ketzaren and Jeh stood guarding me and obviously talking to people over the interface. I didn’t like to ask any more questions when they were tensed for attack, and after a while I gave up and started playing around with interface settings. I still hadn’t decided on the decoration for my rooms, and had found a vast array of images I could purchase to use, and yet couldn’t settle on any of them.
    Ketzaren made a sound, so I stopped playing with the interface and looked at her only to find her looking back at me with a strange expression.
    “They found the incursion,” she said. “That Ionoth cat from the Maze Rotation must have followed–”
    She broke off. I guess I must have done some sort of major colour change. I certainly felt sick right through: lightning nausea. “It hurt someone?”
    “No.” She gave me a quizzical frown. “Don’t jump to conclusions. Here, have a chair.” She steered me into the nearest and shook her head at me.
    “Probably simplest to show her rather than explain,” Jeh said. “I’ll route it.”
    Perhaps the oddest thing ever about living on Tare is that when you watch what people have recorded with their own eyes and ears, you not only have it filtered by factors like bad hearing or red-green colour blindness, but you also see it through the frame of their face. Just as how you can see the edges of your nose but usually tune it out. Whoever had made the recording Jeh sent me blinked a lot, had a long fringe, and wore a stud in their nose.
    The recording started out with the Ionoth cat, sitting on top of a high cabinet in a huge and busy industrial kitchen, staring down at something below it. It was all coiled and intent, tail twitching, and the person who was recording called out to the other people in the kitchen, drawing attention to it. The cat didn’t seem to care, staring down at this guy standing just beneath it. Some girl made a joke and the guy looked up and looked confused, and stepped away. The cat’s tail twitched even faster and then it leapt at him, making a lot of people shout and shriek, and it would have landed right on his chest, except it went right through him. And he gasped and shuddered and sat down in a heap and there was the cat on the floor on the other side of him, with something in its mouth that looked like a big silverfish with octopus tendencies. The cat shook the thing briskly, then held it down with a paw and bit it in a particularly final way, crunch. Then it picked the body up, jumped up to the nearby counter and on top of another cabinet, and vanished.
    “Is stickie?” I asked, still feeling sick about the whole thing. The Ionoth cat had followed me home because I’d petted it. If it had attacked the cook instead of the bug-octopus, then it would have been my fault.
    “A new type.” Ketzaren sat down with a sigh, apparently deciding we weren’t in immediate danger of attack. “One that’s beyond the current