“Mutation? A cat-worshipping mutation? One that appears at exactly the same time as a cat-infecting mutation?” I groaned. “Doesn’t that seem like too much of a coincidence to you, Doctor?”
“But it’s still just a coincidence, Kid.”
“How can you be so sure?”
“Because the peep cat isn’t viable.” She stood and walked to the far wall, where a pile of cages were filled with various cats, all of whom had the scruffy, streetwise look of strays. “See these little guys? Since yesterday I’ve been trying to produce transmission from the peep cat to one of them … and nothing. Doesn’t matter if they lick each other, eat from the same bowl. Zilch. It’s like trying to force two mosquitoes to give each other malaria; it’s hopeless.”
“But what about transmission through rats?”
She shook her head. “I’ve been testing that too. I’ve tried biting, ingestion, even blood transfusion, and I haven’t gotten the parasite to move to a single rat, much less from rat to cat. That peep cat is a dead end.”
I had to bite my lip to keep from arguing. The peep cat wasn’t a dead end; I knew about a dozen others. But how could I explain about them to Dr. Rat without telling her everything I’d seen the night before? If I told her about Ryder House, I’d have to mention Morgan and Angela, and how I’d found them … which would mean bringing up what Chip had told me about the Mayor’s office. And once I admitted my suspicions about the Night Mayor, I’d have to start my own counterconspiracy.
Suddenly my racing mind was halted by the smell of Dr. Rat’s lair, a scent that had been conspicuously absent the night before: rats. Ryder House had been so clean. No piles of garbage, no reeking decay. No sign at all of a brood of rodents.
“What if rats don’t matter?” I said softly.
She snorted. “You found a huge brood down in the tunnel, Cal.”
“No, that’s not what I mean. Those rats carry the parasite, sure. They were the reservoir. But what if they weren’t the vector for the peep cat getting infected?”
“But I told you, it doesn’t travel from cat to cat. So what else is left?”
“Humans.”
She frowned.
“What if this strain really is like malaria?” I continued. “Except with cats instead of mosquitoes? Maybe it just bounces back and forth between felines and people.”
Dr. Rat smiled. “Interesting theory, Kid, but there’s one problem.” She crossed to the cage where the peep cat lay calmly watching us and stuck a finger in through the bars.
“Um, Dr. Rat, I wouldn’t do that…”
She chuckled; the cat was sniffing her finger, its whiskers vibrating. “This cat isn’t violent. It doesn’t bite.”
My hand went to my cheek. “Are you forgetting what it did to my face?”
Dr. Rat gave a snort. “Any cat will attack if you get it mad enough. And anyway that’s a scratch, not a bite.” She turned back to the cat, rubbing its forehead through the wires of the cage. It closed its eyes and began to purr.
“But the cats are important somehow!” I shouted. “I know they are!”
She turned to face me. “The cats? Plural?”
“Oh.” I cleared my throat. “Well, potentially plural.”
Dr. Rat narrowed her eyes. “Cal, is there something you’re not telling me?”
There were lots of things I hadn’t told her. But at that moment a horrible thought crossed my mind…
“Wait a second,” I said. “What if the strain spreads between cats and humans without biting? How would that work?”
Dr. Rat’s suspicious expression didn’t waver, but she answered me. “Well, it could happen in a few ways. Remember toxoplasma?”
“Who could forget toxoplasma? It’s in my brain.”
She nodded. “Mine too. Toxoplasma spores are airborne. Cats leave them in the litter box, then they go up your nose. But that would only work from cat to human, not the other way around. For two-way transmission, you and a cat would have to breathe on each other a lot at short range…”
I remembered something Dr. Rat had said the day before, and my stomach did a back flip. “You mean, if the cat stole your breath?”
She smiled. “Like in those old legends where cats were demons? Yeah. That might work.” A frown crossed her face. “And you know, those old stories date from around the time of the plague.”
“Yeah. Plague.”
Dr. Rat’s eyes widened. My face must have been turning odd colors. “What did I say, Cal?”
I didn’t answer. A small but horrible memory had drifted through my mind, something Lace had said the night before.
“Yeah,” I said softly, “really nice.”
“What’s really nice?” said Dr. Rat.
“I have to go now.”
“What’s wrong, Cal?”
“Nothing.” I stood shakily. “I have to go home is all.”
She raised an eyebrow. “Feeling sick?”
“No, I’m fine. This conversation just reminded me, though… My cat is, um, unwell.”
“Oh.” She frowned. “Nothing serious, I hope.”
I shrugged, dizzy from standing up too fast. My throat was dry. What I was thinking could not be true. “Probably not too serious. You know how cats are.”
The cab ride back to Brooklyn was the most unpleasant twenty dollars I’d ever spent. I stared out the window as we soared across the Williamsburg Bridge, wondering if I’d gone insane. Wondering if Cornelius had really contracted the disease from me.
The old cat had never bitten me, hadn’t even scratched me in the last year.
Airborne, Dr. Rat had said.
That had to be nuts. Diseases transmitted by fluids didn’t just suddenly become airborne. If they did, we’d all die from Ebola, we’d all get rabies from a walk in the woods, we’d all be carrying HIV …
We’d all be vampires.
Of course, diseases change. Evolution never sleeps. But my strain was too well developed to be brand-new. It infected cats, turned its victims into feline-worshippers and carriers, created smarter and saner peeps. A whole raft of adaptations.
And those ancient legends about cats stealing breath—those stories were seven hundred years old. If this strain had been around for seven hundred years, where had it been hiding?
Then I remembered the pale rats below the surface, buried deep until the reservoir had bubbled up beneath the PATH train. Could they have been down there in the darkness for centuries, keeping an ancient strain of the parasite hidden?
And the foul thing I’d smelled but not encountered down there. What did a hidden strain of the parasite have to do with that unseen subterranean creature?
The ride took forever, my sweating palms leaving handprints on the vinyl seats, the sunlight flashing through the struts of the bridge, the taxi meter ticking like a time bomb, and the memory that had struck me in Dr. Rat’s office replaying, Lace’s voice saying again and again: “Except for not having any of my stuff, commuting all the way from Brooklyn, and having your heavy-ass cat lie on me all night. Other than that, it’s been kind of… nice.”
“Yeah. Really nice,” I whispered again.
I picked up a flashlight at the dollar store on the way home.
“Here, kitty, kitty!” I called as the door swung open. “It’s nummy-time.”
For a moment I heard nothing and wondered if Cornelius had somehow figured out that I knew his secret and had escaped my apartment for the wider world. But then he padded out from the bathroom to greet me.