Skyglass: Chapter 1

PHOENIX

I stood in the empty bedroom, delicately sniffing a pair of boxers, trying to learn more about the underfed loner I’d followed home.

The night before, he’d collapsed onto his bed, muddy boots still strapped on. I’d stayed a cat and slept on his chest for a while, but it was too poky to get any real rest. The guy was a little sweet to look at, though he wasn’t my flavor. His nose was large and thin, his gloomy green hair kinky, uncut, and stained black with some cheap dye. The rest of him was just a pile of bones: his wrists a pair of skinny butterfly legs, his chest no thicker than a strong-willed tapeworm. But I wriggled a little as I remembered the orange warmth of his eyes.

He was exactly what I needed–a hermit with a weakness for cats, who knew his way around the city. He didn’t take up much space; besides his bed, a dirty pile of clothes, a shelf of old discs, a bathroom scale, and a mummified lemon I’d found under his bed, his apartment was empty. Not much to learn from, but shuffling through his p-com (a scrappy thing that looked like something a robot shat out) while he had slept revealed a little more: his name was Moss, and he worked at a disc shop named Myriad. But I’d barely gotten to poke through his VR files when the com began shivering and screaming in my paw, so I’d been forced to abandon it on his face. After he’d left and taken it with him, I used my feline senses to investigate the apartment, and they told me little more than which boxers he’d dribbled the most piss on.

I transformed back into a human–a naked one, because the change had disintegrated my clothing. It had been an hour since Moss had scrambled off, and I wanted to visit him at work. I stole some clothes, propped the front door open with the bathroom scale, and headed out.

Myriad was a little shack clinging to the edge of Raith’s Abyss, pinched between the airway and a drippy wall. I licked my lips, unsure of the dankness, and tramped down a squeaky staircase to get inside.

A deep bell sounded as I opened the door. Within, the shop rumbled with dragon music. The place was full of discs rattling in their shells like crone bones. My lip curled. I couldn’t believe people still listened to the things. Gross!

“Greetings.”

There was a man behind a counter, talking to me. Not the guy I was looking for, but maybe they were friends.

“Does Moss work here?” I asked.

“Do you know him?” the man at the counter asked back.

“Well, I woke up in his bed this morning, so I guess I’d have to say yes.” I shrugged. I’d left out a couple of specifics–like the part where Moss had chased me out of his bed–because they weren’t useful to me right then.

“You…what?”

The look on the guy’s face was not what I expected, oh no, not at all–it was like he’d just come home to find someone turning his puppy on a spit. Hungry questions crowded my mind, but I didn’t dwell on them long, because right then, I noticed his ears–long and pointy. Another elf, just like the one who’d chased me with the gun.

I stepped closer and poked him in the face, curious.

“Huh?” He blinked at me, confused.

I gave him a huge grin. Elves were, after all, quite fascinating; I’d learned all about them on my way to Earth. They literally kept the lights on in Raith; elven meditation fed the plants, and plants powered the city via a leach system hooked up to all the greenery. All the poor little elves got out of the deal was a meager stipend and a jail sentence if they refused to participate.

I mostly just liked their sparkly eyes. Take the guy at the counter, for example: his gaze was as red as a chopped-up pomegranate.

“You’re pretty,” I told him, drinking in his strangeness. He had the elven bits the city had marked him with to make him stand out from the regular old humans–his bright green thumbs, pointy ears, and a paper-white patch of skin over his left eye–and bits that were just him, like the flush in his cheeks and motionless tattoos drawn all over his brown skin.

He drew back a little, his eyebrows furrowed at my scrutiny.

“So, is Moss here?” I asked again.

He rubbed his nose, and managed to get out, “Uh, no. No, he’s off today.” For a moment, he looked like he was lost in thought, and then his glinty eyes focused on me again. “Did you…did you really sleep with him? Moss, I mean.”

“Oh.” I sighed. “No. He was too sleepy to do anything fun.”

The guy across from me looked deeply relieved. I laughed at him and patted his head, then left the shop.

Back at the apartment, I waited for Moss, crouching as my cat-self in his bathtub. An hour into my wait, the front door opened.

“Cat,” I heard him grumble as he stepped inside. “How the rot did you drag my scale out here?”

His boots scuffed across the floor as he approached the bathroom.

“You,” he said, spying me in the tub. “Food.” He threw a greasy bag at me.

I sniffed it. Yuck. It smelled like deep-fried rat babies.

“MEOW,” I complained, but Moss ignored me.

He pulled off his boots and stripped down to his boxers. So bony, I thought. Ugh. He placed the scale on the floor and stepped on it, rudely not looking in my direction.

I hated being ignored, and he seemed very good at ignoring things, so I decided it was time for something unignorable. I jumped up onto the ledge of the tub, burned away my catskin, and uncoiled up into my humanoid cage.

Moss froze on the scale. Slowly, his head turned.

“Hi,” I said. “I’m the cat.”

Moss toppled off the scale and caught himself on the doorframe. “What?” he gulped limply.

I crouched down to his level and thumped him on the head. “The cat,” I said. “You know–the furry thing you shared your bed with last night?”

He rubbed his eyes, his mouth hanging open so temptingly that I wanted to stick something in it.

I waited, but still nothing. “Really?” I growled at him. “Fine.” I grabbed his chin.

“Watch,” I told him. I let go, stood back, and let my skin fragment into ash until I was my fire-furred cat-self once again.

Moss gave me a look of terror and fainted across the bathroom floor.

Continued in Chapter 2.

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