The cat

1. Chapter 1 (Yaz): on the drifting sensor

Nobody could find the cat.

This produced eleven minutes of a specific, low-grade shipboard panic — not real fear, more the performance of fear people do around something they already suspect will resolve itself — Bram checking every open case on deck on the theory that Curiosity might have folded herself into one, William insisting loudly that cats did not, as a rule, disembark voluntarily and therefore the search should be systematic, Amaleto quietly checking the places a cat would actually go rather than the places a nervous crew imagined one might, until Bram came up from the wet lab two decks down holding her against his chest like a man surrendering, and she looked out at all of them with the flat, unbothered patience of a creature who had never once considered herself lost.

"She was on the salinity bench," Bram said. "Sitting on the sensor."

"The one that's drifting?"

"The one that's drifting."

Nobody thought anything of that at the time. Yaz got it on camera anyway, because you never knew.

2. Chapter 5 (Solá): at the monitor nobody watches

He found the science team's comms corner mostly dark, mostly quiet, the way it should be at this hour, and Curiosity sitting square in front of the space-weather monitor with the stillness of an animal that had decided, some time ago, this was where she lived now.

Nobody watched that screen. It had been running since the comms suite was rigged in port — solar wind speed, a Kp index ticking along the bottom, an auroral oval nobody aboard had reason to care about this far south — left on out of the same habit that leaves a porch light burning long after anyone's expected home. The cat had claimed it three nights running. Solá crouched, once, and looked at what she was looking at, which as far as he could tell was nothing: numbers, a curve, the low hum of a machine doing exactly what it had been built to do and nothing more.

He did not think much of it. He filed it, the way he filed most small ship-facts that didn't yet have anywhere to go, and moved on.

3. Interlude I: the warm box

The warm box hums, low and even, and the warmth comes up through the floor of it into the place where she has settled, which is not a place she chose so much as a place that offered itself, the way good places always do.

Light moves across the front of the box. Not fast. A slow climbing thing, green, then a flicker of something brighter that comes and goes and comes again, no rhythm to it a body could set a paw by, which is itself the interesting part. Things that repeat are for sleeping through. Things that don't are for watching.

Feet pass, twice, unhurried, and a second, heavier set behind them, and neither pair stops long enough to matter.

Something in the box flickers harder than before — a bright climbing thing, there and gone — and she does not startle, because startling is for creatures who mistake noticing for danger. She only watches, ears forward, tail still, the whole of her narrowed down to the small bright place at the edge of the glass where the light did the thing it doesn't usually do.

It will do it again. She intends to be here when it does.

She sleeps, eventually, but not far, and not for long, and when she wakes the box is still humming, still warm, still hers, and nothing at all has been decided, which does not trouble her in the slightest.

4. Chapter 6 (Yaz): the same monitor, the next night

Curiosity was on the monitor again that evening, same spot, same stillness, and Yaz — passing through the comms corner on her way to check the satellite feed one more time before dinner — paused long enough to scratch the cat behind one ear, which earned her nothing, not a purr, not a look, just the same fixed attention on the screen as if Yaz herself were a mildly interesting piece of weather passing through the frame.

"You and me both, honestly," Yaz told her. "Staring at something that's probably nothing. Building a whole personality around it."

The cat did not dignify this with a response, which Yaz felt was, on balance, the correct call.

5. Interlude II: the connector

She goes where she always goes when the ship gets like this. Down, and back, to the bench that hums, to the small dead thing with the crack in its side that nobody has touched in three weeks and everybody stopped looking at even longer ago than that — the first one, the one that was wrong before any of the rest of it was wrong, before the warm box, before the deep place, before any of it had a shape a body could sit on.

She sits on it now, the way she sat on it the very first day, and something under her paw — loose, forgotten, a connector nobody re-seated after they decided the thing wasn't worth the trouble — shifts, just slightly, just enough.

She does not notice this as anything. It is only a thing that moved because she was sitting on it, the way things always move when she sits on them, and she settles, and closes her eyes, and does not think about it again.

Somewhere above her, the ship keeps humming with its good, urgent noise, and none of it is any of her business at all.

6. Chapter 19 (Bram): "Did you know?"

She did not, obviously, dignify this with a response, and he found himself laughing, once, quietly, at his own question, because of course she hadn't known anything at all. She had sat on a warm sensor because it was warm, and sat on a warm monitor because it was warm, and gone wherever a body went for reasons that had nothing to do with any of the things the rest of them had spent three weeks trying so hard to prove. She had never once been chasing the mystery. She had simply gone wherever comfort happened to be sitting, and comfort, this whole voyage, kept turning out to be sitting exactly where the mystery was.

Then, a few paragraphs on:

It had never been an accident finding things. The accidents were just where his attention happened to land first — the flooded housing, a cat's idle paw, a connector nobody thought worth fixing. What actually found anything, every single time, was the part that came after the accident: the part where he went back, and checked, and refused to write noise on something without pulling the timestamp first to be sure. That part had never once been luck. That part had been him, the whole voyage, quietly, without anyone including himself noticing it was the actual skill and not merely the cleanup crew that followed the real discovery around.

7. Chapter 20 (Yaz): down the gangway

Curiosity went down the gangway on her own terms, the way she'd come up it three weeks before, pausing halfway to survey the dock with an expression that suggested the whole of La Paz existed largely to be tolerated, and then continued on, unhurried, uninterested, toward whatever warm surface the harbor was going to offer her next. Nobody chased her. Nobody needed to. She had never once, in three weeks, been lost — only exactly where she'd meant to be, every single time, for reasons that had never once had anything to do with any of the rest of it.

And Yaz's last log line:

The cat left without saying goodbye. Never once said hello either, if I'm honest. I don't think either gesture was ever really her department.