Chapter Thirty-Six - Catkiller

“Our weakness? You want me to just tell you what Samurai are weak against?

Well, I suppose... awkwardness?”

--Guillotine, interview with Star-Spangled Monthly, 2029

***

There were all sorts of things I could have handled. Katallina being angry at me. Her throwing a tantrum. Having her curse me out. All reactions I’d seen from my kittens plenty of times. They were outlets to anger and sadness that I got. I could deal with snark, it was how I did emotions.

Katallina looked at me, then her eyes got wet and she started to cry.

I didn’t do crying. Lucy did crying.

If a kitten cried, it was Lucy that did the hugging and the shushing and all that junk.

“Ah, fuck,” I said. “Uh, shit, it’s okay, kid?” I tried.

Somehow that didn’t work.

I looked around, but other than her dog, there wasn’t much to see. “Shit, uh, look, you’re safe, alright?” I asked. “I’m gonna slip you, and your dog I guess, a mask, and we can both leave this place, okay?”

She bawled harder.

Interesting.

“What?” I asked.

I started looking for catalogues that could improve maternal instincts or help people in emotional distress, but other than some drug cocktails I can’t find anything very relevant. It’s an oversight I don’t think we were expecting. A complaint has been filed.

“That’s nice,” I deadpanned. I reached up to run my hands through my hair, bumped my helmet, then groaned. “Okay, okay. Hey, kid, you hear me?”

The girl nodded. She was ugly crying, and she was just old enough that it wasn’t even passably cute.

“Okay, look, I’ve got some questions, alright?” I asked.

Katallina snorted some and I sighed as I backed up.

“Myalis, can you connect me to Gomorrah?”

Certainly.

“Thanks,” I said. Something ‘pinged’ and I sighed again because I was in that sort of mood. “Yo, G-girl,” I said.

“I recall telling you not to call me that. Or some variation thereof,” Gomorrah said.

“Yup. I recall not recalling that. So, uh, found the girl, and the dog. Neither are Vanguards. I... wait, Myalis, is the dog?”

No. The dog is not a Vanguard.

Gomorrah hummed. “Interesting. So, where is our wayward Samurai?”

“That’s a question, isn’t it?” I muttered. I tapped on the glass of the chamber. “Hey, kid, uh... shit, I don’t know where to start. Look, we’re looking for someone, a Samurai. The one that gave you that gun you had. Do you know where they are?”

“He’s dead,” Katallina said. “The monsters ate him.”

“Uh,” I said. “Do you know who he was? His name?”

She nodded. “Randall, he was from 2B.”

I blanked, but Gomorrah was on the ball apparently. “Randall from 2B. That’s an older teenaged boy from the same floor where Katallina lived. Male, sixteen. Good clean record. Babysits others on occasion from his social feeds... and the cleanup crews for that building have tagged his body already.”

I rubbed at the nape of my neck, then stood up and stretched. “Whelp, that’s fucked,” I said. “Can you tell Deus Ex?”

“You don’t want to tell her yourself?”

“Not particularly. Make some space in your car for a girl and a dog, would you?”

Gomorrah was quiet for a little while. “You want to put a dog in my car?”

“I’m not leaving the kid here,” I said. “She’s in a fucking cage.”

“That’s fine. But the dog?”

I started pacing. “Gomorrah, you can’t just abandon a dog. Even I know that.”

Gomorrah groaned, a very un-nunlike sound. “God give me patience. Fine. I’m going to contact Deus-Ex. Ping me when you’re done, and I’ll blow off a wall to pick you up.”

“We could leave from the front,” I said.

“Look, this whole thing has been a little disappointing to me, and I have missiles primed to fire already. Don’t take my fun away from me.”

I surrendered to the crazy pyromaniac nun with the missile launchers on account of her being crazy and a pyromaniac and having missile launchers. “See you in a bit then.” I said.

Once the line cut off, I moved closer to the glass wall of Katallina's cell.

I didn’t want to speak my next question out loud, so I opened a text box with a twitch of my eye and typed it out. Myalis, her parents?

All dead. I found their insurance and have filed a claim on it in her name, to be transferred to an account she can access. The insurance company didn’t want to pay out, but I persuaded them otherwise.

“That’s nice of you... how did you persuade them?”

Footage of you at the Hour Men base. For the record, no, she doesn’t have any extended family capable of taking care of her.

If it worked it worked, I supposed. “Hey, Katallina,” I said. “I’m going to get you out of here, okay?”

The girl snorted. “Who even are you?”

“Uh, I’m a samurai,” I said.

“Samurai are supposed to be cool.”

Nevermind being shot twice, my worst injury of the day had just landed with critical damage. “First, good insult there, but wrong target. Second, you’re like, in your teens, stop acting so young.”

She straightened a little. “I lost everything,” she said.

“That happens sometimes. Now, you can stay in the cage with the creepy scientist dudes until they figure out that you’re not a samurai, or you can come with me. I... basically run an orphanage at this point.”

“I don’t want to go to an orphanage,” she said. She sniffed a last time and wiped her nose on the sleeve of her beige shirt. “I can take care of myself.”

“Very cute, but no, you really can’t. City’s got to be full of refugees right now. You’d be swallowed up on the streets in no time. At least come with me for the day, we can figure things out tomorrow.”

“What about the assholes that kidnapped me?” she asked.

“I’ll give you a share of their money once I’m done bankrupting them,” I said.

That perked her up. I had the terrible impression that she might just fit in with all of the kittens. I shuffled over to the glass and tapped it, expecting a screen to show up somewhere.

“The door’s wireless,” Katallina said.

“Right,” I agreed. “Myalis, two masks, one for the kid, one for the dog. Can you make them appear on the other side of the glass?”

I can.

“Are you talking to yourself?” Katallina asked. She looked concerned.

New Purchase: Hazard Mask

Points reduced to... 7520

New Purchase: Hazard Mask - Canid Modified

Points reduced to... 7510

Two boxes plopped onto the ground of the cell, and Katallina jumped. “You actually are a samurai,” she said.

“What did you think?”

“Shitty cosplayer.”

“God save me from little shits with attitude,” I muttered. “Put on the fucking masks.”

Do you have any idea of how ironic it is that you want saving from children with attitudes?

“You calling me a child?” I asked.

That would be insulting children everywhere.

I scoffed, but couldn’t hold back a chuckle. “You ready?” I asked. Katallina was strapping a mask over her dog’s snout. It seemed very okay with the bulbous mask. Its tail was wagging, anyway, which I figured meant it was alright.

My experience with actual dogs was pretty limited. I’d pet one or two when I ran across them, but for the most part I spent more time seeing dogs in my media feed than interacting with them. They were something of a luxury, needing space, and food, and grooming. The sort of person that had time for that wasn’t the sort of person living in the same space as the orphanage.

“What’s its name?” I asked.

“The dog?” Katallina asked. “He belonged to Miss Rupert next door. She was nice, let us play with him and take him out for walks. She died. His name is Catkiller.”

I groaned. My life was a joke. Myalis got the door opened, and judging by how neither the girl nor the dog fainted, the masks worked well enough to protect from the knock-out gas. “Let’s go,” I said as I brought my gun up.

A glance at my map of the building showed me where Gomorrah would be coming from. It also revealed that the red dots of security personnel were moving a lot more than before.

“What’s up with the security?” I asked.

I can’t see what alerted them. One moment... ah. It seems that one of them spoke to another and neither recalled your appointment. I’m afraid that I don’t have the tools to rewrite memories.

“You have a gift for being terrifying,” I said.

“Who are you talking to?” Katallina asked.

“The alien voices in my head,” I said. “Let’s get the fuck out of here.”

“There’re guards.”

I blinked, then raised my grenade launcher while my shoulder-mounted guns deployed over my back.

“Oh,” she said.

“Come on, if you behave you’ll maybe get to see an asshole blow up.”

On leaving the room, Katallina took a moment to punt the scientist sprawled in the floor right in the face.

She’d fit right in with the kittens.

***