Chrome

By Lisa Mason

Two hundred fifty years ago, a purveyor of poisons and the creator of genetically modified organisms—Emirk Corporation—launched into the Moon’s orbit around the Earth an artificial planetoid called Chrome.

There, Emirk technicians created races of human beings blended with the genes of animals. They were called Blends.

Now Luna Lightfoot—half puma, half woman, jewel thief—inadvertently hears a confidential conversation and witnesses a murder. She teams up with Terralina Rustabrin—half tortoise, half woman, bond-promised to a tortoise prince—and discovers a murderous scheme to change the lives of Chromians. A chameleon mercenary and an insane mastermind lurk behind the scheme.

Lisa Mason has published eleven novels, including Summer of Love (a Philip K. Dick Award Finalist), The Gilded Age (a New York Times Notable Book), Arachne (a Locus Hardcover Bestseller), The Garden of Abracadabra (“Fun and enjoyable Urban Fantasy”), Celestial Girl (A Lily Modjeska Mystery), Strange Ladies: 7 Stories (“A must-read collection”), and forty stories and novelettes in magazines and anthologies worldwide.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Lisa Mason
• Release date: Jul 3, 2019
• ISBN: 9780463416808

Lisa Mason

Lisa Mason is the author of eleven novels, including Summer of Love (Bantam), a San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book and Philip K. Dick Award finalist, and The Golden Nineties (Bantam), a New York Times Notable Book and New York Public Library Recommended Book.Her most recent speculative novel is CHROME.Mason published her first story, “Arachne,” in Omni and has since published short fiction in magazines and anthologies worldwide, including Omni, Full Spectrum, Universe, Year’s Best Fantasy and Horror, Asimov’s Science Fiction Magazine, Unique, Transcendental Tales, Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, Immortal Unicorn, Tales of the Impossible, Desire Burn, Fantastic Alice, The Shimmering Door, Hayakawa Science Fiction Magazine, Unter Die Haut, and others. Her thirty-two stories and novelettes have been translated into Chinese, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Portuguese, Spanish, and Swedish.Mason’s story, “Tomorrow’s Child,” first published in Omni Magazine, is in active development at Universal Studios.Lisa Mason lives in the San Francisco Bay area with her husband, the renowned artist and jeweler Tom Robinson. Visit her on the web at Lisa Mason’s Official Website, follow her Official Blog, follow her on Twitter @lisaSmason, or e-mail her at [e-mail].

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CHROME

Lisa Mason

This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are either products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously and are not to be construed as real. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, organizations, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright 2019 by Lisa Mason.

Cover, colophon, and art copyright 2019 by Tom Robinson.

All rights reserved.

PUBLISHING HISTORY

Bast Books Ebook Edition published July 9, 2019.

Bast Books Print Edition published August 13, 2019.

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage or retrieval, without permission in writing from the publisher.

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This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting my hard work.

For information address:

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Thank you for your readership! Visit Lisa Mason at her Official Web Site for her books, ebooks, screenplays, stories, interviews, blogs, cute pet pictures, and more. Enjoy!

Table of Contents

Praise for Books by Lisa Mason

Chrome

The Chrominary

About Lisa Mason

Books by Lisa Mason

Praise for Books by Lisa Mason

CHROME

Mason entertains and elicits fascinating questions about human nature in this fast-paced, action-packed science fiction adventure....The colorful cast raises the question of which ancestry is more savage: that of animals or humans? (CHROME reads) like a cinematic sibling of The Island of Doctor Moreau. Readers ....will be hooked.

—Publishers Weekly

An excellent semi-noir full-on SF work by a terrific author. . . .a science-fiction homage, in part, to the noir books and movies of the forties and fifties, only brought forth into a future time a quarter-millennium from now. . . a fully-realized society.

—Amazing Stories.com

So Walter Mosley reread Animal Farm and The Island of Dr. Moreau and says to himself, Oh, yes indeed, I've got a terrific idea for my next best seller. But! Lisa says, Hold on, hot stuff. You're too late. Chrome is already on the streets. Haha! Wow! I just tore through Chrome. So much fun. Oh, I guess I should take a time-out to say that it was very well-written too, but I was enjoying the characters and the story so much that the superb writing simply did its job and I had to consciously reflect to notice the excellent and clever construction and reveals. Isn't that the definition of good writing?

—Five–Star Reader Review

ODDITIES: 22 Stories

I find myself constantly surprised by the breadth of styles, places, and characters in this collection. ....sometimes you want to be surprised; and that’s what Ms. Mason delivers in this collection.... Like Ray Bradbury’s short stories, these never fail to surprise you with little sparkles and occasional rockets going off and spreading happy fireworks in your brain.

—Amazing Stories.com

Summer of Love

A San Francisco Chronicle Recommended Book of the Year

A Philip K. Dick Award Finalist

Remarkable. . . .a whole array of beautifully portrayed characters along the spectrum from outright heroism to villainy. . . .not what you expected of a book with flowers in its hair. . . the intellect on display within these psychedelically packaged pages is clear-sighted, witty, and wise.

—Locus Magazine

A fine novel packed with vivid detail, colorful characters, and genuine insight.

—The Washington Post Book World

Captures the moment perfectly and offers a tantalizing glimpse of its wonderful and terrible consequences.

—The San Francisco Chronicle

Brilliantly crafted. . . .An engrossing tale spun round a very clever concept.

—Katharine Kerr, author of Days of Air and Darkness

"Just imagine The Terminator in love beads, set in the Haight-Ashbury ‘hood of 1967."

—Entertainment Weekly

Mason has an astonishing gift. Her characters almost walk off the page. And the story is as significant as anyone could wish. This book will surely be on the prize ballots.

—Analog

The Gilded Age

A New York Times Notable Book

A New York Public Library Recommended Book

A winning mixture of intelligence and passion.

—The New York Times Book Review

Should both leave the reader wanting more and solidify Mason’s position as one of the most interesting writers in science fiction.

—Publishers Weekly

Rollicking. . .Dazzling. . .Mason’s characters are just as endearing as her world.

—Locus Magazine

Graceful prose. . . A complex and satisfying plot.

—Library Journal

Arachne and Cyberweb

Locus Magazine Hardcover Bestsellers

Powerful . . . Entertaining . . . Imaginative.

—People Magazine

Cybernetics, robotics, the aftermath of San Francisco’s Big Quake II, urban tribalism—Lisa Mason combines them all with such deftness and grace, they form a living world . . . Her characters and their world will stay with you long after you’ve finished this fine book.

—Locus Magazine

Lisa Mason stakes out, within the cyberpunk sub-genre, a territory all her own.

—The San Francisco Chronicle

Mason’s endearing characters and their absorbing adventures will hook even the most jaded SF fan.

—Booklist

One Day in the Life of Alexa

Incorporates lively prose, past/present time jumps, and the consequences of longevity technology. An absorbing read with an appealing narrator and subtly powerful emotional rhythms.

—Goodreads

Five Stars! Like all the truly great scifi writers, what [Lisa Mason] really writes about is you and me and today and what is really important in life. . . . I enjoyed every word.

—Reader Review

The Garden of Abracadabra

So refreshing! This is Stephanie Plum in the world of Harry Potter.

—Goodreads

Fun and enjoyable urban fantasy

This is a very entertaining novel—sort of a down-to-earth Harry Potter with a modern adult woman in the lead. Even as Abby has to deal with mundane concerns like college and running the apartment complex she works at, she is surrounded by supernatural elements and mysteries that she is more than capable of taking on. Although this book is just the first in a series, it ties up the first episode while still leaving some story threads for upcoming books. I'm looking forward to finding out more.

—Reader Review

I love the writing style and am hungry for more!

—Goodreads

Strange Ladies: 7 Stories

Offers everything you could possibly want, from more traditional science fiction and fantasy tropes to thought-provoking explorations of gender issues and pleasing postmodern humor…This is a must-read collection.

—The San Francisco Review of Books

Lisa Mason might just be the female Phillip K. Dick. Like Dick, Mason's stories are far more than just sci-fi tales, they are brimming with insight into human consciousness and the social condition….a sci-fi collection of excellent quality….you won't want to miss it.

—The Book Brothers Review Blog

Fantastic book of short stories….Recommended.

—Reader Review

"I’m quite impressed, not only by the writing, which gleams and sparkles, but also by [Lisa Mason’s] versatility . . . Mason is a wordsmith . . . her modern take on Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland is a hilarious gem! [This collection] sparkles, whirls, and fizzes. Mason is clearly a writer to follow!"

—Amazing Stories

Celestial Girl (A Lily Modjeska Mystery)

Passionate Historical Romantic Suspense

5 Stars! I really enjoyed the story and would love to read a sequel! I enjoy living in the 21st century, but this book made me want to visit the Victorian era. The characters were brought to life, a delight to read about. The tasteful sex scenes were very racy….Good Job!

—Reader Review

CHROME

Preface

In The Forbidden District

The pupils of her golden eyes widen and her nocturnal vision takes in every stirring shadow, every moonlit glimmer.

Dark blocks of buildings brood beneath the starry night, regimented like military barracks. Grim windows glint under eaves, too tiny to crawl through, grilled in by metal bars, some with the panes of glass half punched out. Stacks of rickety brick jut from the endless tarred roofs. Chimneys for the crematories where the failed experiments were once consigned to an oven’s flames?

Lightfoot doesn’t know. A lot of failed experiments, that’s what the histories say.

She spies the collapsed trough of a rain gutter, a door twisted off its hinges, a scatter of shackles abandoned on the gravel where the survivors, newly freed from their cages, had torn their prison apart.

Lightfoot drops to a crouch, stilling the breath in her chest. Slowing the pound of her heart. She shouldn’t be here. She wouldn’t be here, if not for the clue she’d found.

Silence, save the keening wind.

Desolation bears down like the boot of an oppressor. She shouldn’t be here.

So different from the honking, howling, squealing, squawking, yapping, yowling of Chrome City. Different, too, from the boroughs of the Blends, the sprawl of their habitats, their meadows and mountains, jungles and deserts, ponds and aeries. Different even from the Wildlands with its savage brambles and untamed trees.

No life wants to live here. Not in this cursed place.

Lightfoot shivers. Then steels herself, tensing her muscles for the task ahead.

The Forbidden District must be haunted. She can practically hear the ghostly screams of the failed experiments two-and-a-half centuries ago.

The screams of her human ancestors.

1

Luna Lightfoot

Later, when she’s prowling off from the heist, a pounce in her step, the pilfered treasure in her pocket, Luna Lightfoot sees something she is not supposed to see.

On Chrome, the artificial planetoid orbiting Earth, everyone celebrates Jamboree on the cusp of spring, donning masks and costumes and indulging in their fondest fantasies, usually with impunity. Lightfoot loves Jamboree. She’s scored her richest heists while everyone is swilling gin, devouring feasts, and mating up with their specimen of choice.

Cage free to you, Lightfoot, growls Dom Swifty Panterr, gnawing a gobbet of bloody beef impaled on a toothpick feathered with green tinsel. Fine mask.

"Cage free to you, Dom Panterr," she purrs, unreasonably pleased the criminal kingpin has noticed her slinking through the ballroom among the high-society herd.

Lightfoot wonders—but only briefly—why he has been invited.

Oh, that’s right. Swipe a slice of bacon and you’re a thief bound for jail-time in a Chrome City lockup. But swindle the hard-earned wages of a million mice and sheep and quite a few dogs, commission and commit extortion and murder-for-hire, prey on gazelles because you just can’t help your instincts, peddle cram and soot and tobacco—all of which Dom Panterr does in the usual course of his enterprise, if the rumors are true—and you’re an honored, respected guest at Bunny Hedgeway’s shindig on a sultry spring evening during Jamboree.

Who can be surprised? That’s the law of the jungle. Only Chrome is no jungle. A higher high-tech megalopolis than Chrome City doesn’t exist among the sorry burgs down on Earth.

This is Chrome.

Lightfoot preens before a World Eye, running her hand with the claws unsheathed through her thatch of tawny hair. She pictures fifteen billion wretched Earthians watching the Instrumentality. Watching her. Their eyes wide with wonder. Their jaws agape with awe.

As well they should. She has costumed her lithesome self as a High Priestess for Jamboree. Pulled an ancient Egyptian cat mask over her natural face of puma blended with woman. A silver lamé jumpsuit hugs her long, powerful limbs. A bib-necklace of turquoise and carnelian beads nearly throttles her thick, muscular throat. The knee-high, silver leather boots with four-inch heels won’t make the heist any easier when she’s got to leap from the rooftop to the terrace but, damn, the boots look hot.

Lightfoot is more than unreasonably pleased to make her appearance at the Hedgeway mansion on the toniest street in Heavenly Hills. A Jamboree not to be missed, though Bunny did require every guest to sign a release granting permission to use their personal images on the Instrumentality. For free.

Lightfoot flexes her knees, leaps clear over the heads of several revelers. Plants her boot heels in front of the buffet table. Effortlessly. Precisely.

That Chrome has an artificial gravity ninety-percent of the pull on Earth has little to do with Lightfoot’s astounding leap. Everyone engineered and raised on Chrome has adjusted for generations to the lightness of Chromian life. Lightfoot’s leap has everything to do with her puma Blend. Leaping is merely one of her many puma talents.

She licks her lips, snuffling luscious scents. The table groans with every gourmet delicacy the Vats have to offer. Marbled meats. Pink slabs of salmon. Wheels of cheese rimmed with rinds of purple and orange. A whole suckling pig, the seams of its stitching seared golden-brown, rotates on a barbecue spit over flickering blue flames.

Mostly carnivores at this Jamboree, Lightfoot decides, though the platters of salads, exotic fruits, and braided breads suggest that herbivores are mingling among the guests. They had better be big, nasty herbivores—an elephant man, say, or a water buffalo woman—to mingle so fearlessly with this predator pack.

Lightfoot heaps caviar and smoked salmon on a white porcelain plate and mulls over her plans. She always plans each heist down to the last detail. Planning for this heist began with a viewcast on Cocktails Around Chrome, which aired last winter and featured Bunny Hedgeway. Bunny is quite the collector of Earth antiques, as only befits her position as the heiress to a commodities fortune seized by her ancestors after Liberation Day. Chatting with the viewcaster, Bunny had boasted of owning an ivory statuette—a snowy egret, its delicate avian face inset with citrine cabochons for eyes.

The statuette—very fragile, circa Earth’s sixteenth century, the Tokugawa shogunate—had been smuggled to Chrome in a Plexiglas box. Lightfoot shakes her head at the audacity. Who would dare do such a thing? A pirate breaching the Quarantine? An Emirk Corporation employee fattening his wages while shipping up on corporate business?

Lightfoot takes her plate of food to the bar, orders a Carnivore’s Bloody Mary from the tuxed bovine mixing drinks. She toasts those clever smugglers. She’s had her eye on the egret ever since she saw Cocktails Around Chrome.

Cage free to you, darling! she shouts across the ballroom and exchanges warm smiles with her esteemed hostess. Bunny Hedgeway has become her dearest friend. Lightfoot has made sure of it. They bumped Tatts two weeks ago. Now Lightfoot and Bunny can wink each other and often do, gossiping, commiserating about life on Chrome.

Bunny is no carrot-crunching lagomorph as her name may suggest, sweet and pliant and willing to bed just about any male specimen as long as he doesn’t devour her first. Wonderful Bunny is a domestic dog. A Pomeranian woman of elegant refinement. She’s achieved her enviable wealth and social prominence due in part to her inheritance and in part to the abundant funding she enjoys as the poster child for Pomeranian Fanciers of Earth. PFOE, also known as POOF, deplores the horrific, inhumane experiments carried out by Emirk Corporation two-and-a-half centuries ago on Chrome.

Illegal experiments that created a Blend like Bunny.

Does their pleasant friendship deter Lightfoot from the heist she’s planned tonight?

Don’t be silly. Bunny doesn’t need the ivory egret; her life will go on. Whereas Lightfoot craves the gee-gaw. She can’t live without it. Acquiring beautiful things by whatever means is her own personal little obsession. If all goes well, the Pomeranian will never know who swiped her treasure. She will invite Lightfoot to a wine-soaked luncheon next Wednesday, and Lightfoot will check her calendar, reschedule someone, and graciously accept.

Lightfoot devours the hors d’oeuvres, drains her drink. She surveys the crowd, her golden eyes shrewd and appraising. Her olfactory sense testing the air. A lot of carnivores, then. An unusual selection of carnivores, at that. Lightfoot wrinkles her nose beneath the mask.

Canine and feline Blends may mingle well at social functions—hounds and tabbies generally behave civilized to each other—but watch out for the canids and felis. Many a jackal has gotten into a fistfight with a bobcat at a black-tie piano recital.

The instincts go way back.

Bunny, howling with laughter at the bar, is a merry sort around any hot blood. She’s painted her watery brown eyes with blue eyeliner. Her sensitive pert nose quivers in her pleasantly plump face. Her pink tongue lolls between her sweet little fangs curving out ever so slightly between her rosy lipsticked lips.

Like Lightfoot, and all Feralists, Bunny goes for a natural look. Not for her, Lightfoot, or any Feralist the dentist’s file razing away the proud ancestral fangs of their genetic heritage. Lightfoot applauds Bunny’s fangs.

Celebrate your ancestral beast, the Feralists like to say.

Lightfoot’s smile fades. Pomeranians are always obliging but they’ve got no commonsense. On Cocktails Around Chrome, Bunny had unwisely mentioned she keeps her ivory prize locked in a treasure room on the third floor. A treasure room devoted to housing her other collectibles. A treasure room next door to the bedroom of the mistress of the mansion—that would be Bunny—so said mistress may rise from her featherbed when disturbed by insomnia, trot over, and savor the sights of her collection.

On Earth, there’s a homily: Possession is nine-tenths of the law. On Chrome, Luna Lightfoot likes to say: Possession is ten-tenths of the law.

Tonight is the night to live up to her inestimable moral standards.

Lightfoot glances over her shoulder. Is anyone watching?

Dom Panterr circulates on the far side of the ballroom. His striking face of puma blended with Cherokee tribesman is only slightly concealed by a strip of black silk across his golden eyes. The rest of his long, lean physique impeccably clad in a black tuxedo. His faithful lynx bodyguards, Luke and Danny, trail behind him. Their sharp eyes glancing around. Their tufted ears swiveling for the ever-present death threats to their boss.

Insects, madam? A bovine server presents a platter heaped with delicacies—fried ants, crickets, grasshoppers—each spicy morsel skewered on more of those tinselly toothpicks.

She holds up her hand. No thanks. She’s had enough to nibble.

She pushes through the crowd, spies Chromians she’s never seen on her nocturnal prowls around the City. There goes a turtle gentleman in a costly custom-fit tuxedo. Olive-drab silk bunches up around his stubby, wrinkled limbs and swells over his rounded belly. He’s pushed the papier-mâché mask of a dragon onto the forehead of his leathery little face. He turns to trade a joke with a bejeweled antelope and Lightfoot startles at the carapace over his back from the nape of his neck to his thighs. A huge handsome dome of red, green, and gold bony plates. Turtle royalty, he’s got to be. The splendid colors those of his dynasty. The mask of a dragon, then. The Tatt on his right hand strobes emerald green with what must surely be Very Important Winks.

Leave it to Bunny to dredge up turtle royalty.

And there. Is it really?

Yes! That’s the famous dancer on Chrome City stages. Zena Kinski is amazingly tall with impossibly long legs. Her long, slender neck and proud, big-eyed face celebrates seven generations of her successful ostrich Blend. Her human ancestors, rumor says, were Russian mobsters captured by rival Russian mobsters and sold to Emirk Corporation for the experiments. The white lace mask is meant to decorate that famously blended face, rather than conceal it. A scanty, lacy costume flatters her shapely figure that manages to combine a tiny, tiny waist with a voluptuous bosom and hips. And those spectacular legs.

An odd scent suddenly catches Lightfoot’s attention. She sniffs curiously, detecting all manner of animal odors beneath the expensive perfumes. Is that the sour smell of reptile?

Like Lightfoot, everyone in the festive throng wears fanciful masks and costumes concealing their identities, their social position, and—if the costumes are really good—sometimes their Blend.

Are there any other Feralists here tonight? How about Reformists? Any agents of Emirk Corporation spying on their fellow Chromians?

Who can say?

Which is excellent, in Lightfoot’s opinion. What are costume parties for?

Jamboree! What a sight to see!

How did this wondrous world come to be?

* * *

Two-and-a-half centuries ago on Earth, Emirk Corporation had hoarded ten trillion dollars in its corporate coffers. How had it done that? For over a century, the Board of Directors declined to pay their long-suffering shareholders a dividend. No sharing of the profits. No sharing, at all.

Emirk boasted an inglorious history of nefarious enterprise. The corporation manufactured mustard gas during Earth’s World War I. Other war poisons during World War II. Nerve gas and napalm sold especially well.

Winning the War for You! the corporate slogan declared.

When the big wars ended and the little wars wound down into uneasy truces, militarized borders, and unresolved hostilities, international law banned the war poisons as too terrible to use against human beings.

That’s life in the war-profiteering lane. Emirk moved on from war poisons to agricultural poisons. To pesticides and herbicides and fungicides of deadly toxicity.

The corporate slogan was retooled, Safeguarding Your Food for You!

Once entrenched in the agricultural poisons business, the Board of Directors sought lucrative new directions. Seeds, genetically modified seeds, said the technicians. Seeds producing food crops resistant to the pests and molds the agricultural poisons couldn’t, with all their toxicity, totally eradicate. Thus Emirk pioneered genetically modified organisms—GMOs—starting with corn and soy and wheat.

And it was good.

Growing Better Food for You! became the corporate slogan.

With the huge success of GMOs, the technicians moved on to modification of every kind of plant, every kind of animal, every kind of human being. The technicians proposed experiments to the Board of Directors and the Board enthusiastically approved.

There was just one hitch. There always is.

The proposed experiments using human beings, to be performed on human beings, were so horrific to contemplate, so inhumane to implement that the international community enacted laws forbidding them. Just as the international community had outlawed mustard gas and nerve gas and napalm in which Emirk Corporation had specialized during the wars, great and small, of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.

No problem! Emirk sought out nations that neither respected nor abided by international law. Set up laboratories there. Yet in time, even the most repressive, tyrannical nations on Earth came to outlaw the experiments, too.

That’s how horrific and inhumane they were.

Did that stop Emirk Corporation?

Of course not. Emirk was not to be deterred by small, insignificant things like international law, the outrage of worldwide citizenry, or moral decency.

The corporation hatched a plan, investing its hoarded trillions into constructing Chrome. With corporate spaceships, it launched pieces of the planetoid into near space and assembled it in L5, a Lagrangian stable point of gravitational equilibrium along the orbit of the Moon.

Once the planetoid was placed in orbit, Chrome could spin round the Earth till the end of time without consuming a drop of costly fuel. That is the great gift of gravitational equilibrium. The planetoid was as easy a commute from Earth as a trip to the Moon, yet way beyond the reach of Earth’s meddlesome laws.

There’s no place like Chrome, the Blends like to say.

And it was very good.

Emirk terraformed an atmosphere using a patented, synthesized circulating cloud cover. It engineered an Earthlike artificial gravity and motorized the planetoid to rotate in a languorous twenty-four hours matching Earth’s. When the planetoid was up and running, Emirk built Chrome City, a rugged frontier town. At first, only barracks and laboratories stood on the barren streets. There the technicians could conduct the horrific, inhumane experiments without anyone’s interference or regulation.

And conduct experiments they did.

* * *

Lightfoot edges toward the grand staircase. Discreetly. Stealthily. Gilt balustrades hold aloft cast-bronze handrails in the shape of human thigh bones. A plush scarlet carpet runs up the center, revealing faux-oak planks at the edge of each step. A blue velvet rope cordons off the stairs.

Lightfoot moves to the rope, is ducking beneath it, when she feels a sharp, rude tap on her shoulder. She turns and confronts a mysterious Blend.

Or rather, he confronts her.

He stands in her way, an intimidating hulk in a wolf mask and costume concealing him from head to toe. Smoky gray eyes peer out at her. The expensive faux-fur has been teased into a handsome coiffure. Canine claws jut from his wolf-paw gloves and boots.

The gloves and boots are fake, not the body-altering cosmetics and surgeries of a Reformist. A simple disguise. Lightfoot grunts in disdain, retracts the claws at her fingertips. Canines and canids—dogs and wolves and their kin—can’t retract their claws. She’s not sure which is worse: if you’re born with claws you can’t retract or with no claws at all.

Good evening, the Blend says in a gruff, strangely strangled voice that sounds so feigned she nearly laughs out loud. Your mask is quite lovely.

And yours is quite hairy.

A sibilant chuckle. I do so admire feline Blends, especially those of the female gender. Which, I take it, you really are beneath that cunning masquerade?

Who wants to know?

Ah, forgive my boorish manners. You may call me Rex.

You may call me High Priestess. Lightfoot sniffs, her acute olfactory sense working, working. A heavy application of Eau d’Lycanthrope cologne assaults her nostrils, but can’t quite camouflage a sour, indefinable underscent. What is it? Rex suggests a lion beneath the mask, but she doesn’t detect that robust sexy wild feline scent.

Who is he?

What is he?

Can I fetch you a drink, High Priestess?

Hey, Rex, I’m off to the ladies’ room. So thanks, but no.

The ladies’ room is, I believe, that way. Not up the stairs. He points his paw across the ballroom toward the guest lavatories.

Why should he care which lavatory she uses to brush her hair or adjust her costume? As Lightfoot peers in his smoky eyes buried deep behind the mask, she notices a peculiar gleam or sheen over his right eye. She blinks, unable to account for that, either.

Bunny Hedgeway is a special friend of mine, not that it’s any of your business. She unhooks the metal clasp of the blue velvet rope. Lets herself onto the staircase, fastening the clasp behind her. She aims her predator’s glare. "I know this house well. There is a private ladies’ room on the second floor, which Bunny permits me to use. You’re the one who’s not allowed upstairs. Bye-bye, got to go. Cage free to you."

She bounds up the staircase without a look back, taking the stairs two at a time. The babble of the party fades. Scents of food and perfume dissipate, along with the odors of canine and feline, canid and felis, herbivore and reptile. Reptile?

"What was that about?" Lightfoot mutters.

The second floor is dark. Deserted. Silent. Bronze wall sconces in the shape of skeletal human hands cast a dim silver light. Tiny surveillance drones zip up and down the hall. Doors to the guest bedrooms and the gaming parlors are locked tight. Narrow streams of red illumination flash across lintels, warning, Private Keep Out Private Keep Out.

The confrontation downstairs troubles her. Is Rex—whoever, whatever he is—a new security guard hired by Bunny for Jamboree? Snooping around? Or out for himself, hitting up on the female guests? Lightfoot is quite sure she’s never seen anyone of his size, costumed or not, during her previous soirees at the mansion.

Well, meow-wow-wow. She’s not about to let an obnoxious stranger interfere with her heist.

She moves down the hall, melding into shadows and shadowed corners. Pausing. Then moving again so swiftly neither the tired old Security Eyes swiveling back and forth nor the drones can capture a glimpse of her.

The World Eyes on the upper floors remain dark, lids closed and blinded. Turned off according to Bunny’s contractual stipulation with the Instrumentality. Lightfoot had made sure of that arrangement. She convinced the Pomeranian she wouldn’t want World Eyes watching her if she had to go upstairs and adjust the train of her ball gown around her wagging tail.

They’d be spying on you for free, Bun. You want that?

Bunny’s watery eyes had widened.

At the thought of wagging tails, Lightfoot presses her jumpsuit on the ache at the