This morning, she spent most of the commute thinking about Ailh-down-the-road, the poor thing. Ailh was a nice enough person: well-bred, a little diffident—a handsome, close-coated little mauve-beige creature, with brown points and big lustrous green eyes. Not, Rhiow had to admit, the kind of cat one usually meets on the streets in the city; which made her unusual, memorable in her way. But apparently Ailh also couldn’t control herself well enough to keep her scratching outside, though she had access to the few well-grown trees in their street. It was a shame. A shame, too, that ehhif were so peculiarly territorial about the things they kept in their dens. Being territorial about the den itself, that any cat could understand; but not about things. It was one of the great causes of friction between two species that had enough trouble understanding one another as it was. Rhiow wished heartily that ehhif could somehow come by enough sense to see that things simply didn’t matter, but that was unlikely at best. Not in this life, she thought, and not in the next couple either, I’ll bet.

Just west of Third on Fifty-sixth, Rhiow paused, looking down from an iron-spiked connecting wall between two brownstones, and caught a familiar glimpse of a blotched brown shape, skulking wide-eyed in the shadows of the driveway-tunnel leading into the parking garage near the corner. This was one of the more convenient parts of Rhiow’s morning run: a handy meeting place fairly close to the Terminal, where the ehhif knew her and her team, and didn’t mind them. Not for the first time, Rhiow considered Saash’s luck in getting herself adopted by the ehhif who worked there. Luck, though, she thought, almost certainly has nothing to do with it, in our line of work,…