"Boss. Boss. I only ate a little. Meow."
"Half the basket." Jude held Yomogi at arm's length and shook it, gently but with feeling. "You ate half the basket and you're calling that a little."
"Not full. Meow."
"Say that one more time. Go ahead."
Yomogi's crossed eyes drifted to the large slipper sitting in the corner of the room. It reassessed its position.
"Boss doesn't understand." Its voice went small and slightly distant, the way voices do when a memory is doing something unpleasant. "Back in Funanoke Village. We had dango. Every day. Mitarashi dango. Red bean dango. Kinako dango. Edamame dango. Yomogi dango."
It stared at a point in the middle distance.
"Morning dango. Afternoon dango. Evening dango. I dreamed about a giant dango chasing me and biting me. Meow." A shudder moved through its round body. "Dango is terrifying. Meow."
Jude lowered his arm and looked at it.
He knew Kamura Village. He knew what its specialty was. He had not, until this moment, considered what years of compulsory dango consumption might do to a small creature's relationship with food in general.
"What about the yakitori?" he asked. "The onigiri?"
"Can't eat anymore. Meow. Already full of dango. Meow."
"Then don't eat the dango."
"Master get angry… Meow."
Jude was quiet for a moment.
A Palico, he thought, with the resigned fondness of a man who has gotten exactly what he paid for. I bought a Palico. Spoiled completely rotten by the women of Kamura Village and traumatized by the local cuisine. One million asset points.
"You," he said, "have had the spirit of the Cat Hunt completely drained out of you. It's a tragedy." He tossed Yomogi toward the kitchen doorway. "New arrangement. You cook two dishes. I cook two dishes. We each eat our own. This is a household of independent contributors."
Yomogi righted itself in midair with the effortless physics of something that had never needed to worry about landing.
"Boss is such a good provider. Meow."
"That's not what I said."
"Cat food made of mudfish, please. Meow. Mudfish is delicious. Meow."
"Food made by cats is cat food. Food made for cats is dinner. There's a distinction."
"Meow," Yomogi said, and disappeared into the kitchen with the purposeful shuffle of something that had already decided what it was making and intended to make extra.
The afternoon streets were warm, the foot traffic steady.
Jude pulled the tricycle to a stop near the waterfront promenade and looked down at the bundle of purple-tinted fur sitting beside the front wheel. Today's operational disguise: a very convincing Siamese cat, dark-faced, round-bodied, wearing the expression of a creature of distinguished breeding and very modest intelligence. The System had apparently factored in the need for fieldwork.
"Ground rules," Jude said. "You're a cat. You behave like a cat. You do not make observations, you do not offer commentary, and you absolutely do not speak. If someone looks at you, you look back. That's it. If you perform correctly, you can come out next time. If you don't—"
"Understood, meow."
"—you stay home and clean the apartment." He pointed at the cart. "Stay close."
Yomogi sat down in a posture that suggested it was taking this seriously, and then immediately licked its paw, which was at least appropriately cat-like.
"Mr. Danton."
Jude looked up from the display tray as the familiar figure approached from the promenade. He'd been expecting the usual greeting — Danton's warmth had a quality of reliable good cheer to it — but today the smile arrived a beat late and didn't quite reach his eyes.
"I didn't see you out last week," Jude said. "Thought you might have moved."
"No, still here." Danton looked at the cart. "Do you have those white pastries? The ones Elizabeth liked. The soft ones."
"I've been making a strawberry version lately — same base, same texture, just a different filling." Jude was already reaching for the tray. "I think she'd like it just as well, but if you want the original I can—"
"No, no. Everything you make is good. I'll take a few." He glanced at the display without the usual focused attention of a man with strong wagashi opinions. "Several. Actually."
Jude started packing.
"Is she here with you today?"
Danton's pause was half a second longer than it needed to be. "She hasn't been well. Hasn't been able to get out much. She mentioned your pastries specifically, said she was missing them — so." He lifted one shoulder. "I came to look."
He clearly didn't want to say more, and Jude didn't push. He folded the paper around the top of the box and secured it.
Then Danton looked down.
At his feet: a very fat Siamese cat with a dark face, round body, four small paws arranged with nowhere particularly useful to put them, and eyes that were, on close inspection, slightly crossed.
"Is that—"
"My cat," Jude said. "I bring her along when I'm working. She needs the exercise."
Danton looked at the cat. The cat looked at Danton. It was, objectively, the best specimen of ridiculous Jude had encountered in some time, and he had spent several months in Gotham.
"Boss," Yomogi said, quietly, "I don't think I'm fat. Meow."
Danton blinked.
"Hot weather," Jude said, in the same tone a person uses when continuing a sentence that had already been going fine. "The heat does things to the acoustics in enclosed spaces. You know how it is. Here's your order — do you need anything else, Mr. Danton?"
"No. Thank you."
Danton accepted the box with the careful movements of a man who was fairly sure something unusual had just happened and was choosing not to investigate it. He turned and walked back toward the promenade.
Jude waited until he was well out of earshot.
Then he looked at Yomogi.
"We had a conversation," he said. "This morning. About the one thing you were not supposed to do."
"I thought he couldn't hear. Meow."
"He heard."
"I'll clean the apartment. Meow."
"Yes. You will." He turned back to the cart. "Starting with the kitchen."
By mid-afternoon, the display tray was clear and the money bag was satisfyingly heavy. Yomogi had, after the Danton incident, maintained admirable silence — sitting at the base of the cart, performing cat with focused dedication, drawing occasional comments from passersby who found it charming in the way that particularly round cats always are.
The day's supply had moved faster than expected. People were coming in already knowing what they wanted — naming specific items, buying in the quantities of someone stocking a household rather than satisfying a passing craving.
Word of mouth, Jude concluded. It gets ahead of you.
He was loading the empty trays back into the cart and thinking about calling it a day when two men stepped into his path.
Neither had tattoos. Neither had the particular organized-crime energy of the protection crews he'd been dodging for months. They had a different energy entirely — opportunistic, impatient, the energy of people who had heard about something profitable and made a plan that took about fifteen minutes to develop.
"Not taking apprentices," Jude said, preemptively. "And we're sold out. Come back earlier next time."
The larger of the two produced a cold smile that communicated he was not here about pastries.
"We heard about your cart," the thinner one said. His hand rested near his waistband in the way that meant he wanted Jude to notice it. "Few thousand a day, they said. Japanese food, right? Japanese bread or something."
"Traditional Japanese handcrafted wagashi." Jude looked at him with the patience of a teacher correcting a repeated error. "If you're going to target a business, knowing what it actually sells is basic due diligence. It reflects poorly."
"I don't care what you call it. Hand over the money."
Jude looked at the two of them. He looked at Yomogi, who had settled into a posture of complete and conspicuous innocence — the posture of a creature that was absolutely not here, had never been here, and was simply a small round object resting in proximity to a food cart for entirely unrelated reasons.
He looked back at the two men.
"Give me a moment," he said. "I want to make sure I understand the situation properly."