I felt myself suddenly lifted off the floor, snatched by the back of my neck. A yelp nearly escaped, but I choked it down, realizing any sound would draw the masked stranger. Alan, cradling me in one arm, closed the door behind us as quietly as she could.

My whiskers curled. My nose scrunched up. The air hit my lungs. Dear god! It reeked. Like death laced with a chemical tang that stung my nose. Burned my eyes. Gagging, I fought the urge to retch.

I wriggled free from Alan's grip and landed silently on all fours, glancing around to get my bearings. There was something about this room that felt so warped. And then I realized– the Kill Room.

The room felt off, more uncomfortable from the others, which had been dim and cramped, crammed with cages and tanks. This space was larger and white. A bright light filled the room, its source a half-dome fixture embedded in the ceiling, humming faintly.

I caught sight of Flynn, curled up in the corner, nervously looking up at Alan.

“She won’t harm you,” I reassured him.

“Can you blame me for not trusting humans?” he shot back. “I’ve seen her and others eat my kind. Now, they’re taking us, using us for their twisted experiments.”

“Hey, both of you! Take a look at this,” said Ziggy, who had wandered over to the other side of the room, taking in the sight before him.

Sprawled across the floor was a maze of twisting paths and dead ends. Streaks of dried blood stained the passageways, while small clumps of feces lay scattered throughout the maze.

Then I saw it. A ball of brown fur. It was curled up in a corner. An unfortunate victim. Ziggy walked over and leaned in as close as he could without leaping over the mini-walls and into the maze itself.

“It's dead,” he said, his whiskers twitching with apprehension and disgust.

Flynn rushed to where Ziggy stood, but when he looked over the maze’s wall and saw the lifeless rat, he lost his grip on the wall and slid down to the floor. His breath came in ragged gasps, the sight had shaken him to his core, and he crawled as far from the maze as possible.

“Did you know the rat?” Ziggy asked.

“No, but it’s hard to see one of your own like that,” Flynn replied, clearly upset.

Ziggy glanced around, studying the maze’s perimeter with interest. “What do you think this maze is for?”

I mulled over the bizarre sights we’d encountered so far—the map projection of Floating City, in blue light; the rats trapped in their tiny prisons; the blobs in glass tanks.

But what gnawed at me most was Wynn. The way he had snapped to attention, stiff as a puppet on strings, when that shrill frequency sliced through the air. His entire demeanor changed again, the instant the sound became a low hum, as if he’d been shaken awake from a dream he hadn’t known he was trapped in.

I pieced each clue together, trying to solve an impossible riddle that may not even have an answer. Then, something clicked, once I had wedged a piece of the puzzle into the picture. A light went on inside my head. The truth was: it wasn’t just Wynn who was being controlled, but the blob inside him, and the masked stranger held the remote. But for what purpose?

“To see if the rat could find its way through the maze,” I finally answered, “under the masked stranger's control–mind control. And he must've used sound.”

Ziggy tilted his head in confusion. “Using sound to control?”

“Didn't you notice how Flynn's brother's behavior switched when the pitch of the sound changed?”

“Yes, but come on! Sounds used to control the animals? That’s ridiculous,” Ziggy scoffed.

“It is possible.”

“But how?”

“It’s the blobs.”

Flynn and Ziggy muttered, “The blobs…”

I nodded. “Once they're infused in the body, you control the blob, and through the blob, you control the animal.”

“Control the blob-infected animal with sound.” Ziggy's eyes lit up; he was starting to follow the thread of thoughts I was weaving together.

“That's right, with sound. But it seems that most of the experiments haven't been so successful.”

“Why do you say that?”

I pointed at the rat in the maze. As I leaned in, I saw its jaw unnaturally split wide, flesh hanging like a cracked, brittle husk. Not far from the body lay a shriveled blob, pale with streaks of sickly red where blood had dried and crusted, its hundreds of tendrils curled and withered.

Meanwhile, Alan paced the room in a panic, muttering under her breath, “Shit, shit, shit, what am I going to do?”

She frantically searched for an escape, but there was nothing—no other door, no window. We were trapped. She stopped at the table, her face twisting in disgust at whatever she saw there.

Of course, naturally driven by curiosity, I climbed up to the table’s surface for a closer look. What I saw nearly made eyes bulge from my skull. I stumbled back, nearly losing my footing, overwhelmed by a nauseating sight unlike anything I could have imagined. It made my soul shrink back in horror.

“What is it? What's up there?” I hear Ziggy asking me from below.

More dead rats.

Three of them lay in a row, their abdomens split wide open, skin pinned down to the surface. Inside each of them, infecting every inch of their exposed organs, was a blob, shriveled and motionless.

What made it even more horrifying was the fourth body. Except it wasn’t a rat… it was a cat. One that looked like me. Deep red and orange fur. He was cut open and pinned in the same manner, only this time with a larger blob nestled inside. I leaned over the edge, catching sight of Ziggy gazing up at me, his head cocked to the side, waiting patiently for my answer.

“Did you know of any other cats, besides Tinker, who’ve been missing or infected?” I asked.

“Um, let me think…” Ziggy replied, scratching his head. “Well, I heard that Blink from Sea Green has been missing for a week now. His forever partner mentioned he went up to Old Rig for some food and just never came home. Why do you ask?”

Flynn scrambled up the leg of the table and joined me on the surface, but once he saw the grisly scene, he stumbled back, slipping off the edge. He would have fallen if I hadn’t grabbed him by his long tail just in time. I set him down beside me.

“It's Blink, isn't it?” Ziggy said. “He's up there…”

“Oh, my dear god!” Flynn gasped, putting a hand over his heart. “And more of my kind are dead. We're being dissected like we're nothing!”

I stepped carefully around the carcasses, making my way to a tray of syringes and scalpels. Beside it sat a small glass dish filled with clear liquid, and next to that, a large bowl holding a deflated pufferfish, its body split open down the middle. Its insides had been removed and were now floating in the water.

Once Flynn regained his composure, he approached the syringes, inspecting them closely. His eyes went over to the dish and scrutinized the clear and odorless liquid before leaning in to sniff the bowl containing the dead pufferfish.

“I wouldn't touch that if I were you,” he warned.

“It's the pufferfish poison.”

“Yup, it is,” he confirmed with a slight nod. “It could kill you in seconds. If you're lucky, it'll only paralyze you for life.”

“I'm very much aware of that.”

Alan reached for the scalpel on the tray, gently pushing Flynn aside with a wave of her fingers.

“Alright, boys, time to make our move,” she whispered to herself. Her face was set, though there was fear in her eyes. “If he’s out there, waiting… Well, we’ll fight him off. Then we’ll run. Just keep running.”

She turned to me, her expression softening with a slight nod and a wry smile. "You'll have my back, won’t you, Page?”

I answered her with a proud meow as I puffed out my chest, whiskers twitching in agreement.

She responded with a feeble but fond grin, her fingers finding that familiar spot behind my ear, the one that always made me purr.

“Stay close behind me,” she instructed, her grip tightening around the small, sharp scalpel that was her only defense.

She pressed her ear against the surface, waiting.

Listening.