Sebastian chose to be called Mort(e). Names were such an important thing. For some of these cats, choosing a new identity was the first act of independence. It was not long before Mort(e) learned the significance behind every one in the Red Sphinx: Cromwell, Dutch, Bentley, Gai Den, Dane, Rookie, Anansi, Seljuk, Stitch, Rao, Biko, Dread, Texan, Riker, Striker, Sugar, Logan, Bin Lydon, Foxtrot, Folsom, Hanh, Jomo, Uzi, Le Guin, Brutal, Bailarina, Hennessey, Juke, Bicker, Packer, Ironhawk. Only Red Sphinx members knew the origins of one another’s names. No one else could be told.

Sebastian based his name on a word he had come across in one of the old libraries. A word meaning death. He had died. He had killed. And he would kill again. So the name fit. But it could also be a normal name, the name of a regular guy named Mort who was meant for a life surrounded by loved ones. That life was still out there, but it would have to wait. Hence the need to keep the letter e in parentheses. Things could go either way. They could always go either way.

Culdesac soon chose Mort(e) as his Number One, the executive officer who carried out his commands. Luna was not happy about it, but she knew she was not cut out to be a leader. Before Mort(e) joined the Red Sphinx, she had had to euthanize many EMSAH-infected animals and was never the same. Thus, when she turned out to be wrong about Mort(e) having the virus, she second-guessed her actions. Her mind became distracted by memories of dead comrades, along with living ones who would soon be dead. It was not long after Mort(e) joined the band that she was unceremoniously killed during a seven-minute firefight with army deserters who had sought refuge in a fire station.

The battles continued. Sieges of small towns that had somehow held out, where old men and twelve-year-old boys fired rusty shotguns from freshly dug trenches. Raids of bunkers in which starving humans appeared ready to beg for death. Weeklong chases through forests, through city streets, through the bowels of abandoned factories and warehouses, hunting prey in the dark where only the felines could see. Burning entire villages to the ground to make the humans scurry out like vermin, and then cutting them down, or pouncing on the slow ones to save for later. Enormous pitched battles fought on plains with the Alphas as cannon fodder. Culdesac was right—their species was meant to do this. Although Mort(e) was sad to find he was so good at something so ghastly, he learned to extract some pleasure from it. Each murder was revenge for his loss. Every human who pleaded for mercy, every man or woman who whispered a prayer to the old man in the sky, had to pay for Sheba. Any one of them could have tried to kill her. Or infect her with EMSAH. Or enslave her again. Every human was his enemy. And for years, he never came across a single one who acted otherwise.

Mort(e) surprised himself with his toughness, with his willingness to shed Sebastian the House Cat so quickly. The Red Sphinx traveled light, slept in ditches and fields, drank water from puddles, ate worms and overripe berries to stay alive. They were lean and angry. Always reminding one another, the way Culdesac did, to aim true, to stay on the hunt.

Tiberius would eventually earn his chosen name, even saving Mort(e)’s life on a few occasions. Mort(e) returned the favor. There were three straight missions in which they led the way. The first involved scaling the side of a building to toss a sniper from a rooftop. The second required them to swim to an anchored boat and plant a bomb on her hull. The other cats were too scared of the water and watched in awe as Mort(e) dove in. The third was a suicide mission, a frontal assault on a machine-gun nest that turned out to be operated by three teenage girls whose families had left them behind. After that, the rest of the Red Sphinx begged to be among the first for such missions. They had been shamed by their skepticism of Socks the medic and the choker-house-cat-turned-warrior. Their new Number One was somehow charmed, chosen by the Queen herself. Even those who had allied themselves with Luna had to agree that Mort(e) was the fearless, competent leader they needed. He laughed at death as it slid off him again and again. He was death.

The Red Sphinx recruited other stray cats to replace the ones they lost. Some came looking for the Red Sphinx, driven by growing legends among the animals. Tales of Mort(e) the Fearless. So many wanted to join that Culdesac would force them to audition by fighting one another. The matches were sometimes so vicious that Mort(e) would intervene and tell both contestants that they had qualified.

The months bled into years, and the years folded into one another until Mort(e) found himself wondering if it had been two years or three since he had killed his master. Had it been three years or four since he had last seen Sheba? One morning, he woke from a dream realizing that he could not remember the last time he had thought of her. Weeks? Months? He wanted to beg her memory for forgiveness. Forgetting her was just as bad as killing her.

Thanks to Sheba, Mort(e) was able to learn about pain—and then to switch it off—so much faster than the other Red Sphinx. Thus the memories of those awful years became buried, a series of fragments seen through a foggy glass. It was the best he could hope for.

SOMETIMES, HOWEVER, THE past came looking for him.

For all Mort(e)’s acts of bravery over those eight years, none compared with the time that he and Tiberius defied Culdesac’s orders and went snooping around in a town decimated by the EMSAH syndrome. Tiberius had been clamoring for an opportunity to study the effects of the plague. As company medic, he had been beset with recurring nightmares about being caught in an EMSAH outbreak, surrounded by corpses that could walk upright.

So there was a noble, selfless goal. But the opportunity to search for Sheba was the real motivation. She could be in some infected town, waiting to die, wondering if she would ever see him again. Or perhaps she wasn’t wondering at all. In his most sullen moods, he thought that it would be better for Sheba to be dead than for her to forget him. And then he hated himself for thinking such a thing.

Mort(e)’s act of insubordination took place after the war had turned in the Colony’s favor. The humans were nearing extinction, off to meet the imaginary creator who had promised them everything in this world and the next. Those who remained were growing more desperate. With virtually every human city on the continent now occupied or destroyed, guerrilla tactics and suicide attacks replaced pitched battles. The animals began to resettle the scarred lands, picking up where the humans had left off.

Even so, the Colony continued to preach vigilance of the signs of EMSAH. These blooming civilian centers were prime targets for a human terrorist. It was in this climate that the first “celebrity” of the war emerged, a chimpanzee doctor named Miriam who had escaped from a zoo. As the leader of a team of scientists searching for a cure, her image was everywhere. Miriam appeared in a number of public service announcements, warning of the symptoms, giving updates on her team’s progress. One of the early attempts at humor among the animals involved impersonating the dour Miriam. “Remember,” people would say, arms folded, eyes squinting, “if you see something, say something.” And then they would imitate a wild monkey: “Oooh-oooh-oooh-aaahh-aaahh!”

The term EMSAH, Miriam explained, meant nothing—it was a corruption of an acronym the Colony had used when they first discovered the disease. Over time, her team concluded that the virus had mutated, making it harder to cure. Its effects were equally confounding. Different species had different symptoms. Felines suffered skin lesions. Hoofed animals tended to have allergic reactions that closed up their throats and swelled their eyes shut. Dogs experienced a form of narcolepsy accompanied by hallucinations. Regardless of the physical symptoms, all the victims ended the same: unhinged, often irrationally violent, and pleading for death. They were somehow reduced to a state of savagery. Perhaps that was exactly what the humans wanted. The Queen could create, and they could destroy.

Thanks to Miriam’s eagerly awaited quarterly reports, the disease remained a sinister word, whispered by pups and kittens to frighten one another while telling stories at night. Newly founded schools even banned games in which the young animals tagged one another, declaring in singsong, “You have EM-SAH! You have EM-SAH!” Rumors spread of rebuilding sectors being quarantined and exterminated, with every building leveled and every living thing burned away, down to the last microbe.

When Tiberius and Mort(e) asked Culdesac if they could see an infected town for themselves, the captain told them that the topic was off-limits. They had a war to win. Bad news would be a setback to the effort. Tiberius asked how the hell he was supposed to diagnose someone when he hadn’t seen the effects firsthand. Culdesac insisted that Miriam’s reports were more than enough and that they were getting better. If the animals could defeat the humans, then they could stop a virus.

Tiberius asked if Culdesac would shoot him if he tried to investigate one of the settlements.

“Yes,” Culdesac said.

One night, Culdesac gathered all the Red Sphinx together. They were camped in the woods near a newly established town. They had been patrolling the countryside for a few days, responding to reports of humans smuggling weapons, but found nothing. It was a welcome relief.

But Culdesac’s news was grim. The town was infected, he said. A bioweapon attack. Every settler was dead. The ants were on their way to clear it out, to devour and destroy every last trace of the town. The land would be indistinguishable from the wilderness around it.

“If you needed a reason for why we are fighting this war, this is it,” Culdesac said. “The enemy is barbaric. We must be strong in response. Slavery and death are the alternatives.”

They would leave in the morning for a nearby army base. Culdesac wished them a good night and then headed for his sleeping spot.

In the middle of the night, Mort(e) roused Tiberius and told him that they were going into the town. Tiberius stretched theatrically in order to show his annoyance with being woken up.

“Did the captain give you permission?” he asked, yawning.

“Yes.”

“No, he didn’t.”

“All right, he didn’t.”

“You can’t order me.”

“You’re the doctor. You want to see what’s down there even more than I do.”

“I don’t want to get shot even more than you do.”

“You know that it’s easier to ask forgiveness than to ask permission.”

Tiberius thought about this for a moment. “You’re going to owe me,” he said.

“You already owe me.”

“Don’t start.”

They set off. Tiberius was groggy but managed to keep up. They spoke little.

By then, Mort(e) had imagined every conceivable scenario for his reunion with Sheba, from passing her on the road to finding her in the aftermath of a battle, Sheba walking upright toward him, through the smoke, stepping over the bodies of their enemies, exhausted but smiling weakly as she recognized him. He preferred to think of her as a competent yet reluctant warrior like himself. Maybe she would be the first canine member of the Red Sphinx. Or they would put her in charge of her own unit. The Blue Cerberus or something. Culdesac may have peered into his past with that translator device of his, but only Sheba knew who he was before he had to wear a mask all the time.

The first stop on the trip was a storage depot near the highway, about two miles north of the town. The depot was nothing more than a dumpster buried halfway in the dirt. Inside were medical supplies, rations, water bottles. The regular army left these in strategic places along the frontier. Officers carried maps showing their locations, and coming across one was often more of a psychological boost than a relief from physical hardship. The depots were stubborn indications that civilization was rising from the rubble.

Mort(e) and Tiberius wanted the hazmat suits and respirators. There were only two—typically the depots had at least four. Some volunteer dog soldiers probably smelled something funny and panicked. In the suits, the cats were two spacemen traversing an alien landscape. With his sense of smell cut off, and his breathing amplified, Mort(e) felt like a testing subject in one of the humans’ prewar experiments.

They made steady progress to the town. More important, the thoughts of Sheba were propelling without distracting him, a gentle voice in his head ordering him to keep going. Within an hour, they reached a chain-link fence, the perimeter of the quarantine. The mounds of dirt at each pole were freshly dug. Every forty feet or so, there was a sign showing Miriam’s stern face, each with a terse warning to stay away.

Tiberius placed his glove onto the metal. He screamed, his body convulsing. An electric jolt seemed to surge through him. His tail bulged against his suit, desperately trying to get out. But soon his screams degenerated into laughter. When he turned around, clearly expecting a reaction, Mort(e) smacked him on the crown of his helmet.

“Ow,” Tiberius said.

“Knock it off.”

They climbed the fence and kept walking. Soon they could make out the wooden rooftops of the town. The settlement consisted of a few buildings: cabins, a marketplace, a stone-and-mortar meeting hall, an enclosed amphitheater, an administrative building, a school, a modest army barracks and commissary. Mort(e) expected to see at least one dead body lying facedown, but the ground was bare.

They split up and searched the cabins. All the homes were empty, save for the same boring furniture: soft brown couch, brown chairs, wooden table. The comforters in the bedrooms were unmoved. Litter boxes were immaculate, food bowls were spotless. No one had left in a hurry. Even though he couldn’t smell anything, Mort(e) suspected that even the scent was gone.

Later, Mort(e) and Tiberius met in the center of town, on the main thoroughfare leading to the meeting hall. The bodies had to be there. Mort(e) imagined the stench rising from the chimney and windows like a flight of demons. They made it a few steps farther before they heard the flies. There had to be thousands of them, drinking the EMSAH-tainted blood from open wounds.

“Mort(e),” Tiberius said. Mort(e) did not answer.

The double doors were ajar. Mort(e) swung them open. Inside, motionless forms clung to the floor and leaned against the walls. Tiberius patted the wall for a switch. The fluorescent lights snapped to life, flooding the room with a sharp white glow.

“Oh, no,” Tiberius said.

Just as they thought: the townsfolk were lying in rows or propped against the wall in awkward sitting poses. All dead. All bleeding from the eyes and noses, a coagulated brown stain clinging to their fur. All torn apart by the telltale lesions that burst from the skin.

There was nowhere to walk. Every square inch of the floor yielded a corpse. At the front of the room, on a stage probably used for school plays and public debates, a dog slouched before a podium. His mouth hung open in a perpetual yawn. A piece of paper had fallen from his lap to the floor. Maybe he had been giving them instructions on how to die.

Whatever petty differences existed between the species seemed to have vanished in this room. A glass-eyed kitten rested her head in the lap of an old dog. A wolf cradled a bloody raccoon, both their dried tongues sticking out. Mort(e) searched the bodies for Sheba’s white fur. He detected blotches peeking out from under limbs and torsos. But none of it was hers. Or all of it was hers, forming a patchwork among the dead.

“What kind of hospital is this?” Tiberius said.

“It—it’s not,” Mort(e) stammered. “It’s not a hospital.”

“They waited here to die, then?”

“Our people used to do it that way,” Mort(e) said.

“But not like this.”

“Maybe they quarantined themselves.”

“Or maybe the EMSAH made them crazy.”

“Maybe,” Mort(e) said, adjusting his gloves. “Do you still want to do an autopsy?”

“Yes,” Tiberius said. “I want to see—”

“Do you need my help?”

“Uh … no. I could just—”

“Good,” Mort(e) said. He steadied himself and headed for the exit.

“Don’t you want to see it?”

“Yell if you need me,” Mort(e) said.

As he exited, he caught sight of a rope pulled taut. There was a young fox—or half fox, half dog; one never knew with these canines. The fox had been leashed, an unheard-of practice, an abomination. But there the animal was, a collar around its swollen neck. The tether resembled the one Tristan had used on Sheba. The fox’s eyes were closed while its mouth gaped open, a wound unto itself. Someone did not want this little one to get away. Someone had gone through the trouble of treating it like a pet. And apparently no one in the room objected.

Inside the meeting hall, Mort(e) could hear Tiberius moving a body, preparing to slice it open from its neck to its crotch.

Some time passed before Tiberius stepped outside, a stain smeared across the chest of his suit. The blood was blue in the darkness. He was about to start talking about what he had found. Mort(e) told him to save it for later.

They walked to the fence and continued into the forest. In a small clearing, far from both the camp and the town, Mort(e) said that they should take off their suits. They gathered sticks and started a fire. When the flames were high enough, they stripped off their suits and tossed them in, releasing plumes of smoke. Then they stamped out the embers and continued on to the camp.

“Did you see the leash?” Tiberius asked.

“Yes.”

“Maybe gathering in that hall wasn’t a result of the final stages,” Tiberius said, “but a leash sure as hell was. Pure crazy.”

“Could have been something else,” Mort(e) said. “Maybe they weren’t driven insane from the EMSAH. Maybe they went crazy because they just couldn’t handle it. Like humans.”

“I hope not.”

There was the sound of twigs breaking ahead of them. They stopped in time to hear more sticks snapping behind them, along with gravel crunching underfoot. Cats emerged upright from the tree line, all wearing protective white suits and helmets. The muzzles of their guns became shiny circles in the firelight.

It took only a second to spot Culdesac. His helmet was so large it resembled the front of a car. “You had to see it, didn’t you?” Culdesac said, his voice muffled.

He ordered the soldiers to stay away so that he could talk to the two insubordinates by himself. There was more rustling of leaves and sticks as the cats formed a perimeter.

“Why did you do it?” Culdesac asked.

“We had to know, sir,” Tiberius said.

“Then tell me what you know.”

Mort(e) nudged Tiberius. Though hesitant at first, Tiberius was soon blathering away. He probably thought that it would keep him alive. He explained that the victims had discoloration in the fingernails and teeth, along with polyps in the throat and on the tongue. If he was right, then these symptoms arose early, allowing for faster diagnosis and more efficient quarantine, at least until an accurate blood test could be devised. Miriam was still working on that.

Culdesac asked if Mort(e) had anything to add.

“None of this is going to work,” Mort(e) said.

“Socks says that we’re closer to a cure.”

“I don’t mean EMSAH,” Mort(e) said. “I mean this. All of this. We’re going to become just like the humans.”

Culdesac was not one to allow a non sequitur to throw him off. “What are you talking about?” he asked.

“I want to know why they locked themselves in that barn,” Mort(e) said.

“They set up a quarantine. They’re heroes. We should honor their memory.”

“No,” Mort(e) said. “The disease brought out the worst in them. There was a dog at the front of the room, giving them some kind of pep talk while they were dying. Or else he was keeping them there.”

“We don’t know that,” Tiberius said.

“What did you expect to find?” Culdesac said. “A big party? They were dying.”

“There was a fox chained with a leash,” Mort(e) said. “Like an animal.”

Culdesac leaned toward Mort(e). “You better tell me what’s gotten into you,” he said.

Mort(e) did not know where to start. His mind was still locked on the image of the dead.

Culdesac slapped him in the face, turning his head toward Tiberius, who remained still, facing straight ahead. If Culdesac’s claws had not been encased in a thick glove, Mort(e)’s snout would have flopped on the ground, bloody at Tiberius’s feet.

And then it spilled from him, all of it: Sheba, Daniel, the square of sunlight, the bucket of squealing puppies. Shouting out Sheba’s name for no reason. Wondering what he could have done differently. Wondering why he was alive and she was gone. Wondering why others had gotten over their past so easily, while he couldn’t leave his behind. For Tiberius, the past was something to shrug off, to laugh about over drinks and a card game. For Culdesac, it was a badge of honor, the foundation for his bravery and ruthlessness. For Mort(e), it was all bad memories and regret, weighing him down, poisoning the present. As if he were a human.

“You hardly knew Sheba,” Culdesac said.

“I knew her well enough.”

Culdesac told Mort(e) that he was still compromised by human outlooks on the world. He needed to let go of them if he truly wanted to be free. Mort(e) disagreed. He simply missed his friend. There was only one cure for that.

“She’s only good to you now as a reason to hate,” Culdesac said. “Cherish that.”

“A lot of animals experience this,” Tiberius interrupted. “It’s called Regressive Defense Mechanism. RDM. They hold onto some memory. Sometimes they even miss their old masters and cry themselves—”

“Shut up, Socks!” Culdesac said.

Tiberius shut up.

“I can’t tell you how to live,” Culdesac said. “I can only ask you to die. If you miss some aspects of your slave life, go ahead and complain about it. But I won’t tolerate this nonsense about us becoming like them. Do I need to explain why?”

“No, sir.”

“I need you to be at my side,” Culdesac said. “Are you still with me?”

“Yes, sir.” Mort(e) wasn’t even sure if he was lying.

“So now you’ve seen it,” Culdesac said. “You know almost as much as Miriam herself.”

He allowed for more awkward stillness before rendering his verdict.

“I can’t kill both of you,” he said at last, folding his arms. “And it might be good to have you telling people what you saw. It beats rumors spreading. Or doubts.”

He paced. “Stay here for three days,” he said. “If you’re still asymptomatic, come join us at Camp Delta. If you are symptomatic, then kill yourselves. Or kill the other one, and then kill yourself. Plenty of options there.”

Culdesac stepped away and signaled to his troops to follow him into the woods. “Looking forward to the full report.”

The Red Sphinx scattered into the forest.

Mort(e) was drained, wobbly. He was grateful when Tiberius, overcome with emotion, began to weep. For some reason, it kept Mort(e) from doing the same.

THEY STAYED FOR five days, just to be sure.

On the second day, an ant mound rose on the outskirts of town. It started as a dimple but soon resembled a small volcano. The next day, the Alphas began pouring out. From a sloping hill, Mort(e) and Tiberius watched the ants dismantle the town, removing every trace, converting all the inhabitants into nutrients. Mort(e) imagined white blood cells acting in the same way to repel viruses and bacteria. EMSAH had cleansed the town. The Colony would now clear out the EMSAH.

After a while, Mort(e) was glad that they were not close enough to get any real detail. In their jaws, the Alphas carried the victims out of the main hall in pieces: bleeding slabs of flesh dragged along in the insects’ mechanical mouths. There was no attempt to catalogue the names, to maintain some level of dignity. Even in death, these people would be punished for their terrible luck in life.

Mort(e) was too far away to see the little fox on its leash.

The Colony had calculated exactly how many Alphas it would take to remove all the bodies in one sweep. These vulture ants marched in a line to the new mound, while the others went about the business of toppling the buildings one at a time. The structures collapsed in neatly executed implosions, like the splashes from pebbles dropped into still water. The ants carted off the lumber and then plowed up the dirt. By nightfall, only a muddy patch remained, in the shape of an equilateral hexagon. The Queen had blotted out the past, proving once again that nothing lasted forever. She alone could decide what remained and what would be discarded.

Mort(e) and Tiberius examined each other’s eyes for burst blood vessels. They gazed into each other’s open mouths, searching for purple lumps that would turn into lesions. They quizzed each other on basic things, using a recommended list of questions that Miriam had devised: What was your slave name? What was the name of your master? What was the first word you could read? What was the first word you could speak? Who is your enemy? It was Tiberius’s job to know the answers for each member of the Red Sphinx. The answer to the last question was the same for everyone and, after what they had seen in the town, was easier than ever. The humans were the enemy. Now and for all eternity.

They experienced no symptoms, not even a headache or fatigue. Thus they rejoined the Red Sphinx at Camp Delta. The camp was a wooden structure, also shaped like a hexagon, with walls made of forest logs and watchtowers at three of its six points. A scout spotted them and alerted the others. The entire Red Sphinx greeted them at the gate, cheering wildly. The two invincible cats had cheated death once again. They were living symbols of the pending victory over humanity.

When Mort(e) spotted Culdesac, the bobcat tipped his head, a signal that Mort(e) should enjoy this while he could. There would be work to do later. Culdesac had played the entire episode to his advantage. As far as anyone else knew, he had sent Mort(e) and Tiberius on a suicide mission, and their loyalty was so absolute that they agreed immediately. Some human traits, such as duplicity, came in handy every once in a while.

MORT(E) DID NOT talk about Sheba again for a long time.

He managed to survive a few more years of war. And thanks to the increasing need for EMSAH experts in the field, he and Tiberius became minor celebrities, important assets in the Queen’s experiment. The Red Sphinx could not stop at a base or settlement without some officer from the regular army asking questions about the quarantine. Under Culdesac’s orders, they downplayed the disturbing late-stage behavior of the victims, focusing instead on detection and diagnosis of the physical traits. Tiberius was invited to vivisect other animals, and he often asked Mort(e) to join him. Whether he wanted to or not, Mort(e) was auditing a medical education.

Tiberius died still believing he would find a cure. It happened during a raid on an underground bunker, which the Red Sphinx tried to infiltrate by crawling through a ventilation shaft. The humans detected them and began firing. Tiberius couldn’t run away. Mort(e) screamed his name over the noise but heard no answer.

After the humans were overrun and the bunker secured, Culdesac personally executed the survivors. The Red Sphinx buried Tiberius near a river and placed rocks on the ground in the shape of a medical cross. Afterward, Mort(e) began to accept that they were no closer to finding a cure, despite the constant news of victories on the frontier.

One day, the Red Sphinx passed through another settlement. Mort(e) was the only one who refrained from remarking bitterly about how good these civilians had it. He wanted what they had. He wanted to find a house and wait for Sheba to return, or else continue his search for her. He would explore life rather than death. There was nothing more for him to learn about the latter. There had to be some justice in the universe that would bring her back after the enormous price he had paid. But this was human thinking. The universe owed him nothing.

With the new settlements cropping up, there was talk of the war shifting into a “transition period,” when life would finally proceed as planned. The ants, speaking through their chosen animal ambassadors, assured everyone that their needs would be met while things were returned to normal. Accustomed to taking orders and living only for sustenance, the animals fell in line.

With this loyalty as a foundation, the Colony set up a quorum of elders for every species, each of which sent a representative to the Council. The first order of business was to establish a Bureau to oversee the dirty work of rebuilding: construction contracts, relocation assistance, adoption services for orphans, local policing, education, medicine. Weary from years of conflict, the animals embraced these mundane tasks. Veterans were returning home, and construction workers were arriving by the busload. Things moved again. Streets opened up. There was even talk about reestablishing cell phone connections once the network of towers was rebuilt.

Ignoring all these developments, Culdesac asked the Red Sphinx to stay together. The enemy was still watching them, he warned, and no one should relax simply because some politicians declared the war to be technically over. “The new order must be defended,” he said, sounding like some human propaganda broadcast. “Somebody has to protect these trash-pickers and schoolteachers.”

When a new settlement known as Wellbeing opened in the part of the country where he had grown up, Mort(e) quietly left the Red Sphinx. It was his right. He was the first one to do so while still living. Mort(e) had saved the lives of the others so many times that they dared not criticize him. But Culdesac could not hide his disappointment. He said he would never forgive Mort(e).

Mort(e)’s decision to quit came with another price. He relinquished many of the benefits of being a war hero and would have to go to the resettlement camps and wait with all the civilians. Still, he had options. Culdesac, on the other hand, had no home to which he could return. His entire life was combat. The Change had made him smarter, but the struggle would never end.

Living in the camps took some adjusting for Mort(e). The food was bland and repetitive, and he had to sleep in a massive auditorium with rows of pallets on the floor. He grew accustomed to the routine. After so many exhausting missions, his strength was returning, his mind clearing at last. And because he was a veteran, the administrators gave him prime real estate by one of the windows. They even let him browse the logbooks, though he could not find records for anyone named Sheba.

Mort(e) was snoozing in the dusty light, his thoughts dissipating among the echoing voices in the room, when the captain paid him a visit. Culdesac nudged him with his foot. Mort(e) rose to give a salute.

Culdesac put up his great paw to stop him. “Don’t bother.”

In his typical blunt fashion, the captain went through the list of those who had died on the latest mission, a raid on a fortified villa in the mountains. He kept his hands at his sides, his ears twitching at the sound of crying children. This camp, filled with weak, ungrateful civilians, insulted everything he stood for, everything he was. He needed the war. Peace, for him, was the equivalent of death.

“You’re going to get lazy and fat again with all these other pets, aren’t you?” Culdesac asked. “You’re going to take this new order for granted.”

“There is no new order,” Mort(e) said.

Their ongoing argument had grown more heated in recent years without Tiberius to act as mediator. The newer members of the Red Sphinx, unfamiliar with the long relationship between the two, would sometimes fear for Mort(e)’s life when he disagreed with the captain. For his part, Culdesac seemed to enjoy their debates. It was exercise for him, the same way a battle was something to prepare for and learn from.

“Has it ever crossed your choker mind,” he asked now, “that the Colony has bigger plans for you?”

“I’ve served the Colony,” Mort(e) replied. “The war is over. They can’t possibly have any other plans for me.”

“You were supposed to represent the best of the Change.”

Mort(e) burst into mocking laughter. “If that’s true, then we’re all choked,” he said. “What are you getting at? What is Her Highness telling you these days?”

Culdesac waved him off. “Never mind,” he said. “It just wasn’t supposed to be like this.”

“We’re going to become like the humans,” Mort(e) said, as he always did. “I don’t care about this ‘aim true’ crap. Your Queen is wrong about us.”

Culdesac said that if Mort(e)’s predictions ever came to pass, then Mort(e) could punch him in the face. “And I won’t even kill you for it.”

“Okay,” Mort(e) said, “Then the next time we meet, you know what I’m going to do.” He balled his mangled hand into a knobby fist.

“Then maybe this should be the last time we meet.”

Somewhere in the large auditorium, two pups fought over a stuffed animal until an adult told them to stop.

“You’re going to try to find her again, aren’t you?” Culdesac said. “After all you’ve learned. After all I’ve taught you. You still think you’re going to see her again.”

Mort(e) considered this for a moment, letting out a deep sigh.

“Yes,” he said. “Yes.”