“Nero,” said Oxford in a strangled sort of voice. “Are you… associated with these people?”
Nero turned his piercing blue eyes on Oxford. Monterey had never looked especially closely at Nero’s eyes before. Blue, yes, but this close they had a purple sort of sheen to them.
“We all keep secrets,” said Nero evenly. “You’ve been keeping mine for years, Oxford. Covering up for your parents, all their secret plots. Why stop now?”
Oxford could not have looked more wounded if Nero had scratched him in the face. Wounded, and somewhat guilty. Monterey wondered what that meant.
A jangle of broadcast static filled the air around them.1 A voice came over the sound system. “This is Boleyn speaking. They’re here. The Grimalkins. They got Claudius. I haven’t seen Marlowe — I think he got out through a hoop. The staff library is gone. If you can hear this, get out now.”
“What are the Grimalkins?” Monterey asked.
Nero flicked a glance at him. “Large purple cats. Grim bald humans in blue.”
“Oh. We’ve met.”
Nero’s eyes narrowed to slits. “They can’t have found you very interesting, if they let you go. I doubt I’ll be so lucky.”
A flare of light, purple and blue, columned up from one of the outer buildings of the campus, then another, and another, like a wave of targeted fireworks.
Professor Shelley let out a small noise of helpless rage. “Control!” she said sharply, tapping her opal implant. “Can you hear me? Boleyn. Anyone?”
Nero leaped on to Oxford’s shoulders. Oxford steadied him with one hand. Automatic reflexes.
“That’s the staff library, residential halls, admin, and now the tech centre,” said Nero. “Control is gone, Professor Shelley.”
“We’re trapped,” said Fenella. “Nowhere to run.”
Monterey scooped up Lovelace. She clung to him, claws out.
“Excellent rescue, Nero,” said Cressida sarcastically. “Dragged directly into the frying pan.” She glanced down at her hands, which were fading. Translucent. “I don’t know if I have another frying pan in me.”
“I’d offer a witty comeback,” sighed Nero. “But you don’t exist, so I shan’t bother.”
Another building near them flared with purple and blue light.
Media Archive, Monterey thought, something frantic building up in his chest. At least, it would be the Media Archive back on their own campus. It was probably the Party Planning building. “All this for a pineapple?” he said, voice wobbling a little.
Professor Shelley gave him the most exhausted, eye-rolling expression. If he had doubted she was a professor, that would have convinced him. “They’re not actually looking for a pineapple.”
Purple shapes shimmered before them, giant sphinx-style cats appearing in mid-prowl down the large stone steps, advancing across the quad. The statues were different, Monterey realised suddenly. Banksia College had statues dedicated to various ex-extinct animals. Chronos College had its lost heroes: Banksia and Burbage, Cressida Church, Ruthven’s Aesop.
Aleister College had three statues of cats, arranged on the same large plinth, overlooking the quad. Monterey recognised all three of them. Banksia. Aesop. Nero. He had no idea why those three had been singled out, or how Nero of all cats had ended up on a plinth of honour.
His head was full of questions, but there was no time for answers.
The purple cats surrounded them, slow and steady, like they had all the time in the world.
Lovelace hid her face against Monterey’s chest.
Professor Shelley backed up a step, as if there was anywhere to go. She bumped into Oxford, looked up at him as if she could not believe a person could be so tall, and used his arm to steady herself for a moment.
“Ah, well,” said Nero. He spoke as if he was trying to be brave, and also as if he hoped someone was recording his final words for posterity. “Time to go out in a blaze of glory. The twenty-fourth century was fun while it lasted.”
Blue light filled the quad. Blue and purple, and…
“Cressida!” cried Fenella, grasping at empty air. “Where did she go?”
“Don’t worry about her,” said Nero. “Worry about us.”
Blue light spiralled around them all — waves of it, crests of it. Bubbling…
As Monterey’s vision spun, sparkled and went dark, he thought he saw Nero leaping from Oxford’s shoulders into empty air… but no, that wasn’t Nero, at all. Nero wasn’t purple…
Was he?
1 They used to have a public address system at Chronos College, back when Monterey was a student. The speakers fell mysteriously silent one day. The rumour was that the campus cats, tired of having their sensitive hearing disrupted by daily announcements, banded together to chew through every wire in the system. Clearly the cats of Aleister College were not so well-organised.
Forty-Four
Elsewhere in the 24th Century
Tunbridge woke up.
She hadn’t been sleeping well. There was something wrong at Chronos College, and it felt like she was the only person who knew.
Well, her and Ptolemy. Her cat had been acting strange. Twitchy and irritable. When Ptolemy lost his chill, you knew there really was something to worry about.
It was the Rose Garden Incident, of course. Whatever went wrong that night went wrong so catastrophically that… well. The others hadn’t come back, had they?