The interviews of the witnesses were thrown up on screens and broadcast through enormous speakers, so everyone could see despite the distances between them.
Ruthven could see many of his friends and colleagues — Boswell and Lovelace, Oxford and Monterey and Fenella, spread out on similar platforms to he and Cressida. They also had large purple cats close at hand, keeping an eye on them. He couldn’t see how to reach them from here, not without some kind of trapeze.
He wasn’t even sure he was allowed to move.
Nero continued to be purple. The trial had many shocks and surprises to come, but it was hard to beat that.
“Shapeshifting abilities,” Cressida murmured at one point, during Fleur Shropshire’s testimony. “That explains so much.” Most of her attention was on Ruthven’s postcard, with which she had been fiddling this whole time.
The rumbling in the throats of Ione and Igor was sufficiently threatening to quiet her.
After Fleur stepped down from the witness stand, Ruthven ventured: “Nero and the others could still be innocent.”
Cressida didn’t bother to reply, and the Emperor Claudius gave him a pitying look.
Ruthven couldn’t wrap his head around Aesop being a criminal from a future of super-evolved power cats. Nero, sure. That didn’t take a huge leap. He hadn’t ever met Banksia, so couldn’t make moral judgements in his general direction. But Aesop? His little Aesop?
The most concerning revelation was that of the Violet Sunflower — confirmation that Boswell’s missing memories had been caused by Melusine and the other Founders.
That also suggested that Ruthven’s loss of memory around Aesop’s death had nothing to do with trauma, and everything to do with admin.
Once Anne Boleyn’s testimony began, Ruthven stopped wondering whether Nero and the others were innocent.
“You’d forget about the trial, forget about all the prisoners brought here from the twenty-fourth century. Why, you might even forget about Nero, Banksia and Aesop stealing it in the first place. You might forget that the Jade Pineapple and the other High Artefacts were ever invented, let alone lost.”
Anne Boleyn, thirty seconds ago
The arena was in chaos. Someone had triggered some kind of emergency status for the Theatre of Justice. Glass staircases appeared out of nowhere, and vanished again. Automated pavements connected the platforms in wild, illogical patterns.
Cats everywhere were howling, caterwauling. Some fought each other, flipping back and forth in the air. Others cried out in confusion, or merely stared blankly into space.
“Can we run?” Ruthven asked Cressida.
“I think we’d better!”
Ione and Igor looked at Ruthven like they’d never seen him before… like they’d never seen humans before. Like they hadn’t shared an in-depth conversation about twenty-fourth century feline habits a mere half an hour earlier.
A hissing automated pavement ran directly past their platform. Trying not to think about how high up they were, Ruthven leaped for it. Cressida came with him, her hand catching hold of his at the last moment.
Down, down, they leaped from platform to pavement and back again, making their way towards ground level.
The cats weren’t trying to stop them. Mostly, they looked like they just wanted the pain in their heads to stop. The ones that did get in their way had creepy, glassy stares.
“Is this the Violet Sunflower at work?” Ruthven asked Cressida.
“Who knows?” she yelled back, squeezing his hand.
Assuming there was a High Artefact called the Violet Sunflower that had the capabilities Anne Boleyn had described, well…someone must have used it. How else to explain all this?
Ruthven and Cressida had lost track of the Emperor Claudius. In all fairness, they hadn’t been trying to keep him.
“One of the Anachronauts must have done it,” Cressida said breathlessly.
“Where are we running?” They were closer to ground level now, only a few tiers and leaps away from what felt like safety. And that meant they needed a plan.
“Away!” said Cressida.
Ruthven yanked on her arm, forcing her to stop for a moment. “What’s the endgame? We’re trapped in the far future. Can we use their time travel? Do they even have time hoops that work like ours?” What, he did not say aloud, if the only people in this century who understood how to send them home were the cats who had just had some kind of bomb go off in their memories?
“They have to have time travel!” Cressida yelled at him. “We stole it from them.”
“I didn’t steal anything! Don’t shout at me!”
“You know what I mean!”
They stood helplessly together for a moment, teetering on a glass precipice.
Someone crashed into them. “Ruthven!”
“Oxford!”
It felt like a million years since they had been in the same space. In the same time period. It had, in fact, been six hundred years, give or take a few millennia. Ruthven stared up at his friend, realising all over again just how tall he was.
Oxford stared wildly back at him.
