"Sterilization! Before chipping! Who DOES that!" Gabby's voice cracked against the wind like a whip. She stood on the scratching post with one foot, the other braced against the crate's rim, red hair streaming behind her in a tangled banner. Her tail lashed in furious arcs. "Three days! She was going to cut him in three days and she hadn't even registered him! That's not pet care, that's butchery! And the DRINKING, oh my gods, the drinking. I've seen guttered kittens with more self-control."

The crate bucked on a thermal rising from Tuftenwag's chimney district. Gabby rode it without shifting her weight, bare feet gripping sisal, claws extended. Below, the capital spread in tessellated light: amber runestones marking streets, blue ward-glow humming from shop fronts, the occasional flicker of an enchanted billboard advertising something the hero couldn't read.

"And she HIT you! I saw the mark on your arm! She grabbed you so hard it bruised and then she cried about it and shoved you in her gut flap like that makes it okay! Who raises a skinjie like that!"

She spun on the scratching post, the motion catlike in its precision, and dropped into a crouch. Her blue eyes, electric behind smeared black liner, locked onto the hero sitting wedged between her coiled capture net and the speargun that smelled like fish oil and rust. The fury in her expression cracked down the middle. Underneath it was something softer but no less hungry.

"Hey." Lower now. The wind carried the gentleness away almost before it landed. "Hey, baby. I'm sorry. I'm scaring you, aren't I?"

She reached down and caught the hero's chin between her thumb and forefinger, tilting their face up. Studied them. Her ears flattened, then perked, then flattened again, cycling through emotional states faster than her mouth could narrate.

"Poor thing. You're shaking." Her thumb traced the hero's jawline, claw retracted, just the calloused pad of her fingertip dragging across skin. "Forget about her. You're mine now. Gabby's got you."

The possessiveness landed without ceremony. Mine. Like picking up a stray from the road and declaring it yours before you'd even checked it for fleas.

Her hand left the hero's jaw and traveled south. Down the chest, nails dragging faint lines through fabric. Over the stomach, palm pressing flat to feel the warmth underneath. Past the waistband in one sharp tug, elastic snapping against hip bones, cool night air rushing in to replace the heat of her fingers for exactly the half-second before her grip closed around the shaft.

Her palm was rough. Calluses built from years of hauling rope, gripping spear handles, and wrestling net-tangled harpies out of open sky. The texture scraped across sensitive skin with every micro-adjustment of her fingers, coarse pads at the base of each knuckle contrasting with the smoother valley between her thumb and forefinger where the shaft settled naturally into the groove.

"There we go," she murmured, and the crate dipped below a cloud bank, the city lights painting orange stripes across pale skin and red hair and the black-painted claws wrapped around the hero's cock. "Let mama Gabby take care of everything."

Her thumb found the tip. Pressed into the slit with the deliberate, specific pressure of someone who understood exactly how much nerve density lived in that square centimeter of skin. She traced a slow circle, smearing the first slick bead that gathered there down the underside in one long stroke that followed the vein from head to base. Then back up, her grip tightening in a rolling squeeze, each finger closing in sequence like a wave.

The crate rocked. Gabby's thighs flexed on the scratching post as she compensated, and the motion pressed her hip against the hero's shoulder, yoga pants thin enough that the heat of her skin bled through the fabric. Her abs contracted above the hero's temple, hard ridges of muscle shifting beneath the crop top.

She leaned down. Fish jerky and cheap perfume and the metallic bite of speargun grease on her forearm. Her breath came in warm huffs against the hero's ear, synced unconsciously with the rhythm of her wrist.

"You like that, baby?" Rhetorical. Everything Gabby said to the hero was rhetorical. She bit down on the earlobe, canines pressing individual crescents into soft tissue, held it between her teeth while her hand worked faster. Her tail curled around the hero's calf and squeezed. "Yeah. That's my good skinjie."

The city grew larger below. Rooftops sharpening into individual tiles, chimney smoke threading between them. Gabby's apartment building rising into view at the edge of a residential block, its rooftop hatch hanging open like a waiting mouth.

Gabby's hand didn't slow.

Cana deleted the entire previous draft without ceremony. "Clean slate. Leaner, faster, starts on the hero, ends on a choice. Three days of context compressed into setup lines instead of scenes. Got it."

She started typing.

Three days burned through Gabby's savings the way fire burns through tissue paper: spectacularly, uselessly, and with a smell that lingered.

Three days of bars where she bought rounds for strangers and introduced the hero as "my little guy" while grinding her hip against their shoulder under the counter. Three days of street food purchased from every stall in the market district. Three days of enchanted trinkets she didn't need, bottles she didn't finish, and one spiked collar she bought for the hero as a joke and then got genuinely upset when they wouldn't wear it. Three nights in her apartment where the wrestling started as play and ended with her thighs locked around the hero's hips and her teeth in their neck, purring so loud the walls vibrated.

On the fourth morning Gabby counted her coins on the kitchen counter three times, each count producing a worse number than the last. Her ears went flat. Her tail went still. She stared at the small pile of copper and silver like it had personally betrayed her and then swept it into her pouch with a snarl.

Rent was due. Chipping was a fantasy. The pantry held fish jerky and half a bottle of something that might have been cooking wine or might have been floor cleaner.

Thirty minutes later the hero was on the pallet.

The city shrank beneath them. Rooftops became tiles became specks became texture, and then Tuftenwag was just a smear of amber light on the landscape below as the pallet climbed, the enchanted wood humming under the hero's palms, wind cutting across the short plank walls hard enough to make their eyes stream. Gabby stood on the scratching post above them, barefoot, speargun braced against her hip, scanning the sky with the sharp focus that only appeared when money was involved.

"Keep an eye on the sky, skinjie! These avians are tricky!"

She said it without looking down. Her ears rotated independently, sweeping for wing beats in frequencies the hero couldn't hear. Her tail counterbalanced every gust, every shift of weight, every subtle tilt of the pallet as it gained altitude. A mile up. Two. The air thinned and cooled and tasted like copper. The clouds were still far above, a white ceiling that separated Gabby's hunting ground from the winged civilization that lived beyond it. South of Tuftenwag, the sky opened into a vast blue emptiness where thermal columns rose like invisible pillars and the only things that moved were birds, wind, and money.

The hero watched. Waited. Shivered in the thin air and tried to calculate how many successful hunts stood between them and a chip they didn't want but needed to survive.

Then they heard it.

Low at first. A vibration more than a sound, felt in the sternum before the ears caught up. A bass drone that pressed against the inside of the skull and stayed there, building, layering, until it resolved into something the hero recognized on a primal level they couldn't explain. Engines. Massive ones. The roar of something that should have been a Luftwaffe bomber screaming in for a strafing run, except the pitch was wrong, waterlogged somehow, the frequencies bent through steam pressure and iron resonance until the sound came out thick and wet and furious.

A cloud moved.

Not drifted. Moved. Laterally, against the wind, pushed aside by something inside it that was too large and too angry to stay hidden. The white vapor bulged, split, and tore open like a curtain being ripped from its rod.

"GIVE THAT BACK YOU HARPY!" The voice hit before the ship did. Loudspeakers. Military-grade, fleet-command loudspeakers bolted to an iron hull and cranked to a volume that made the pallet's planks rattle. The words echoed off the cloud ceiling and bounced across open sky, scattering a cluster of shapes the hero hadn't noticed until they scattered.

Then the Castille emerged.

It came out of the cloud like a cathedral being pushed through a wall. Nose cannons first — two iron barrels so long and so thick they looked like they belonged on a completely different, much larger ship, extending from the prow like jousting lances designed by someone who had never been told no. Behind them the hull followed, blackened steel over weathered wood, rivets the size of fists catching dull light along plated seams. B-17 wings spread wide on either side, and mounted on each wing sat turbine engines the size of houses, capped with smokestacks that rose straight up into the torn cloud cover and belched columns of black smoke so thick they left stains on the sky. Machine gun turrets studded every available surface — wing roots, dorsal ridge, ventral belly, port and starboard rails — all of them unmanned, all of them tracking something small and fast and feathered that was streaking away from the ship's cargo nets with what appeared to be a brass navigation instrument clutched in its talons.

The ship was absurd. Grotesquely, magnificently absurd. It looked like a battleship had mated with a barn and the offspring had been raised by artillery enthusiasts. It flew with the grace of a thrown refrigerator and the conviction of a man who had decided that today's problem would be solved with volume.

Gabby's speargun dropped six inches. Her ears went flat, then up, then flat again. Her tail puffed to three times its normal width. She crouched low on the scratching post with all four limbs gripping sisal and wood, claws fully extended, her back arched toward the hero, every line of her body screaming small target, small target, don't see me.

The Castille's bridge windows reflected grey sky and black smoke. Behind the glass stood a single silhouette. White hair. Navy greatcoat with torn patches where insignia used to be. One hand on the throttle. The other holding a bottle by the neck.

The ship banked. The harpy with the stolen instrument peeled off east and vanished into a thermal column, already forgotten. The Castille's trajectory adjusted. The nose cannons, each one longer than Gabby's apartment building was tall, swung slowly toward the pallet.

Not toward Gabby.

Toward the hero.

A grinding sound echoed from the ship's belly. Metal on metal, chains and gears, something mechanical unfolding beneath the hull. A cargo hatch opened. A rope ladder tumbled out, unrolling in the wind, its bottom rungs swinging free two hundred feet above the distant ground. Close enough to reach if the pallet held its altitude. Close enough to grab if someone jumped.

The loudspeakers crackled. The voice came back, different now. Quieter. Still amplified to a volume that could crack plaster, but the tone underneath had shifted from fury to something raw and rough and aimed with surgical precision at the only creature in the sky who could understand the words.

"Jump, kid."

Two words. A command that assumed the hero was a person. The first time anyone in this world had spoken to them like that since the nobles declared them worthless.

Gabby's head whipped around. She saw the ladder. She saw the hero's face. Her pupils blew wide and her hand shot out, claws extended, reaching for the hero's arm, for their shirt, for anything she could grip.

"No no no no — stay, STAY —"

The pallet rocked in the Castille's engine wash. The ladder swung. Gabby reached.

The hero had about two seconds.

The hero chose to stay.

They chose it in the two seconds Gabby's claws closed around their wrist and the rope ladder swung past and the Castille's loudspeakers barked something lost to wind shear. They chose it when the pallet banked so hard the plank walls groaned and the speargun slid six inches toward the edge and Gabby's tail wrapped around their ankle like a seatbelt made of fur and bad decisions. They chose it because jumping onto an unknown aircraft piloted by a drunk man screaming through military-grade speakers seemed marginally worse than staying on a wooden board piloted by a catgirl who had given them a handjob forty-eight hours ago.

Marginally.

The storm cloud swallowed them whole. Grey nothing. Moisture so thick it beaded on the hero's eyelashes and pooled in the grain of the pallet's wood. Gabby steered blind, navigating by ear, her white ears rotating like radar dishes while her body swayed with every bank and dive and roll. The Castille's engine roar followed them into the vapor — enormous, grinding, shaking the water droplets off the plank walls — and then Gabby threw the pallet into a vertical drop that pressed the hero's spine against the floor and made their stomach try to escape through their mouth.

Thirty seconds of freefall. A hard left that nearly threw the speargun overboard. Another climb, steep enough that the hero's bare heels slid against wet wood and Gabby's claws punched new holes in the scratching post. Behind them the engine roar faded, direction uncertain, the Castille's massive profile unable to match the pallet's insane turning radius. Steam engines could push tonnage through open sky. They could not thread a needle through a thunderhead.

When the pallet broke through the cloud's eastern edge into clear blue air, the Castille was gone. Somewhere behind them, buried in grey vapor, a man with white hair was shouting into loudspeakers that nobody could hear anymore.

Gabby exhaled so hard her ears vibrated. She released the scratching post one claw at a time, stood upright, and shook herself head to tail in a rippling full-body motion that sprayed water droplets in every direction including directly into the hero's face.

"That human was CRAZY, skinjie! He actually expected you to jump!" She grinned down at the hero from the scratching post, soaked, exhilarated, her crop top plastered to her torso and her red hair hanging in wet ropes around her shoulders. Water ran down her abs in rivulets that caught the returning sunlight. "Off a perfectly good pallet! Onto a scary metal thing! Humans are so weird."

She said it with the warm condescension of someone who couldn't fathom why a fish would choose a different aquarium.

The pallet leveled out. Clean air. Open sky. South-southeast of Tuftenwag, past the thermal ridges where the hunting was better and the competition thinner. The clouds sat above them like a second sky, white and heavy and hiding whatever civilization the winged demi-humans had built on top of them. Below, the ground was a quilt of green and brown patched together two miles down. The wind had dried from a howl to a steady push.

Gabby climbed the scratching post with the fluid ease of something that had been climbing things since birth. Her bare feet gripped the sisal. Her knees braced against the top platform. She rose to her full height, one hand shading her eyes, scanning east where the cloud ceiling dipped lower and the thermals created upwelling currents that winged creatures rode like elevators.

Her ears locked forward. Both of them. Rigid, pointed, aimed at the same spot on the horizon like matched gun barrels.

"I see them," she whispered. The wind almost stole it. "A school of harpies. Dead east."

She dropped to all fours on top of the scratching post so fast the wood groaned. Her hands and feet gripped the platform, body low, tail straight back for balance, every muscle in her shoulders and thighs coiled into a crouch so perfectly feline that for one disorienting moment the hero forgot she was seven feet tall and saw only the cat. The pallet responded to her shift in weight and intent, banking hard left, the enchanted wood reading her predatory focus the way a hunting dog reads a pointed finger.

In the distance, shapes.

Small ones. A dozen, maybe fifteen, moving in loose formation against the white cloud belly. Wings catching light in flashes of color — blue, green, tawny, spotted. They flew in patterns that were almost but not quite organized, the spacing too regular for a flock and too sloppy for a squadron. Practice formations. The careful, clumsy geometry of students following instructions they hadn't memorized yet.

Children.

Winged children, flying together below the cloud line in the open air, supervised by a larger shape that circled above them with the patient altitude of someone who had counted heads six times and would count them again in thirty seconds. A teacher keeping formation over a field trip that had descended too far from the safety of the cloud cities. Too far from home. Too close to the thermal ridges where bird-catchers worked and human steamships trolled and the sky belonged to whoever had the bigger net.

Gabby's hand found the speargun. Quietly. The way her mother had taught her to find a fishing spear on the beach when the seagulls landed close enough. No sudden movements. No sound that carried. Just fingers closing around the stock, lifting it from the pallet floor, bringing it to her shoulder in one smooth motion that ended with the barrel pointed east and the net cartridge seated in the rail with a soft click.

She aimed past the children.

At the largest shape. The one flying above them all. The teacher.

The hero watched Gabby's finger find the trigger. They watched the barrel track its target. They watched the harpy schoolteacher circle her students unaware that a catgirl on a wooden pallet was drifting toward her at the speed of a hot air balloon with a steam-powered net gun aimed at her wingspan.

Gabby's breathing slowed. Her ears went still. Her tail stopped moving.

She squeezed.

The speargun kicked. A burst of pressurized steam punched the net cartridge out of the barrel with a crack that rolled across the open sky like a dry branch snapping in a cathedral. The net unfurled mid-flight, spreading wide, weighted at the corners, engineered to wrap around wing joints and lock them shut. It sailed through the distance between the pallet and the formation in a long, rising arc.

It hit.

The harpy teacher folded. Wings pinned, body spinning, the net cinching tight around her torso and flight feathers in a tangle of cord and weighted steel. She dropped out of formation like a stone and the children above her scattered in a burst of panicked wingbeats and high-pitched cries that sounded like screaming because they were.

Gabby slammed one bare foot onto the pallet's side railing, anchoring herself, and punched the button mounted on the speargun's stock. The steam-powered crank engaged with a grinding whir. The line went taut. The winch hauled, dragging the harpy through open air toward the pallet in jerking, struggling increments, the net spinning with each pull, the teacher's wings beating uselessly against cord designed to hold things ten times her strength.

The harpy hit the pallet floor with a sound like a sack of wet laundry dropped from a rooftop. She tumbled, tangled in netting, feathers bent at wrong angles, glasses cracked, one lens missing. Blood from a cut on her forehead ran into teal hair matted with cord fiber. She was smaller than the hero expected. Smaller than Gabby by a wide margin. Her wings, pinned flat against her body by the net, trembled with the rapid shallow breathing of something that had just learned the difference between sky and cage.

Gabby reached for the cleaver hanging from the pallet wall rack. The blade was old, heavy, stained dark along the edge with residue that wasn't rust. She tested the weight with a casual flip and stepped toward the harpy with the easy confidence of someone who had done this a hundred times. Butchering was the family trade. This was Tuesday.

The harpy's amber eyes — one clear, one half-blinded by blood from the cut — found the hero.

She froze. Her mouth opened. Her cracked glasses sat crooked on her face, and the look that crossed her features was something the hero hadn't seen directed at them since the summoning. Recognition. Not of their face.

Of their species.

"Please." Her voice cracked. Small and wrecked and shaking. She spoke in the common tongue, the language of the sky civilizations, a language the hero understood perfectly and Gabby heard as pleasant-sounding bird noise. "No. Please, no."

Gabby stepped closer. The cleaver turned in her grip, edge angling toward the base of the left wing where the primary feathers met the joint. The money cut. Eight gold per pound.

Leslie's bound hands reached through the netting toward the hero. Toward the only creature on this pallet who could parse the sounds coming out of her mouth as words instead of music.

"I know you can understand me." Tears cut clean lines through the blood on her face. "I have students. Those are my students up there. They won't find their way home without me. You know what I'm saying. I can see it in your face. Please. Don't let her kill me."

Above them, the scattered children circled. Too scared to descend. Too young to know what else to do. Their formation was gone. Their teacher was on a wooden board with a catgirl and a cleaver and a human who was staring at them with an expression that Leslie read as horror and Gabby read as her pet being overstimulated by a new experience.

Gabby glanced down at the hero. Smiled.

"Aw, first catch jitters? Don't worry baby, you'll get used to it!" She turned back to Leslie and raised the cleaver. "Okay pretty bird. Hold still for mama."

The hero's hands were free. Gabby's back was half-turned. The cleaver was up. Leslie's eyes were on them. Above, children flew in circles waiting for a teacher who couldn't fly anymore.