" ' Oh... how unfortunate. ' "

Instructions

" ' Oh, you never seem to notice.. ' " Tw - Static, beetles, slow music. Some cats left pawprints. Others left stories. Anomalykit, Hauntedkit was beginning to suspect, left questions. They followed him everywhere. In the way his eyes lingered a moment too long, in the things he asked and the things he swallowed before they could escape his mouth. Even when he said nothing, there was the peculiar impression that something in his head was turning over, searching for a hidden latch. " ' When I trail behind you ' " Hauntedkit found this terribly interesting. And terribly inconvenient. She sat at the edge of camp, watching a beetle navigate a crack in the earth. It reached the other side, disappeared beneath a leaf, and emerged again several moments later. "Thought you'd escaped, didn't you?" she whispered. The beetle continued on its way. Hauntedkit smiled faintly. " 'In the dark of your home ' " Everyone was always trying to get somewhere. Away from something, towards something, around something they didn't want to face. Sometimes she wondered whether anyone ever stopped to consider that the path itself might be the interesting part. Anomalykit seemed to. Or perhaps he was simply very good at looking as though he did. That was the trouble. " ' You always though you were alone. ' " She could guess at his intentions, assemble little theories, turn his words over until they revealed a dozen possible meanings. But every time she settled on an answer, another question crawled out from beneath it. Why had he noticed her smile? Why had he surrendered so suddenly? And why, after all his insistence on uncovering other cats' secrets, had he looked so startled when she asked about his? " ' What will it take? ' " Hauntedkit's ears tilted backwards. "An investigator who doesn't like being investigated," she murmured. "How unusual." Then again, perhaps that wasn't fair. Perhaps he hadn't minded at all. Perhaps she'd mistaken surprise for fear, or curiosity for suspicion. She had a habit of finding patterns in things, and patterns, she was learning, could be terribly convincing even when they were wrong. The thought made her grin. Oh, that was interesting. " ' What must I do? ' " For once, she had caught herself making an assumption. She wondered if Anomalykit ever did the same. Her gaze wandered towards the camp entrance, searching without quite admitting what she was searching for. It wasn't that she wanted him to return. Not exactly. She merely had several questions left unanswered, and it seemed a dreadful waste to leave a perfectly good mystery unfinished. Besides, there was something rather amusing about a cat who wanted to understand the world discovering that the world had no intention of explaining itself. " ' Finally once to prove ' " Hauntedkit rose, flicking a leaf from her paw. "Come along, then, detective," she whispered to the empty air. "I've found a contradiction." She paused. A thoughtful little frown crossed her face. "Unfortunately, I think it might be me." ... " ' I've always been you ' "