His jaw tightened. He hadn’t thought that he could loathe Miranda Evans more than he already did, but here they were. After everything she’d put Lady Emily through… now this. He stood there with the notice crumpling in his fist, staring at the door as if it owed him an explanation. Two doors down, a door cracked open. He turned that way, opening his mouth to ask about the cat, but instantly it slammed shut.
Great, no answers there then. He sighed and tipped his head back, pushing his hair back from his face.
Okay, so the cat was gone. The question was, where? A shelter, a neighbor, some-draanth-knew-where. How long had the notice been up?
He smoothed the paper out and checked again. Two days ago. Draanth. The cat could be anywhere by now.
He pressed his palm flat against the door and leaned in. There was no sound from inside. No scratching, no meowing, so the cat hadn’t been left locked in the apartment to starve. That was one less thing to worry about.
He headed back down the stairs, taking them three at a time. His boots hammered a rhythm that echoed up through the whole stairwell. Somewhere behind one of those closed doors, someone was probably complaining about the noise. Let them.
The Vett’an’s interior was quiet after the drone of the city outside. He sealed the ramp behind him and just stood in the bridge for a moment, breathing filtered air with an entirely new appreciation.
His gaze landed on the console in front of him. It swept in a graceful arc in front of the pilot’s chair and was packed with more systems than he’d ever seen in one craft. But then, the Emperor’s yacht was one of the most advanced vessels in the empire. If he couldn’t trace one Terran cat with this thing, he didn’t deserve the pilot’s seat.
Dropping into the chair, he pulled up the scanner interface and let muscle memory take over. His cousin had been a Krin hunter, and he’d taught Thyaar a thing or two about tracking prey that didn’t want to be found. The principle was the same whether you were belly-down in high grass with a rifle or sitting in a climate-controlled bridge running spectral analysis. Patience mostly, and knowing what you were looking for before you started.
He wrapped one of his braids around his finger as he thought. Terran cats weren’t that different to deearin. Really, all he’d have to do… He set the filter for non-human biomarkers and narrowed the range to the apartment block, then ran the sweep.
The scanner chimed instantly. He sat up quickly.
He had a hit. Strong and clear, it was right there in unit 317.
He stared at the screen. It couldn’t be that easy, could it?
Then he looked again and sighed.
It was him. He was the non-human marker. The scanner was retrospective, and he’d been standing in front of the apartment door long enough for it to register.
“Draanth.”
Killing the result, he recalibrated and increased the sensitivity. Then he adjusted for body mass, filtering out anything over fifteen kilograms. Then he filtered out anything under two kilograms. He also added his own biomarker to the exclusion matrix so the scanners wouldn’t make the same mistake twice.
He ran it again. The display flickered, cycling through bands he barely understood, and for a long moment there was nothing. Just static.
He leaned back in the pilot’s seat and made himself wait. Patience. It was all about patience.
Trouble is, he’d never had much of it.
The scanner chimed again, and he leaned forward.
There was a faint biomarker in the right range. It was very faint, but there. He frowned as he looked at it. It was small enough to be the cat he was looking for. It was weak, which meant the reading was hours old, maybe more, but it was there, tucked into a corner of the apartment’s thermal profile like the animal had found somewhere warm and stayed there.
He smiled.
The trace wasn’t going to give him an exact location on its own, but it was more than he’d had before. He’d need to widen the sweep and follow the trail. The cat could be in another apartment or some shelter three districts over.
But it was a start, which was more than he’d had before.
Pulling up the wider scan parameters, he set the scanners to map the surrounding blocks. If the cat had been moved, there’d be a trail. And if it was still inside, hiding in the walls or under a floorboard, he’d find that too.
The screen flickered again, and there it was. A faint trace moving away from the apartment building approximately thirty-six hours ago.
He smiled.
“Got you.”
An hour later, Thyaar was in an even worse neighborhood.
