Game Over

Chapter 12





ON THE GROUNDS of a shrine in a residential area of Ota, a district on the south side of Tokyo, a sleek black cat rested atop a high garden wall and cried softy, its blue-white eyes shining up into the starry night.

There was a certain peacefulness about the spot, a tranquility that almost gave the cat a sense of hope after the past several hours of panicked chaos. Somebody or—more accurately, several somebodies—had been hunting it all night long.

And it wasn’t over yet. A gunshot ripped through the darkness, and the cat sprang from its perch.

It was a tremendous leap. From the force of its legs alone, the cat had landed a good twenty feet from the wall. And then, as it cleared the bushes that ran parallel, it sprouted wings that glinted and gleamed like peacock feathers in the moonlight.

The cat banked steeply, clearing the garden gate and hurtling down the alleyway, a look of steely resolution—a resolution to live—in its now glowing, slit-pupiled eyes.

It would not be an easy resolution to keep. As the bullet ricocheted above the just-blossoming cherry trees, the hunter bounded over the wall, its grasshopper-style rear legs disloding enormous divots of soil from the ground.

And now the hunter, too, opened its wings—leathery and ridged with a network of scarlet veins—and banked out over the alley. It howled like a banshee as it flew through the night air, a gale of dust blowing up off the ground.

The cat’s pursuer was not just bigger, stronger, and faster; it was also high-tech. A pair of wraparound goggles tracked the quarry’s flitting figure and illumined it like a torch in a dark field. It also had a gun in each of its three forehands.

The cat’s reflexes were already dull from exhaustion. Every time it had shaken its pursuer, another one somehow found it again. Still, it hadn’t been transported halfway across the galaxy—the last of its kind—because it was prone to giving up.

The hunter was gaining—maybe just ten yards behind now. The cat’s eyes suddenly shone like high beams, and, right then, from glands in each of its hind legs, it sprayed two clouds of nitric acid into the air.

In an instant, the attacker’s lungs convulsed in mortal pain, its organs spilling into one another as the powerful acid destroyed the membranes between them, causing the great insect-like beast to slam into the cobblestones and explode as if it were a water balloon filled with black yogurt.

The bird-cat trilled with satisfaction and shot straight up into the night, clearing the artfully stacked roofs of a pagoda, and then arcing south toward a massive oil refinery on the banks of Tokyo Harbor.