The Book of Night With Moon Read Free Page A

-box out on their small terrace for her, where it was under cover from rain. While using it, Rhiow went off into unfocused mode briefly and could hear them talking as Hhuha opened the window-coverings and the window.
    "Mmngnggh…" Iaehh's voice. "Did she eat?"
    "Uh huh." A pause. "She's out now…. I don't know… I'm still not sure it's a great idea to have her box out there."
    "Oh, come on, Sue. Better there than in the bathroom. You're the one who was always muttering about walking in the kitty litter in the morning. Anyway, she's not going to fall or anything."
    "I don't mean that. It's encouraging her to get down on that lower roof that worries me."
    "Why? It's not like she can get to anywhere else from there. She can roam around and get some fresh air… and she's been doing it for months now without any trouble. She would have gone missing a long time back if she could have."
    "Well, I still worry."
    " Su sannnnn… She's not stupid. It's not like she's going to try to go twenty stories straight down."
    Rhiow put her whiskers forward in a slight smile as she finished tidying the box, then got out and shook her feet fastidiously. Bits of litter scattered in various directions, skittering off the terrace. They can make water run uphill and fly off to the Moon when they like, she thought, resigned, but they can't make hiouh- litter that won't stick to your paws. A serious misplacement of priorities…
    Rhiow went to the edge of the railed terrace, looked down. Her ehhif 's apartment was near the corner of the building. Its wall fell sheer to the next terrace, thirty feet down, but she had no interest in that. Off to the left was an easy jump, about three feet, to the concrete parapet of a lower roof of a building diagonally behind theirs, but Rhiow wasn't going that way either. Her intended path lay sideways, along the brick wall itself. Some fanciful builder had built into it a pattern of slightly protruding bricks, a stairstep pattern repeating above and below. The part of it Rhiow used led rightward down the wall to the building's other near corner, about fifty feet away; and six feet below that, in the direction of the street, was the raised parapet of yet another roof, the top of the next building along.
    Rhiow slipped through the railings, stepped carefully up onto the first brick, and made her way downward along the wall, foot before foot, no hurry. This segment of her road, the first used each day setting out and the last to manage before getting home, was also the trickiest: no more than two inches' width of brick to put her feet on as she went, nothing to catch her should she fall. Once she almost had, and afterward had spent nearly half an hour washing and regaining her composure, horrified at what might have happened, or worse, who might have seen her. Wasted time, she thought now, amused at her younger self. But we all learn….
    At the corner of the building Rhiow paused, looked around. Soft city-noise drifted up to her: the hoot of horns over on Third, someone's car alarm wailing disconsolately to itself four or five blocks north, the rattle of trays being unloaded at the bakery eastward and around the corner. All around her, the sheer walls of other apartment and office buildings turned blind walls and windows to the sight of a small black cat perched on a two-inch-wide brick, ninety feet above the sidewalk of Seventieth Street. No one saw her. But that was life in iAh'hah, after all: no one looked up or paid attention to any but their own affairs.
    Except for a small group of public servants, of whom she was one. But Rhiow spent no more time thinking about that than was necessary, especially not here, where she stuck out like an eye on a week-old fish head. Her business was not to be noticed, and by now, she was good at it.
    She measured the jump down to the parapet. No matter that she had done it a thousand times before: it was the thousandth jump and one, misjudged, that would cheat you out of a spare