Bastet

What people know about her is exactly what cats are willing to say, which is nothing. She turned up Downtown one heatwave evening, flawless black fringe, slit green eyes, and the neighborhood’s stray cats — which follow no one — fell into procession behind her. An antique dealer claims he once saw her exact face on a statuette three thousand years old; he tried to sell it to her, she smiled, and he swears that at that very moment it vanished from the window display. She’s never denied it. Denying, after all, is already an answer.

Bastet works the hushed hours, between last call and dawn, wherever the locks get bored. She walks in where she pleases, walks back out whenever she pleases, and the places she’s visited take days to realize they were. On the rare occasion a job goes sideways anyway, the final bill is always oddly light: retaliation loses its way en route, complaints get misfiled, witnesses only recall a cat. Squads fight over her like a lucky charm, and she picks her outings the way she’d pick a windowsill: sunny, and with a view.

Her cool isn’t a shell, it’s a conviction: nothing deserves being run for, except possibly a closing door. She sleeps entire days away in patches of sun only she knows about, on the House’s rooftops or a friendly windowsill, one eye half-open on the street — because even asleep, she’s watching, and the district has come to count on it. Those who take her for indifferent are confusing indifference with economy: she only spends her attention on what moves, and in this city, sooner or later, everything moves.