Life's already much too busy for Rhiow and the other cats of the New York City worldgating maintenance teams. The old, cramped Penn Station is being torn apart and relocated into its big new building, which means that the Penn worldgates have had to be moved too. Everyone's nerves are in shreds, and no one's had enough sleep for a human, let alone a Person. So when Rhiow goes staggering home to her litterbox the morning after the job's done and finds it already occupied by another cat -- who then vanishes -- at first she thinks she's hallucinating.
But she's not. When her team is called to Los Angeles to do a minor consult after the city's single worldgate is deranged by a string of earthquakes, Rhiow's "hallucination" reappears bearing a dire message from the past. The messenger, a tom called Hwaith, reveals that similar earthquakes are striking Los Angeles in 1946 -- indicators not only of increasing instability in the San Andreas Fault, but of something far more troubling. Something is trying to subvert the Los Angeles gate to its own purposes. "The Lone Power?" Rhiow asks. "No," Hwaith says. "Something worse. Something from outside."
Description:
Life's already much too busy for Rhiow and the other cats of the New York City worldgating maintenance teams. The old, cramped Penn Station is being torn apart and relocated into its big new building, which means that the Penn worldgates have had to be moved too. Everyone's nerves are in shreds, and no one's had enough sleep for a human, let alone a Person. So when Rhiow goes staggering home to her litterbox the morning after the job's done and finds it already occupied by another cat -- who then vanishes -- at first she thinks she's hallucinating.
But she's not. When her team is called to Los Angeles to do a minor consult after the city's single worldgate is deranged by a string of earthquakes, Rhiow's "hallucination" reappears bearing a dire message from the past. The messenger, a tom called Hwaith, reveals that similar earthquakes are striking Los Angeles in 1946 -- indicators not only of increasing instability in the San Andreas Fault, but of something far more troubling. Something is trying to subvert the Los Angeles gate to its own purposes. "The Lone Power?" Rhiow asks. "No," Hwaith says. "Something worse. Something from outside."