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I sprang onto Jubal’s knees shortly before we landed and my boy unstrapped himself from his seat.

The Ranzo landed beside us. In a moment, Pshaw-Ra paraded into the docking bay and activated the paw-pad control for the pyramid ship’s hatch.

A few of the rescued cats peered curiously around the humans emerging from the Ranzo but the rest, I suspected, were hiding under bunks and in ventilation ducts and the other places Barque Cats normally patrolled. They weren’t in a trusting mood, hardly surprising under the circumstances.

My mother—Thomas’s Duchess, aka Chessie—stood beside me. “It’s so open,” she said when her paws touched the ground. We looked out over a landscape more featureless than an empty cargo hold.

Toward the south, though, the endless expanse of golden brown sand and white-hot sky was interrupted by a strip of silver-green river, lined as far as we could see with a fertile strip of trees, grass and some mud-brick structures, most of which were in ruins. A single yellow sun burned overhead, the heat soaking through our dense fluffy coats. We all had long beautiful fur, being descended from a feline race once known for some arcane reason as “Maine Coon.”

“How would you know where you were out there, away from the river?” Mother asked, nervously surveying the surrounding fields and sand.

“That’s why we don’t go away from the river!” Pshaw-Ra told her.. “The river is life. And it is long. But the city is large enough for most of us and that is where my people await your arrival and where your new lives and families will begin.”

“I kind of like the wide open spaces myself.” That was my milk brother, Bat, racing toward us from the Ranzo. Bat and his brothers were born to be wild. Their mother was Git a barn cat who befriended my mother. The two queens had birthed their litters hours apart, Bat and his brothers only slightly older than my siblings and me. When Git was killed, Mother nursed Bat and his brothers Doc, Wyatt and Virgil alongside her own. Jubal’s father then took all of us into space to serve aboard different ships. All except Mother and me, who were sold back to Mother’s original ship.

Bat plowed sand until his paws came to a stop, whereupon he stood stiff legged and lashy-tailed beside me. “I’ve got your back, milk bro,” he told me. “In case the locals don’t all share old Sandy-Britches’ enthusiasm for us.”

“It’s too big,” said Hadley, the Ranzo‘s ship’s cat who was still in the arms of Sosi, Captain Loloma’s daughter and the ship’s self-appointed Cat Person. The Ranzo‘s passenger hatch was still open and while a few more cats and crew poured out, Hadley suddenly wriggled from Sosi’s grasp and bolted back inside the ship, leaping over the cats coming the other way. “I’ll just be in here when we’re ready to leave,” Hadley told us.

Pshaw-Ra spat, “Foolish feline, do you think I have led you all this way to the promised place for you to leave? You are all here to stay. This is the planet of the cats and you are a cat. Accustom yourself to your new life.”

“It’s very warm,” Mother said, and she was right. The humans, who had no thick fur coats, were leaking water from their pelts. Sosi’s face was wet and Beulah’s was as red as her hair. None of them spoke cat however, so they were merely uncomfortable, not alarmed by Pshaw-Ra’s words.

Jubal of course understood him as well as I did.

The Ranzo can go whenever it wants to though, right? he asked me openly enough that Pshaw-Ra could hear.

Pshaw-Ra turned with twitching tail to regard my boy impatiently. He had heard the thought through me but was becoming adept at sorting out whose thoughts were whose. And no wonder. The kefer-ka, the shiny beetles that had caused our psychic link, were his creatures. I didn’t fully understand what they were—other than delicious—or what all that eating them could do, but Pshaw-Ra claimed they were responsible for the link between Jubal and me.

“Ask the boy where he thinks the ship that allowed diseased cats to escape the clutches