“I’ll say,” Gus replied. “Linoleum flooring with stainless steel prep tables? Dreadful.”
“Besides that,” Rose said, scratching beneath Gus’s chin so that he purred and closed his eyes. “Those bakers are terrified of that Mr Butter. And the things they make here: Food-Like Consumer Products? A baked good is natural, wholesome. It’s food. Not a consumer product that’s like food.”
“To say nothing of the fact that they kidnapped us,” Gus reminded her.
“I don’t want to fix their stupid FLCPs,” Rose said. “We need to escape. Maybe if we find the button for that elevator, we could get down to the ground floor.”
“And then what?” said Gus. “I suppose you intend to climb that barbed-wire fence in the distance?” Rose fell silent as the cat opened his eyes and resumed cleaning his back. “Would you mind turning on that lamp, Rose? I can’t see what I’m doing over here.”
“I thought cats could see in the dark!” Rose exclaimed.
“That’s just something we say to impress people. My night vision is actually just as poor as yours,” Gus admitted.
Rose switched on the lamp, then peered out of the window. It was now pitch-dark outside.
“My parents must be flipping out right now,” Rose said. “They probably think I’m dead.” She rolled over and buried her head in the pillow. Gus stopped his cleaning and sat on her head, which was his way of saying that he didn’t know what to say.
Then, after a moment, he leaped across the room and landed on the dresser.
“The Caterwaul!” he exclaimed.
“What?” Rose asked, rolling over.
Gus sat back on his hind legs and clapped his front paws together. “I can’t believe I forgot about the Caterwaul! It won’t get you out of here, but it will get word to your family that you are safe. Trapped, but safe. So they won’t worry.”
“Good!” Rose said, feeling relief wash over her. “But what is the cay-ter-wall?”
“The Caterwaul is a network,” Gus explained. “At some point in our feline history, all the breeds came together and decided that while we each may privately feel that our own breed is the best – which is silly, given that the Scottish Fold is objectively the superior breed – in times of crisis we ought to unite for the common good. Long before Facebook, we formed the world’s first social network. And we named it the Caterwaul.
“If I tell any cat a message,” Gus continued, “he will carry it to another cat, and the message will be passed from cat to cat until eventually it falls on the correct ears. It takes a little while to get information back and forth, but it works.”
Rose feared that Gus might be making this up just to soothe her, but soothe her it did. “I thought you were the only cat who can talk,” she said suspiciously.
“The narrowness of your perspective is endearing. Most cats do not speak English, as I do,” said Gus. “But all cats speak Felinsch. You can’t hear it, but it is being spoken.”
Rose was too happy learning about the Caterwaul to feel embarrassed. If she couldn’t get out of this dreadful prison of a factory, at least her family would know she was safe. “How will you get word to other cats?” she asked. “Where are you going to find one in this place?”
“I shall have to leave this place, obviously.”
“But how are you going to get out of here?”
Gus hopped onto the window ledge and looked down. Then he moved over to the glass wall that overlooked the test kitchen. “Down there!” he said. “Do you see that hose?”
Rose peered out onto the darkened floor of the test kitchen and saw that there was, indeed, a floppy white fire hose coiled on one side of the wall.
“You want me to dangle the hose out the window, and you’ll climb down it?” she asked.
“No!” Gus exclaimed. “I’m not climbing down a hose! I’d break a claw. You are going to tie the hose to the strap of your backpack, and gently lower the backpack to the ground with me in it!”
A short time after Gus laid out the plan, Rose found herself peering over the ledge of the tiny window, watching him hop out of the backpack and slink off into the darkness, his tail held high.
She wished he hadn’t left. Gus usually slept with her little sister, Leigh, but his night-time purring was so loud and guttural that Rose could always hear it across the room like the calm lapping of the nighttime ocean. There was no need for a white noise machine with Gus in the house.
Maybe I should try to climb down the hose, too, Rose thought.
But the building she was in was awfully tall, and the entrance to the compound was far away. Which way should she go once she got out – if she got out? She didn’t even know where the compound was located. Was home to the south? The west? All she had to do to win her freedom was to perfect a few recipes. How hard could that be? Maybe she could even make it happen in less than five days.
Rose pulled the hose up through the window, brought it back down to the dark kitchen, and threaded it back around its hook, praying that none of the bakers would wake.
Her stomach grumbled. She was in a kitchen, wasn’t she? There must be something here to fill her belly. But a quick search turned up only the ingredients for sweet treats, and she didn’t want dessert for dinner. She was briefly tempted when, in one corner of the dimly lit kitchen, she came upon a pyramid of individually wrapped Dinky Cakes. There must have been a hundred in the pile.
But the more she looked at how identically flawless they were, the more she realized she didn’t want to eat one. There was something deeply eerie about such machine-made perfection, something that made Rose think of Mr Butter and shiver with disgust.
She climbed back up to her room, crawled into bed, and went to sleep hungry.
ROSE WAS AWAKENED the following morning by an unpleasant greenish-yellow light that filtered through the glass walls of the bedroom.
She stumbled out of bed. “Wake up, Gus,” she said automatically. Rising up from below was a sound of banging metal – the bakers bustling around the kitchen and frantically scrubbing all of the metal surfaces, which, if she wasn’t mistaken, were still sparkling clean from the night before.
Gus didn’t answer. And then she remembered: he’d gone out to pass a message along to the Caterwaul. She sneaked a look out of the window, but there was no sign of the grey Scottish Fold on the asphalt below. He hadn’t yet returned.
Somehow, Gus’s absence made Rose feel all the more sad and alone.
She turned her attention to the kitchen. Peering through one of the glass walls of her room, Rose saw Melanie, Felanie, and Gene scrubbing the basin of an enormous deep fryer, one big enough for three adults to swim in comfortably. Jasmine and Ning were wiping down the fronts of the ovens.
“Whistle while you work!” commanded Marge, smiling broadly as she darted back and forth between them.
And on cue, all of the bakers began to whistle cheerful tunes. Periodically they’d stop and clap in unison, and then they’d take up the song once more. Rose looked from face to face, and all of them wore an identical wide smile: teeth slightly parted, lips stretched. Why would people who were living in a factory be smiling so hard?
Rose selected the smallest