Awareness came in fragments, each one sharp enough to cut.
can't breathe right can't move grit in mouth dark so dark too small everything's wrong
Kai tried to push and found no space. His body was wedged in something tight, compressed. Rock? Sand? He couldn't tell. He twisted and found a crack—cool air touched something that might have been his face—and he pressed toward it.
His body compressed wrong. Bones bending in ways bones shouldn't bend. But he slid through anyway, and the wrongness felt less wrong than it should have.
A pocket. Barely larger than himself.
He stood—and standing felt wrong, the balance all off, weight distributed across four points instead of two—and looked down at himself.
Paws.
Black pads with tiny claws that extended when he thought grab. A short coat of black fur that he could feel individually, every hair its own universe of sensation. A tail doing its own mathematics, adjusting for balance without him telling it to. Ears swiveling toward sounds he hadn't consciously heard—the shift of sand against sand, the distant drip of water, something chittering far away.
Not hands. Not human. Not him.
The genetic memory supplied a name before he could panic properly, the knowledge arriving fully formed like he'd always known it:
World Cat.
He wanted to scream. His throat made a sound like a cricket dying.
"Okay. Okay." The words came out as squeaks and chirps, the meaning lost but the intent clear in his own head. "This is happening. This is real. I'm—"
Mom. I was supposed to call Mom. Ten o'clock tomorrow morning. She took the day off like I asked. She'll sit there waiting and I won't come and she'll think I forgot, she'll think I lied, she'll think—
PSYCHOLOGICAL WARNING: Trauma spiral detected. Cortisol levels critical. Recommend immediate focus on survival tasks.
The voice in his head wasn't words. It was certainty. Knowledge that felt like remembering instead of learning, like his hindbrain explaining things his forebrain couldn't process yet.
Stop. Survival first. Breakdown later.
He mapped by instinct he didn't know he had. Hardpack above, grainy and dense. A seam angling up toward distant heat. A slope falling into cool dampness. A pebble the size of his skull marking the left boundary.
Moisture where rock met sand. He licked three times, his tongue moving with a life of its own. Metallic. Like licking a battery terminal, copper and sharp. He stopped before his hindbrain said enough.
Something moved under the sand. Reflex took over—muscles firing in patterns he'd never learned, never practiced. Pounce, pin, bite.
Desert cricket. The crunch felt wrong in his mouth, legs breaking between his teeth. It tasted like dust and salt and something his brain labeled fuel.
Warmth spread through his chest. Not just food. Information. His body reading the cricket's structure like a computer scanning code. Filing it. Learning it. Integrating it.
ADAPTATION INITIATED
Chitin analysis: Basic exoskeleton enhancement available
Muscle fiber patterns: Catalogued
Leg joint mechanics: Archived for future reference
Estimated integration time: 6 hours
He found a crack and wedged himself deep, his heart—impossibly small, impossibly fast, hummingbird-quick—gradually slowing.
"This can't be real. This is shock. I'm in an ambulance. Mom's there. The ticket's in my pocket. This is—"
He stopped. The sand against his pads was real. The cricket taste lingering in his mouth was real. The genetic memory feeding him survival data was real.
Chicago was the dream now. This was waking up.
"Tomorrow was supposed to be perfect," he whispered to the dark, the words coming out as soft chirps that meant nothing to anyone but him. "I was going to fix everything."
He curled tight, tail over nose, and tried not to think about his mother waiting at a table for a son who would never arrive. Tried not to think about the lottery money that would go unclaimed. Tried not to think about the Honda Civic with its door probably still open, horn probably still blaring, until someone came to investigate and found—
What? A body? Or just an empty car?
He didn't want to know.
Sleep came anyway. His body demanded it, override programs kicking in to force rest while repairs and adaptations processed.
The last thing he felt was the genetic memory showing him what he was now: a cat the size of an ant, on a world that didn't know his name, carrying the last genetic code of a species that had been extinct for three thousand years.
"I'm sorry, Mom," he squeaked into the darkness.
Then nothing.
Then dreams of parking lots and phone calls and a future that would never exist.