Cats didn’t naturally grow bone spines. That was just a fact. Cats with bone spines longer than their tails — also not a natural phenomenon. Mutated, then, clearly.

What made this one interesting, and not in a good way, was the placement.

Fifteen spines in total, distributed with no apparent logic or symmetry: shoulder blades, hip joints, abdomen, back, head, and one growing directly from the tail. Each one a dark silver in color, showing the faint Activity radiation signature he’d come to associate with bone-analog structures. Each one also positioned in a way that actively interfered with the animal’s movement. The abdominal spine dragged on the ground intermittently. The hip spines threw off the gait. The shoulder spines forced the neck into a permanent sideways tilt.

The creature was roughly the size of a small tiger in body mass. It looked formidable at a distance. In motion, it was a study in frustrated biomechanics.

He watched it make its way down from the ridgeline toward the peach tree, navigating each step with the particular careful concentration of an animal that had learned to work around its own body. On one of the sharper rock faces, the abdominal spine caught the surface and the cat went down hard. He held his breath waiting to see if the spine had broken or worse, impaled something vital.

The cat got up. The spine was intact. The fall had opened cuts at several of the spine bases where the bone met skin, and the blood that followed turned the animal’s yellow-gray coat a vivid red. It didn’t slow down.

He watched it reach the peach tree, assess the trunk, and attempt to climb.

The spines made that impossible. Every grip attempt ended the same way — the spines caught the bark, shifted the center of balance, and the cat fell. Each fall produced more bleeding. The creature tried again. And again. It couldn’t process the information that the tree was inaccessible to it. The Activity radiation from the peaches was overriding whatever passed for self-preservation instinct.

He’d seen enough. He suited up.

The cat had no attention to spare for him. He came in from the side, looped the chain around its neck before it registered his presence, hoisted it on the fang-javelin like a carrying pole, and walked it back to Vajra.

The vocalization it produced was a specific kind of angry — consonants in the wrong places, a wet quality to the sound that suggested some structural change in the larynx.

He tied it into a compact bundle with chain and set it on the cargo floor.

“Mutation markers concentrated in body size increase and fifteen bone spines…”

He trimmed the abdominal spine first — the one that had been dragging on the ground, causing most of the mobility problems. The cat objected loudly.

He held the severed spine and focused his perception on it.

Activity present, but faint. Much fainter than a proper Activity core. And yet the conductivity was excellent — when he pushed Activity into the spine, it accepted the charge readily, distributed it evenly, held it without the usual resistance of non-core bone material.

He trimmed the hip spines next. Same result on both. Good conductivity, weak natural radiation, no core-level concentration.

He tried charging one and driving it into a scrap steel plate. The spine snapped. The steel showed a faint white mark.

Conducts Activity well. Doesn’t harden or sharpen under Activity charge. Neither an Activity core nor ordinary bone.

A third category, apparently. He set the broken spine aside and went through the remaining thirteen methodically.

All fifteen spines: same result. Good conductors, not cores. No enhanced hardness, no enhanced sharpness, no structural reinforcement under Activity charge.

And the cat itself had no properly enlarged bone structures anywhere. Every confirmed Activity core he’d catalogued had been an enlarged bone-analog feature — Fangwolf fangs, Burrower mandibles, Gnawrat incisors, ant mandibles, the queen’s chest plate. This animal had fifteen bone features that should have been cores by that logic, and none of them were.

Another Plastic Rabbit. No core.

He fed the cat a piece of Tumour-Pig steak — it needed the blood loss addressed — and watched it recover with the speed he’d come to expect from Activity-enhanced biology. Angry again within minutes, pulling against the chains, making sounds.

He opened the laptop.

Spine-cat: malformed mutation of domestic cat. Fifteen bone spines distributed across body, apparently random placement. No Activity core identified. Spines accept Activity charge but lack core functionality. Spines impede movement significantly. Combat rating: negligible.

He added a second paragraph:

Likely represents a failed mutation — the Activity-induced genetic modifications produced structural features that are maladaptive rather than beneficial. The Tumour-Pig’s growths may represent a similar failure mode. Hypothesis: Activity operates as a mutation catalyst on biological genomes, and like all mutation processes, produces both adaptive and maladaptive results. The ratio of successful to failed mutations in this environment is unknown.

He looked at the cat, bleeding and angry in its chain bundle, spines reduced by two.

There was a possibility he acknowledged and didn’t particularly like: the cat might be another Plastic Rabbit case. No Activity core visible because the core was external — a metal object somewhere that the cat was bonded to. If so, the object was somewhere behind him, probably back near where the cat had come from on the ridgeline.

He wasn’t going to search the ridgeline for it. The cat was too injured, too compromised, and too unappealing for that level of investment. Its research value had already been substantially extracted. The most probable near-term outcome for it was becoming a meal.

He was composing a follow-up note in the field guide when the sound came from the back of the cargo section.

Tap. Tap.

He was on his feet with the fang-knife out before the thought finished forming, moving toward the rear storage alcove where he kept the fly enclosure and the ant egg incubation box.

Tap. Tap.

The source was the glass vial from the toxicity test.

The blowfly he’d killed — the one that had ingested seven seconds of peach flesh and stopped moving at twenty-three seconds — was not in it.

A fly approximately one size larger than it should have been was.

Alive. Active. Throwing itself against the glass with the particular energy of something that had just woken up and found itself enclosed.

The peach fragment was gone. A black deposit on the vial’s interior was all that remained of it.

Shen Cong stood and looked at the vial for several seconds.

The fly survived the toxin. And grew.

(End of Chapter 31)