Searching For- Lily Labeau Rion King In-all Cat... -

When Mars woke up, she was back in her apartment, the photograph on her nightstand now blank except for the outline of a cat stretching in a moonbeam. She opened her mouth to sing—and found she had forgotten every note of the lullaby. She tried to recall her grandmother’s face—and saw only a blur. A future phone never rang.

Mars picked it up. “Hello, All Cat,” she whispered.

“Where’s the lock?” Mars asked.

Mars had all three.

“Then give them back,” Mars whispered.

“We’ve been waiting,” Lily said. Her eyes were the same as All Cat’s.

“You want Lily,” All Cat spoke—not in words, but in vibrations that landed directly in Mars’s bones. “And Rion. They are not lost. They are a single note now, folded inside me.” Searching for- lily labeau rion king in-All Cat...

All Cat stepped onto a log. It was magnificent and terrible: fur like wet charcoal, paws the size of saucers, and a tail that moved like a conductor’s baton. It yawned, revealing teeth that looked like broken piano keys.

All Cat tilted its head. “A trade. One song you’ll never sing again. One memory you’ll never recover. One tear from a lover you haven’t met yet. That is the price.”

Rion King smiled. “For someone lonely enough to hear us.” When Mars woke up, she was back in

Mars thought of her grandmother’s voice, already fading. She thought of the future she might never hold. And then she nodded.

Gutter pointed a gnarled finger at the cat in the photograph. “All Cat don’t like humans. But it loves three things: raw shrimp, a lullaby sung in a minor key, and the scent of a person who’s truly alone. You got any of those?”

The photograph showed three figures: Lily Labeau, the blues singer who vanished in ’97; Rion King, the enigmatic pianist who followed her everywhere like a shadow with a gold tooth; and between them, a creature they called “All Cat.” All Cat wasn’t a pet. In the grainy image, the beast was as large as a Labrador, with tufted ears that bent like question marks and eyes that held the exact shade of a swamp at midnight. All Cat was a rumor, a myth, a living gris-gris charm that could find anything lost—including a voice. A future phone never rang