The door opened suddenly, and the brass bell above it tinkled. Carla stepped inside, then motioned Masaki and Pita to follow. As Pita closed the door behind them, a small white cat leaped down from one of the stacks of books and wove itself. purring, around her ankles. She reached down to scratch its head, looking around the shop. There was no sign of the proprietor.

“Hello. Welcome to Inner Secrets Thaumaturgical Textbooks. Aziz Fader at your service.”

The voice came from somewhere just ahead. Pita jerked back as a human shape suddenly appeared a step or two in front of her. One minute there had been nothing but empty air in front of her; the next, some guy was standing there. It gave her the weirds to think he’d been there all along, watching her invisibly. Masaki was equally startled, but Carla just smiled. “Hello, Aziz. Long time no scan.”

The shopkeeper was a tall man with jet-black hair combed straight back from his high forehead. He was human, but thin enough to be an elf. His nose had a slight hook to it, and his eyes were so dark it was hard to tell where the iris ended and the pupil began. He wore a flowing, one-piece garment with an ankle-length hem and wide sleeves, and held his hands in front of him, fingers laced together.

His eyes were locked on Carla. They took in every centimeter of the reporter, from her neatly braided hair and high cheekbones, to her tailored suit, to her stylish, expensive leather pumps. “I like the new face,” he commented, one eyebrow arched. He barely glanced at Masaki, with his rumpled shirt and uncombed graying hair, or at Pita, who still wore her torn jeans and cheap synthleather jacket.

Masaki cleared his throat. “We’ve come to-”

“I know why you’re here, Carla,” Aziz said, still addressing the female reporter “I did a minor mind probe before I let you in. A little protective measure. I hope you don’t mind.”

“Not at all,” Carla said smoothly. “Let’s get right to it then, shall we?”

Carla handed him the chip.

The shopkeeper waved them to a large wooden desk in the back of the store. A telecom unit sat on one corner. The rest of its surface was covered with a jumble of books, loose papers, and datachips. Aziz pushed these aside, revealing an ancient data display with a fold-up screen and a battered-looking keyboard. It didn’t even have a pickup for voice recognition, let alone a jack for a datacord. The shopkeeper must have a jones for old-fashioned stuff.

Aziz seated himself at the desk and powered up the datadeck. Carla and Masaki pulled up chairs on either side of him, and Pita, left without a seat, perched on a stack of books.

“Get down from there!” Aziz barked. “Those are valuable!”

Pita leaped to her feet, but the mage had already turned his attention to the flickering screen in front of him. He scrolled through the text, muttering to himself. Pita flipped him the finger behind his back.

“It’s a conjuring spell, all right, but not one I’m familiar with,” Aziz said. Definitely hermetic, and definitely related to the summoning of a spirit. But the diagram for the hermetic circle isn’t like any I’ve seen before. Usually it encloses a square pattern representing the four elemental energies. This one omits the square entirely, and instead places a pentagram at the middle of the circle. The first four symbols at each of the lower points I recognize-they’re the standard glyphs for the elements of fire, water, air, and earth. But I’m not familiar with this fifth one, here at the top of the pentagram. It’s almost reminiscent of a yang symbol Hmm…”

Pita was bored by the shopkeeper’s ramblings. If she stood here any longer she’d fall asleep on her feet. She ambled over to pat the cat. It was wedged into a space between books and shelf, licking its paw and affecting complete boredom and disdain. As Pita reached up and stroked it under the chin, the cat broke into a rumbling purr. Now that it was at a level where she could see its face, Pita noticed the animal’s unusual eyes. One was a vivid yellow, the other a soft sky blue.

The cat shifted, rolling over so that Pita could scratch its belly. It used its rear paws to push itself along the books, and as it did so one was dislodged. Pita instinctively picked it up, intending to put it back into place. But then she looked around at the shelves on which books were stacked every which way, wedged into any available space. She was tempted to just drop the thing back on the floor, but the picture on the cover, done in brilliant primary colors and outlined in gold, caught her eye. It showed a beautiful woman reclining on the ground with her arms straight out in front of her, palms flat against the sandy soil, staring forward intently. Just above and behind her, framing her body with its own, was the shadowy outline of a cat whose eyes were twin dots of gold. To either side of the woman were strange sculptures of a creature with a cat’s body and a human head. The statues looked vaguely familiar, and after a moment Pita remembered where she’d seen them before-In one of her history vids. They’d had a weird name: finks, or spinks, or something like that.

“You recommend this book, huh?” Pita jokingly asked the cat. It mrrrowed softly in response.

Slowly, Pita sounded out the book’s title: Way of the Cat: The Shamanistic Tradition from Ancient Egypt to Current Day. It didn’t sound very exciting. But flipping through the pages, Pita saw that it was full of beautiful pictures like the one on the cover. The book wasn’t anything like the visual aids she’d been used to at school, with their animated graphics and icon-prompted info blips. With a vis-aid, all you had to do was touch the icon and a voice would explain what you were looking at. In comparison, these old-fashioned books were way tougher, full of long passages of printed text that looked like heavy gray blocks. It would be a real yawn having to Sound out all the words yourself just to see what the pictures were about.

One of the illustrations on an inside page caught Pita’s eye. It showed a woman wearing a cat-shaped headdress and standing in a building whose walls were covered in strange symbols. Around her feet sat dozens of cats of every description, looking up at her with a mixture of awe and intense loyalty. What appealed most to Pita was the woman’s air of self-confidence and pride. Her eyes conveyed a clear message-this was one chummer you didn’t want to mess with.

Instinctively, Pita touched one of the cats as she would a vis-aid icon. Then she sighed and shook her head. Lips moving, she sounded out the words beneath the picture: “Bastet, cat goddess of ancient Egypt.”

Pita flipped to the front of the book, looking for instructions, and found something there called a Table of Contents. It seemed to be a kind of static menu! like the kind they put at the beginning of text-based computer files. The menu was organized into blocks called chapters, each with a title and a brief bit of text that was like a dialogue box underneath. Pita read through a few of them. There were chapters on the ancient rituals used to worship this Bastet, on something called mummification, on the jaguar priests of ancient Aztlan, and on the lion kings of Africa. But the chapter title that really intrigued her was one called: “The Way of the Cat: Empathy and Mind Control.” She liked the sound of that. Mind control. Cats had a way of getting people to do what they wanted. Pita wouldn’t mind being able to do that, too.

She turned her back to the others, then slipped the book into an inner pocket of her jacket. Quietly, she zipped her jacket shut. The cat watched her, its head tilted inquisitively to one side.

“You won’t tell, will you?” Pita whispered to it. It purred and closed its eyes.

When Pita returned to the others, Aziz was leaning back from the display, stroking his chin. Suddenly he jumped to his feet. Pita was worried that he might have been mind-reading again, that he’d monitored her thoughts when she boosted his book. But he ignored her and strode over to a messy pile of papers on the floor. Rummaging through them, he withdrew a book bound in cracked red leather.