The Cat Scratched Fever

Chapter 1: The Scratch in the Dark

Phoebe watched the blue line climb past sixty-three degrees and held her breath.

The culture had survived every temperature she had given it so far. If it survived this one, she would have something worth showing at the regional fair. If it didn’t, she would have a glass dish full of dead bacteria and a poster explaining why the experiment had been interesting anyway.

“You’re leaning on the bench,” her father said.

“I’m not touching the chamber.”

“You don’t have to touch it to shake it.”

Phoebe straightened. The line on the screen wavered, then steadied. Her father folded his arms and looked at her over the rims of his glasses. He wore them for close work, though he had spent most of the day squinting at screens without them.

“Sixty-three point four,” she said. “Membrane still intact.”

“For now.”

“You could sound pleased.”

“I am pleased. I’m also reading the part where you increased the temperature faster than your plan says.”

Phoebe glanced at the graph. He was right, which was irritating because she had hoped he wouldn’t notice until she could explain it as a deliberate adjustment. She had made the change deliberately. She just hadn’t written it down yet.

“The automatic cycle kept slowing at sixty-two,” she said. “It was protecting the culture from stress I was trying to measure.”

“Then put the change in your notes.”

She picked up her pencil. “I will.”

“Before you forget why you did it.”

“I know.”

“And when the judges ask?”

“I tell them what happened, including the part where you wouldn’t stop talking during the most important reading.”

Dan laughed. He had come down to the basement intending to help her carry equipment, and had stayed nearly an hour. He couldn’t resist a live experiment, especially one Phoebe had designed without him. The little chamber was hers. He had supplied the bench and insisted on safety checks, but she had selected the harmless teaching culture, built the temperature program, and spent two weeks revising it whenever the results refused to look the way she expected.

Tomorrow she would have seven minutes to make strangers care about it.

The blue line flattened. Phoebe wrote down the time. Beside her, Dan lifted his coffee, discovered it was empty, and set the cup down again.

“There,” she said. “It held.”

“It did.”

His smile arrived slowly, as if he had been saving it until the data earned it. Phoebe liked that smile better than applause. He would tell her if the experiment was bad; he had done so often enough. But when he looked proud of her, she believed him.

She reached for the chamber controls. A pulse of pain went through her temple, small and brief. She rubbed at it before she thought about who was watching.

“Headache?” Dan asked.

“No. Just stared at the screen too long.”

“You’ve been down here since supper.”

“You have too.”

“I’m a cautionary example.” He touched the top of the chamber. “Save the run. We can check it again in the morning.”

Phoebe locked the settings and transferred the graph to her fair presentation. Dan’s concern lingered after the headache had gone. It always did. She knew the story of her birth because he had told it often: three weeks early, barely four pounds, then a fever that kept her in the hospital while he and her mother waited for it to break. Phoebe remembered none of it. Dan remembered enough for both of them.

“You can stop looking at me like that,” she said.

“Like what?”

“Like I’m about to break.”

He studied her for a moment. “Sorry, Fever.”

“That name doesn’t help.”

“I’ve used it for thirteen years.”

“My friends call me Fiery.”

“Your friends don’t have to live with you.”

She threw a clean lab wipe at him. He caught it and set it on the bench, and for a moment the old worry left his face.

His wrist unit chimed. Dan glanced at it, and the smile went away. He turned the screen toward his chest before Phoebe could read it.

“Work?” she asked.

“An update.”

“On the probe?”

He hesitated. He worked for the aerospace company bringing a sample capsule home from the outer system. He wasn’t a pilot or an engineer. His part of the project was the sealed container around the soil cores: what could come through it, what could get out, and how anyone would know. For weeks he had argued about the return schedule at dinner without saying very much about what was inside.

“They’ve committed to the landing window,” he said.

“Tonight?”

“That’s the plan.”

“And you don’t like the plan.”

“I like the part where it lands at the range.”

Phoebe waited, but he put the wrist unit away.

“Come on,” he said. “We have a clear sky. You can worry about the fair again in twenty minutes.”

“I can worry while walking.”

“That I believe.”

Outside, the autumn air had the sharp, damp smell of leaves beginning to rot. Phoebe zipped her jacket and followed him across the yard. He asked AURA to dim the house lights. The path to the back door faded until the kitchen windows were the brightest things on the property.

Barnaby appeared beneath the patio chair. The grey tabby brushed past Phoebe’s ankle, ignored the hand she offered him, and disappeared under the deck.

“That’s gratitude,” she told him.

Dan lay down on the grass. Phoebe hesitated at the thought of wet jeans, then stretched out beside him. They had a clear view above the birches. Dan offered her a pair of viewing glasses, but she left them on the grass. The sky was easier to see without labels floating over it.

“Cassiopeia,” she said, tracing the familiar crooked shape with a finger.

“Show-off.”

“You taught me.”

“I taught you the name. You’re the one who can find it between all those satellites.”

They watched one of those satellites move across the dark. From the basement, Phoebe had heard the muted alerts on his wrist all evening. Out here, she could almost believe Dan had forgotten the landing.

“How’s Toby?” he asked.

“Home this week. He says he’s fine.”

“Does he mean it?”

“Probably not. But Sienna’s keeping an eye on him.”

“And Eli?”

“Giving us a lift tomorrow. The incubator won’t fit on the school shuttle.”

“Anyone else I should know about?”

Phoebe turned her head. “You just named all my friends.”

“I didn’t say friend.”

“Oh, no.”

“It’s an ordinary question.”

“It’s an embarrassing question.”

“There are people at school you don’t tell me about.”

“Because every time I do, you start asking things like that.” She sat up, reached for the viewing glasses, and pushed them against his shoulder. “Stargazing is over.”

“Phoebe—”

“And if this is about Marcus, I don’t want to talk about him tonight.”

Dan’s expression changed. “Did he bother you again?”

“Good night, Dad.”

She had meant to stand. Instead she stayed where she was, because he had stopped looking at her.

A bright orange point moved above the northern trees. Phoebe thought it was an aircraft catching the last light, though there was no last light left. The point grew a tail. It wavered once, then broke into two uneven streaks.

“Is that the capsule?” she asked.

Dan was already on his feet. His wrist unit lit his face from below.

“It’s outside the corridor.”

“How far?”

He didn’t answer. A low crack rolled over the property. The bright object vanished beyond the ridge behind their house, and a second later the ground gave a dull, hard shudder. Birds erupted from the trees. Phoebe heard one strike the side of the shed.

For an instant, both of them stood still.

Then Dan swore under his breath and called the company’s emergency channel. His voice changed as soon as someone answered: clipped, controlled, unmistakably afraid.

“Return capsule down east of the target corridor. I have visual impact behind my property. Put containment in motion now.”

He listened. “No. Do not send a retrieval truck in without a sealed team. I told you what the off-angle load could do to the inner vessel.”

Phoebe could see a faint glow through the trees. Dan ended the call and went for the scan kit by the patio door.

“We need to get away from it,” she said.

“First I need an exact location. The response crew will have an impact estimate, but if the vessel broke they need to know which way the runoff goes.” He pulled a respirator from the kit and handed Phoebe a second one. “You stay here.”

“You just said it might have broken.”

“Which is why you’re staying.”

“The creek runs toward the houses on the other side of the ridge. You won’t see it from here.”

“Phoebe.”

“I’ll stay behind you. I won’t go near it.”

She knew how she sounded: stubborn, certain, thirteen. Dan looked toward the trees and then at the kit in his hand. Whatever calculation he made, she could see he didn’t like the result.

“At the first sign of a leak, we turn around,” he said. “You follow every instruction. No argument.”

Phoebe fitted the respirator over her nose and mouth. “Okay.”

Dan took the lead along the old logging path. Behind them, the yard lights came back up automatically, a pale square shrinking between the trunks. Phoebe concentrated on his boots, stepping where he stepped. The earth had been wet for days, and the path dipped through mud that caught at her shoes.

They smelled the crash before they saw it. Scorched wood, hot metal, and something bitter she couldn’t place. Dan stopped at the edge of a clearing and held up one hand.

The capsule sat in a shallow wound in the ground, smaller than Phoebe had imagined. Its shell was split across one side. Steam lifted from the blackened soil, and a narrow thread of liquid ran from beneath the casing toward the lower edge of the clearing.

Dan swept the scan kit over it. Phoebe waited for the alarm. Nothing sounded.

“Radiation?” she asked.

“Nothing elevated.” He checked another reading and breathed out through his mask. “No fuel vapor at this distance.”

“But the soil—”

“I see it.”

He moved sideways, staying on the dry ground, and raised the kit again. Phoebe followed as far as the fallen birch he had pointed out. From there she could see a jagged opening in the container inside the shell. Dark grit had spilled through it into the wet earth.

Dan lowered the scanner. “The inner vessel’s open.”

He said it quietly, but she knew what the words meant to him. Months of arguments about seals. Meetings from which he came home too tired to eat. The reassurance that the soil would be handled behind several layers of containment before anyone could examine it.

“Go back,” he said. “Stay on the path and tell AURA to seal the doors. I’ll be right behind you.”

“You’re coming too.”

“I need one location reading.” He had already opened the emergency channel again. “From here. Then we leave.”

Leaves shifted beside the crater.

Phoebe turned her light. Barnaby crouched near the split casing, one front paw planted in the dark wet soil. His whiskers stood forward. He sniffed at the rim of the container as if it were the most interesting thing he had ever found.

“Barnaby.” Her voice came out muffled by the mask.

Dan was speaking into his wrist unit, giving the crew coordinates and warning them about the runoff. Phoebe raised a hand to get his attention, but Barnaby lifted his paw toward his mouth.

“No, don’t lick that.”

She stepped off the path before she knew she had done it. Barnaby moved away from the capsule, toward the brush, leaving dark marks on a pale stone. If he vanished into the woods, no one would know where the contaminated soil had gone. He was already close enough that she could reach him.

Phoebe caught him around the middle.

A vent on the capsule gave a sudden hiss. Barnaby twisted, all muscle and panic. One paw raked across the bare skin beneath her right sleeve. She cried out and let go. He landed badly, recovered, and shot between the trees in the direction of the house.

“Phoebe?” Dan turned. “What happened?”

She pulled her sleeve over her wrist. Three scratches burned along her inner forearm. There was dark grit in one of them.

“Barnaby was here,” she said. “He ran.”

Dan stared into the brush where the cat had disappeared. “Did you touch the spill?”

It would have been easy to say yes. She could have held up her arm, and he would have known what to do next, or at least whom to call. Instead she saw Barnaby carried away by strangers in sealed suits. She saw her father looking at her with the same expression he had worn when she rubbed her temple in the lab, only worse.

“I stayed clear of it,” she said.

Dan looked at her shoes, then back toward the capsule. His wrist unit crackled with another voice. “We have to leave. Now.”

Phoebe followed him out of the clearing. Each time her arm swung against her jacket, the scratches stung. She kept that hand close to her side and said nothing.

At the house, Dan made her leave her shoes on the patio. He sealed their jackets in a storage bag and sent her straight to the shower. By the time she came downstairs, he was on another call with the containment team. Two vehicles waited at the entrance to the logging road. AURA showed a restricted area on the kitchen wall, its red boundary stopping well short of the house.

“They’ll check the runoff tonight,” Dan told her after he hung up. “We’re outside the first cordon. If the boundary changes, we leave.”

“What about Barnaby?”

“Keep the doors closed. Tell me if you see him.”

Phoebe nodded. Her arm prickled beneath the clean pyjama sleeve. She could still hear the cat’s claws striking stone as he ran.

“You did what I asked out there?” Dan said.

She looked at the red boundary on the wall. “Mostly.”

“Phoebe.”

The chance to tell him came again. She could feel the shape of the truth in her mouth. Barnaby touched the soil. He scratched me. I lied because I was scared of what you’d do to him.

But Dan’s wrist unit chimed, and he answered it with a weary, “Theriault.” He gestured that she should go to bed. Phoebe went.

In her room, she closed the door and rolled up her sleeve. The scratches had stopped bleeding, but the skin around them was red and raised. She washed them again at the sink. A fleck of dark grit came away on the cloth, small enough to make her wonder whether she had imagined the rest.

She set the cloth down. She could tell Dan in the morning. The crew would have the capsule contained by then. Barnaby would come back hungry and affronted, like he always did after a night outside.

Her bedside screen lit with a message from Sienna: Did you finish the graph?

Phoebe typed Yes. See you tomorrow, then deleted it. She hadn’t checked that the presentation had saved after the crash. Down in the basement, her cultures were still cycling. At school tomorrow, Marcus would be there. The fair would go on, even if a spacecraft had fallen into the woods behind her house.

She sent Sienna a photograph of the graph instead. Sienna replied with three flames and a trophy.

Phoebe smiled despite herself. She checked the time. If she went to sleep now, she could still get enough rest to be sharp for the judges.

The room felt a little warm. She pushed the blanket down to her waist and touched her forehead. She couldn’t tell whether she was running a temperature or whether the shower and her nerves had left her flushed. The scratches stung when her sleeve brushed them, but the feeling faded when she held her arm still. In the morning she would wash them again, find Barnaby, and decide what to tell her father.

Something scraped against the window screen.

Phoebe turned her head. Barnaby stood on the outer sill, rain-damp and grey in the light from her bedside screen. He looked at her through the glass. One of his paws left a dark mark on the sill when he shifted his weight.

She started to reach for the window latch, then remembered what Dan had said about keeping the doors closed. Barnaby opened his mouth in a soundless meow.

“I’ll get you in,” she whispered. “Just wait.”

He did not meow again. He sat and watched her, perfectly still. Phoebe watched him for another minute, then set an alarm for the fair