It started with the silence.
Not the comfortable silence of 3 AM, when the house settled into its bones and the refrigerator hummed its low private hymn and the world outside breathed slowly through its nose. Not that silence. This was the other kind. The kind that did not settle. The kind that waited.
Biscuit noticed it first, because Biscuit noticed everything first, even when she pretended otherwise.
She was on the windowsill when the street outside went wrong. Not dark — the streetlamp was still burning — but wrong in a way that had no name in any language, including the small precise language of mew. The orange cone of light below the lamp was still there. The pavement was still there. But the shadows between the light and the dark had rearranged themselves while she was not looking, and now they sat at angles that did not correspond to anything casting them.
"Mew," she said. Very quietly. Not to anyone.
