The message came through the backroom we pretended didn't exist.
On the surface, the tower's temporary lobby was concrete and caution tape and a receptionist who had perfected the art of apologizing for nonexistent construction delays. Behind two layers of badge-locked doors and a wall that pivoted like a magician's trick, the "research wing" breathed with quiet purpose. Maps glowed on screens. Satellite feeds stuttered over jungles and coastlines. A whiteboard carried names circled in red and a list of markets written in a code our own people had invented.
Haruto stood at the table with a mug that had gone cold hours ago. Elara, dust still in her hair from the morning's inspection, scanned the photos as they appeared. Marcus watched everything from the corner, hands in his pockets, motionless the way a blade is motionless before it's drawn.
"Tapajós region," said Yara, our newest hire—an intelligence analyst who could swallow data and breathe out patterns. She zoomed the satellite image. A thread of brown cut through a sea of green: a road that wasn't supposed to exist. "Logging outfit with a shell company. Illegal. They're moving bushmeat. And something else." She tapped the next image.
The crate was the wrong size for antlers. It was too quiet for birds.
Haruto leaned in. "Big cat spacing," he murmured. "From the scuff marks. And the reinforcement here—" He pointed to the frame. "—they've built for weight and impact."
"El jaguar negro," Yara translated a chat log off her phone. "They're calling it that. High bidder waiting across the border."
"You sure it's not bravado?" Marcus asked. "I've heard 'black jaguar' used to sell a tabby."
Yara scrolled. The next photo was arm-length, blurred, covertly taken. The eyeshine was wrong for a dog. The body—coiled muscle, river-dark—was not a dog's. An ear was torn.
"It's real," she said.
My throat tightened as if the sutures there had never truly dissolved. A cat that learned to walk through fire, I thought. Or at least through the world we set on fire.
Elara's eyes flicked to me and then to Marcus. "We don't have time to argue morals with physics. If we're doing this, we do it now."
Marcus exhaled smoke that wasn't there and nodded. "We move at dusk. Minimal footprint. Truck, plane, home by dawn."
Yara tilted her head. "You'll be walking into a hornet's nest. After the wolves? They've doubled up guards."
"Then we'll bring more smoke," Marcus said, already dialing. "And a beekeeper."
He meant Navarro.
Kaya Navarro met us at the airstrip with a pack that looked like it had been to war and back and learned to smile anyway. Brown skin weathered by sun and rain, hair braided tight, eyes that measured a landscape like it owed her money and then forgave it.
"You sure you want a cat, jefe?" she asked as we taxied low over a green infinity. "Cats are not dogs with better PR. They do not care about your feelings."
"Neither did my father," I said.
She laughed once, sharp. "Then you are prepared."
Marcus updated her on the convoy. Elara spread schematics on her lap—the crate dimensions extrapolated from the photos, weight distribution, tranquilizer dosages Haruto had calculated. The plan was choreography: two vehicles, one roadblock, one decoy. Hit fast. Cut loud. Out before the jungle remembered our names.
I stared out at the jungle's unbroken skin, its rivers glinting like blades. I should hate this, I thought, the theft of a cat from its home. But its home had already been stolen—cut into roads and promises. The cat moved through a world that had narrowed to a wooden box and a price.
Ethics is sometimes the room you keep breathing in when the rest of the house is on fire.
The road was nothing more than a scar through trees that breathed fog. We cut our headlights before the bend. The air grew thicker, green pressing in. Navarro sniffed the wind as if it carried language. Marcus's men checked weapons, checked again. We did not speak.
We heard them before we saw them: diesel coughing; a man's laugh; a metallic rattle that made my skin crawl.
The convoy nosed around the bend. Two trucks, tarps secured so tightly the cargo might suffocate even if it breathed. A motorbike flanked the lead. Another shadow trailed them.
Marcus's decoy rolled out from the brush, a rusted wreck we'd winched into place in silence, like burying a secret. It died in the middle of the road exactly where we had told it to.
"Here we go," Navarro whispered.
Chaos likes to be invited.
The lead truck braked hard; curses snapped the night; the bike swerved, wobbled. Marcus's second car slid behind them, quiet and inevitable. Navarro melted into the brush, a knife already in her hand—the kind of tool that built civilization and ended it.
Elara's job was bolts. Mine was the cat.
The first guard raised a rifle. Marcus shot it out of his hands and then put him to sleep with the butt of another weapon before the man remembered which world he lived in. Navarro ghosted behind the biker and plucked him from his seat like fruit from a branch.
The second truck tried to back. Elara leapt onto the bumper, swung, and clanged the latch with her wrench so hard it thought better of obeying physics.
"Clear!" she shouted.
The tarp stank of urine and panic when we pulled it back. The crate inside was older than any human it contained—repurposed wood, iron strap, fresh locks. The crate's slats permitted a rectangle of darkness and nothing else.
I crouched. The smell of blood cut through everything. "Hola," I said. My voice rasped, then deepened, slipping into the lower harmonics that felt like singing to bone. I am not here to steal. I am not here to hurt. I am the door opening. I am water after fire. The sounds weren't words, not for a human ear. They were a shape I made with my ribs.
Something moved in the dark like ink deciding to think. Two eyes kindled, dull ember to steady coal. A breath that was more like a threat gusted through the slats.
Haruto's dosage gun touched my palm. "If you can get him to lean. Shoulder shot. Big muscle," he said, almost apologetic. "If we get this wrong, his heart stops."
His heart does not stop tonight. My own heart answered. Not on a road we did not invite him to.
I kept breathing the way I had practiced in the forest until breath turned into sound turned into intention. The eyes widened, the heaviness shifted. A head rolled close enough I could smell jungle rot and iron.
"Now," Haruto murmured.
I slid the barrel between slats and squeezed. The cat snarled, a thunderbolt in a box, threw itself against the wood so hard the truck groaned. The men stepped back reflexively; Navarro didn't; Elara braced herself with one hand on the frame; Marcus took aim at the treeline where other dangers might decide to exist.
"Give it a minute," Haruto said. "He's built like a storm."
We counted in the kind of silence that belongs to animals deciding the next fifteen seconds of your life.
The crate went still. Not death-still—breath-still, the weight settling into himself. I touched the wood. The vibration that answered was a drum, slower than mine. Alive.
"Go," Marcus said.
Bolts surrendered under Elara's wrench with a cry that made the jungle lean in. Navarro and Marcus's team heaved the crate down. We slid it onto our flatbed with care that looked like violence and felt like prayer.
That was when the horn blew.
Not ours. Not theirs. Somewhere down the road, another truck called to the dark and things in the dark called back.
"Company," Navarro hissed.
Marcus cursed once. "Plan B."
Plan B was smoke and light and a lie so loud even truth ducked.
Navarro dragged a canister across the road and pulled a pin. White fog rolled out like a ghost with opinions. Marcus's men fired flares into the canopy. The jungle became a red cathedral, full of shadows pretending to be gods.
"Move!" Elara shouted.
We moved. Engines caught. Tires bit mud. The convoy that was now ours lurched forward. Shots cracked behind us, harmless in distance or faith. Navarro popped two more smoke canisters and laughed as if trouble was a story she had already read to the end.
The road unspooled. The river loomed.
We had chosen the bridge because it didn't deserve to call itself one. It was two hands shaking over water, boards missing, rope complaining. The second truck wouldn't risk it. Neither would pursuit.
We did.
The flatbed hit the planks. The crate thudded once and the cat thudded once inside it, disagreeing. The rope sang as we crossed. I did not breathe. Elara did not blink. Marcus did not acknowledge mortality. Navarro whistled something that sounded like a challenge to gravity. The far bank welcomed us with a lurch that felt like survival choosing a team.
We ditched into the trees four clicks later, under a canopy that turned the world into green breath. Engines died. The sounds we made were human and too loud anyway.
Marcus's radio snarled. The tail team whispered of trucks milling at the bridge, men swearing at physics, someone firing into trees to make the night flinch. Marcus smiled without mirth.
"Plane's ready," he said to me. "From here to the strip, ninety minutes if nothing happens."
"Something always happens," Navarro said cheerfully.
"Then it will happen to someone else," Elara said, and for once, everyone believed her.
The airstrip was a scar in grass no one had asked permission to cut. Our pilot didn't bother with names. He pointed. We lifted. The crate hummed with the sleeping storm inside it. Haruto checked vitals through the slats. "Breathing steady," he said. Sweat stood on his forehead anyway.
Navarro slumped into a seat with the cat's smell in her hair. Marcus tapped a rhythm on his knee I had learned meant he was cataloguing ways to die and rating them by difficulty. Elara buckled in and closed her eyes. For the first time since I had met her, she looked like a person whose body remembered gravity.
I strapped in facing the crate. I took you, I thought. I stole you to save you. I will spend the rest of my life paying for both truths.
I sang then, quiet enough that the cabin believed I was just breathing. The tones ran along the crate's boards like rain finding the old paths. The shape said: not prison. Passage. Not ending. Door.
Something in the crate answered, not with sound, but with absence of fear. That is a language, too.
We broke through cloud and then dropped again. Mountains took the horizon, our mountains, their bones familiar now in a way that felt like belonging. As we banked for the valley, the heart chamber's floodlights etched themselves in the dark like constellations we had drawn with our own stubborn hands.
Elara opened her eyes. "He'll need a transitional pen," she said. "No line of sight to the wolves. Smell is fine; sight risks stress aggression."
"Sedation in microdoses," Haruto added. "Feeding schedule carnivore-appropriate—no antibiotics unless absolutely necessary. That ear—infected, but manageable."
Navarro grinned at me. "And you, jefe, will sing lullabies."
My throat ached at the thought. "I will," I said.
Marcus's radio crackled again. The bridge boys had given up. Or the jungle had demanded their attention. Either way, we were ghosts again. For now.
As the wheels kissed the strip, I looked at the crate one last time before the doors opened and the plan resumed pretending to be a plan.
Welcome home, I told the storm asleep inside the wood. We built this with stone and stubbornness and love you will never owe us back. Walk through. Walk through fire if you must. We'll carry water.
The ramp dropped.
The mountain waited.