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The dollar amounts tickled Jonny’s sense of capitalist competition.

Implications

    Back from the impound lot and the brief vigil he’d spent over his car, Deklan became one with his coma-inducing couch. When you sat in it, you lost all incentive to move. It was also old, having been rehabilitated and recovered on more than one occasion. It was possible that every portion of it had been replaced several times. In that sense the couch matched the rest of his possessions in the apartment. Almost nothing was new. Even the things that stamped the place as uniquely his were the posters of cars that dated from before the turn of the century.
    In his inertia Deklan was preoccupied with thinking of a way to test his Keystone ability that didn’t involve blood, pain, death, or dismemberment.
    To fill in the gaps he called several scrap yards to see how much he could get for his wrecked car. Because he was on the financial brink, any extra revenue would help. He could have sought an insurance reimbursement, but he was worried an assessment might reveal that it was his blood in the car, a fact that he wanted to keep from people’s attention.
    His reflections were interrupted by a loud yowl from Mittens, who was pawing at the door. Deklan looked at the cat, then at the door. He pointed toward the hallway to the kitchen. “Your litter box is that way,” he said. “Now be quiet, you irritating vagrant.”
    Bored by the behavior of his cat, Deklan turned to his TV for diversion. There was a rodent on the screen, not a significant improvement. Despite his general exhaustion, something nagged at Deklan, so he focused on what he was seeing. The rat was in space. Life continued to grow stranger. It was a live broadcast from an Elevator out of Nairobi.
    A splintering noise from the vestibule of his apartment drew his attention away from the screen. He sprinted to the front door, or what was left of it.
    The door had been one of the nicer features of his apartment—old and sturdy, made of paneled oak, with whorls in the grain. It now was splintered and dangled from ruined hinges. A large section of the bottom right quadrant was gone, and cracks radiated out from there.
    Through the gaping hole in his door he could see Mittens disemboweling the neighbor’s Great Dane.
    Deklan grabbed the doorknob, but when he pulled it came free, and the entire locking mechanism fell to the floor. Dropping the handle, he seized the door itself and yanked it open.
    His neighbor, Paige, was standing there screaming in pain at the myriad splinters in her skin. Deklan lunged toward Mittens, the only part of the situation he felt capable of handling at the moment.
    Mittens was in the process of killing an animal that outweighed her by at least a factor of twenty. As his hands grabbed her fur, she turned and slashed at Deklan, her claws raking his right forearm. He’d never liked that cat. Corralling her by the scruff of her neck, he dragged her away from the injured canine.
    Paige collected herself enough to run to her dog. “Brownie! Brownie, are you okay? Oh God, what did your cat do to my Brownie? You’re a monster!”
    Deklan stopped, still holding Mittens. “Do you want help in getting Brownie to the vet?” he asked.
    Paige pointed at him with one shaking hand. “No! Take your psycho cat and get the hell away from me!”
    Ignoring her, Deklan ran into his apartment with Mittens swaying from his fist. He threw her into the bathroom, grabbed a towel, and locked her in. Running back to Brownie, he knelt by the dog and tried to hold its stomach shut as he placed the towel on top of the wound.
    Meanwhile, in the back of his mind, Deklan was trying to process what Mittens had done. How had she gotten out into the hallway? How had his door been smashed? How had Mittens come out the winner in a physical confrontation with a full-grown Great Dane?
    Paige was still yelling at him. “Paige!” he shouted. When she didn’t respond, he grabbed her hands and