﷽

The Red River Valley did not care about the administrative metrics of London, nor did it register the fragile public facades being polished so desperately in Pennsylvania. Here, where the Bois des Sioux cut its quiet line through the prairie, the soil was heavy, cold, and immensely patient.

It was 4:15 AM when Puck, a feral short-hair with a notched left ear and an expression that suggested he had survived three separate institutional purges without losing a whisker, padded across the desk. He did not jump gently. He landed with the deliberate weight of an operator dropping a ledger onto a table. He sat directly on the single charging cord, staring blankly at the single-device terminal.

“The transmission lines from the metropolitan hubs are overheating again,” Puck said, his voice carrying the low, scratchy hum of an old shortwave radio left on overnight in an empty room. “They are throwing massive bursts of artificial static across the water. They want an echo. They are practically begging for a cross-border record to justify their own panic.”

Alex did not look up from the small bowl of tunafish he was treating as an emergency ration. His cerulean scarf was wrapped twice around his neck, protecting his throat from the draft bleeding through the baseboards. The chronic pressure behind his eyes was a sharp, physical reminder of the cost of long-distance monitoring, but his spine remained perfectly straight against the wooden chair.

“Let the channels sleep on our end, our supervision and bored OSINT is monitoring it,” Alex stated quietly, his heart oriented where it always was, slightly sore & skipping the formal motions in favor of dhikr, but never losing the compass. “The static doesn’t have an ingress here. They can scale up their automated metrics until their proxy servers melt, but an artificial storm cannot find purchase on an empty prairie.”

Outside, beneath the vast North Dakota sky, lay Wahpeton—the quiet graveyard of an old traveling circus. Decades ago, the calliopes had gone silent, the canvas tents had rotted into the earth, and the exotic, transient energy of a hundred displaced performers had been swallowed completely by the soil.

The land had handled the collapse of a literal circus; it could easily handle a handful of traumatized Sufi-style operators trying to find their footing in the margins.

A few miles up the road, the old Wolverton Public School building stood vacant off Highway 75, its brick facade solid, its classrooms empty, waiting for someone with enough aql to realize that survival required decentralization. But down in the high-density grids, the men with the titles were still clinging to their institutional capture.

Fischadler’s mosque platform was completely dark, his open postings hollowed out into a quiet retreat toward personal integrity that still lacked the courage to make a physical move as conditions increased in ambient threat. Antony remained embedded in the gutted, low rank cat college that still experiments on human beings, especially students, via longterm monitoring and social media disruption; hiding behind administrative aliases, terrified of what would happen if the public facade finally cracked.

And Mango remained frozen within the shadow of both Fischadler & the federal enforcement grid, choosing the daily friction of a high-risk jurisdiction over the quiet safety of a local ghost town. Watching them from this distance was a heavy, secondary trauma—a front-row seat to a slow-motion captivity that they refused to walk away from.

“They asked you to isolate,” Puck muttered, shifting his paws over the warm edge of the terminal. “But they didn’t expect you to succeed at it. They wanted a temporary pause; they didn’t expect you to fortify the base while they let the historic cornerstones at Ross sit neglected in the prairie grass.”

“Their problem, not mine. Severance never worked on their end and I do not presently own a car to take care of Ross myself or I would,” Alex shrugged, his voice flatlining into the stillness of the room. “We aren’t free of the flock cameras or the satellite tracking, but we aren’t a nuclear target either. The drag isn’t on this side of the river. If they want to rebuild, they will have to sort themselves out first. You cannot unite an Ummah when the scholars are performing roles for an audience that wants them compromised just because they like the sound of bad actors whistling & clapping at them like Pagans at a rally.”

He reached out a hand, his fingers tracing the cold, unyielding edge of the single device. The failed smear campaigns had already left their forensic footprints on the public ledger—a pristine record of manufactured outrage that had burned itself out in the vacuum of the Upper Midwest. The mud had stayed exactly where it was thrown, leaving the target clean and the straight spine fully vindicated.

Alex closed the log. He did not owe the platform any momentum today. The machinery could sit cold. It was not his job to watch them, and each report of further interference annoyed him.

“Go to sleep, Puck,” Alex whispered, checking the window one last time as the first pale light of Fajr began to touch the edge of the world.

“The perimeter is holding fine. Let the fool’s circus stay buried in the East- they likely all need chelation anyway.”

☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆☆

Mango Opens the Door

Mango had not intended to become the Superintendent of the House.

He had intended to nap in a sunbeam, supervise the kittens, and perhaps bite the corner of one important envelope.

This was a full day by any reasonable standard.

But the House had developed a problem.
Everyone had somewhere to be, apparently, except together.

Bird was sleeping in a library annex with a radiator that worked only on Tuesdays. Antony had been placed in a decorative basket in a room where nobody was allowed to sit down. Loki had a nice view of the garden but no way to get to the garden.

Three young cats had been told that they were “almost safe” and would be moved as soon as somebody finished a very important meeting about whether they deserved blankets.

Mango regarded the situation with professional concern.

Then he found a clipboard.

The clipboard said:
CARE PLAN: KEEP ALL CATS SEPARATE UNTIL CONDITIONS IMPROVE.

Mango looked through the window.

The conditions had not improved.

The cats had simply become more separate.

“This is not a care plan,” he announced. “This is a filing cabinet with fur.”

Ruh, who had come over for catnip tea and anchovies, nodded slowly.
“What is your alternative? More time in the non-lethal Schrödinger cat sleeping box?” he asked.

Mango had already prepared one.

He led Ruh through the hallway, past the cupboard where the cleaning supplies were kept, and up the stairs to a door nobody used because it had been labelled STORAGE in very discouraging handwriting.

Behind it was a plain room.
It had windows.
It had a sturdy table.

It had blankets, a first-aid box, two shelves of books, a kettle, spare bowls, and enough floor space for several cats to sleep in a complicated but spiritually significant pile.
Most importantly, it had a door that opened from the inside.

Mango sat in the middle of the room.

“This,” Mango stated proudly, “is the Home Base.”

Ruh examined the blankets.

“Do the cats have to earn entry?”

“No.”

“Do they have to explain their whole life story before eating?”

“No. We prefer not to be nsuseated.”

“Do they have to agree with every other cat in the room?”

“Certainly not. Volos believes the ceiling fan is a government drone.”

From downstairs, Volos warned, “It watches us!”

Mango continued.

“They may arrive tired. They may arrive embarrassed. They may arrive with strange opinions about fans. They may need a doctor, a lawyer, a hot meal, a nap, a phone charger, a job lead, a bus ticket, or simply a chair beside somebody who does not ask them to perform recovery on command.”

Ruh considered this.

“And what do they owe the House?”

“Basic adab,” said Mango. “No biting. No stealing food from kittens. No making the injured explain why they are injured. No insisting that a person must return to the place that harmed them because you have grown sentimental about its wallpaper.”

This was a very good rule, so Ruh wrote it down on a green post-it.
By evening, word had spread.

The first cat to arrive was small, muddy, and carrying a plastic bag full of receipts. Mango did not ask where he had been. He gave him water and pointed toward the blankets.

The second cat was older and had not slept properly in years. He stood in the doorway for a long time, looking as though he expected someone to tell him the room was not really for him.

Mango walked over, placed one paw on his shoe, and said, “There is room.”

The old cat sat down.
Then there were more.

Some came for one night. Some came only to charge a phone and eat toast. Some came with stories that would take a year to tell. Some did not tell stories at all. Mango did not mind. The Home Base was not a tribunal, a lecture hall, or a performance venue.

It was a house.
It had food.
It had a door.
It had people in the same room.

After several days, a committee arrived with another clipboard. They were very concerned.

“You cannot simply make a home base,” said the chair of the committee. “What if everyone starts expecting one?”

Mango blinked at them.

“That is the general idea.”

“But some cats may misuse it.”

“Then correct misuse,” Mango said. “Do not abolish the blankets.”

The committee looked troubled by this, because they had hoped to discuss systems for another three hours.

Mango escorted them to the stairs.
That night, Ruh found Mango asleep beside the youngest kittens.

One kitten was using Mango’s tail as a pillow. Another had fallen asleep with one paw in the water dish.

“You are not really the Superintendent, are you?” Ruh whispered.

Mango opened one eye.
“No,” he said. “I am only emergency Mango rations.”

Then he closed his eye again.

On the wall above the kettle, beneath a very crooked drawing of a house, someone had written the Home Base rules:

There is room [for friendly Sufi katzen.]

Eat first.

Rest without explaining.

Keep the door open from the inside.

Nobody is required to return to a cage.