Day 3 of the algae bloom. Water samples revealed the presence of an unexpected alga, one with poorly understood and often deadly effects, but only if ingested. Hazel had been seeing Octa everywhere. Maddy even heard the cat, but no one else could see her. Him? She wasn’t exactly going to check under the tail. Marina Splash was closed until sticky green mats of algae were cleared out of the ocean-connected rides. They weren’t going to be busy anyway.

Research on the tarps from the beach was stalling. There was a rumor that some were being confiscated by the CDC, contamination by the toxic algae having been discovered. All that was on record so far was the discovery that they were made of hemp- a common enough fiber with all kinds of naval applications. A fiber that would presumably decompose underwater, so they couldn't be too old.

There had been no more strange dreams, but whenever the cat showed up, Hazel felt a sense of unease. It kept trying to bring her somewhere. Where? She wasn’t sure. It wasn’t as if she had time to just follow some kind of apparition all day when she had work.

Packing the last bit of a slice of microwaved pizza in her mouth, she realized the flaw in that reasoning. Because her place of work was closed, she had no work. Because she had no work, she did have time to chase Octa around.

The furry lump was sitting on a rug near the kitchen sink. As if psychically aware of Hazel’s shift in attention, the cat opened an eye. “Mrrow?”

Hazel took the pizza box to the trash can under the sink. “Meow yourself. Let’s take a walk.”

A new day brought new opportunities. The cat café an hour and a half away had been a bust (they didn’t even sell real food), and maybe it was harder than it looked to find good library books about feline biology, but there was still one option left: a feral colony living near a park. Rhea was going to learn about cats and find a way to cancel out their distracting effects or die trying. Or maybe get bored and give up in a week or two…

She shook the thought out of her head. It was a problem if people could catch her bewitching them just because a cat showed up. They’d start to wonder if there was something funny going on, and if they wondered they would start to be on guard. An on-guard human was so much harder to influence than an unaware one...

In the park, there were lots of cats eating where some good Samaritan had left bowls of food and fresh water. Even more sat around a fountain, on benches and under bushes. There were poofy cats, sleek cats, scruffy cats… even a few that looked almost like meme stars.

“Day 1,” she recorded on a clean page of note paper. If she couldn’t learn by other means, she would have to observe them in the wild.

Octa ran across the street. In front of a pickup truck. Again. In case it wasn’t already established that there was no tangible quality to this cat. The tires passed right through the fluffy body, something Hazel was starting to wish could apply to her own. Keeping up was hard enough, but she couldn’t just follow across the street without so much as a crosswalk all the time. It was dangerous.

They’d traversed several blocks, walked an estimated 2 miles (according to the Maps app), and only backtracked once, which may have added up to an extra half mile but it was hard to say. Maybe something had changed since Octa’s time?

Octopuss was a name from a sailor, a man Hazel had never seen before, who wore clothing that couldn’t be recent. That was the odd bit of memory she’d gotten from her dream, that had settled in her mind over the last few days. He’d wanted a cat to bring home to his family, so he found a big, buff one to keep them safe while he was at sea. So Octa became domestic and somehow, through a story that wasn’t so clear, became a specter. Why a cat would become a ghost, she could only wonder.

One more corner to turn. Octa waited patiently. Down the street, to a back entrance to the Council’s Memorial Park. It housed a monument dedicated to every lost soul in the Atlantic, and a ridiculous number of cats. This had to be either a social outing or something to do with Octa’s owner.