Sami dreaded the Rat City, its spires grasping like the roots of an upturned tree toward the sky above and its passages searching like tendrils for some great secret in the earth below. She sniffed dismissively, in the manner of all respectable country rats. Her family had lived for generations in the corner of the disused barn, nibbling through their inheritance of corn and rye-straw, snuffling the moldering hay and a faint salty breeze from an unseen bay.
Now the City reached toward the barn, lofting like banners before it the scents of city streets: coalsmoke and flop-sweat, marigolds and stale beer. When Sami closed her eyes, she smelled its passages searching, stretching deep into the dark earth. Whatever those tentacles so much as brushed against, the City grasped hard and swallowed with a hunger that could not be denied.
It reached blindly, swallowed blindly despite its thousand quivering noses. Its tunnels would undermine the barn, which would collapse, and Sami’s whole clan would fall with it. All those nieces and nephews grist for the Rat City’s diabolical mills. There was no reasoning with the City, no protecting from it her stash of crowfoil. Her nest’s lovely woven rattan would stoke the City’s furnaces, its gingham would be shredded by the feral children who roamed the Rat City’s streets like so many hungry cats. The collection, rye-straw for the gnawing souls of the unborn generations, would scatter. No monument would survive her, and their memory of Sami would fade.
At least that’s how Sami imagined the Rat City, and how it would erase her. Never mind her home. Never mind her treasures. Never mind even her family, or their memory of her. When the City, the sootblack rat with its thousand young, snared Sami, she’d become its puppet just as if it reached up inside her and rattled her jaw with its voice. Sami’s squeak was her own. She would not have the City share it. How could she fight it?
“Nez!” Sami nuzzled her sister, whose sons and daughters huddled around her, a warm and writhing mass squealing joyously. Nez would not be roused.
Sami trundled over to the loft where her brother’s brood lived. She climbed the worn ash steps, not even nibbling on the grains fallen lately into their cracks.
“Tak!” She nibbled his toe. “The City approaches!”
“Oh, Sami,” Tak squeaked, running a paw through his long red whiskers. “We have nothing to fear from the City. Our young will prosper. The streets are strewn with rotten turnips. Its sewers overflow with tallow.”
“We’ve been country rats for generations! Since the plows and threshers roamed!” Though she didn’t know that for certain.
“No doubt, Sami. But the pioneers came from somewhere, and we’ll go somewhere too. We rats are hardy. Survivors. We’ll thrive among the tenements and spires.”
“But my—” Sami stopped. Tak had no crowfoil, no aspirations, no monument other than his brood. “Oh, Tak,” she sighed, “When the city comes, we shall never find each other again.”
“There, there, Sami. Surely it won’t be as bad as all that.” He nuzzled her, but she slunk away.
That night, under a full moon that peeped through the fallen-in roof, she dreamed of rotted zucchini, of a particularly fragrant cache of acorns. In the midst of these happy dreams, she woke. That skittering sound: the first of the city’s passageways had broken through the dirt. An army of city rats scratched from the far side of its floorboards, alternately scraping and gnawing a hole into them.
“Ho there!” she shouted. “This is my barn!”
The city rats sniggered. Poor discipline. No soldiers, only an army of irregulars.
“Away with you!” she pressed. “You shan’t have my gingham, nor my silk.”
“We don’t need your nest-shreds. Let us in,” one muttered, “or we’ll devour you.”
“I’m not afraid.” To prove it, she nestled in her cozy straw bed and fell back to sleep.
This time, she dreamed of the Rat City. Its horde of bit-nose goons stood in towers that squeaked and swayed in the breeze, stinking of coal and oil. When they collapsed, Sami woke with a start. She knew now what she had to do.
Sami packed a satchel with glittering scraps of silk, purple and green. On top of that, she layered the choicest calico and crowfoil, and an armful of acorns. Finally, she wrapped herself in a traveling cloak of greased burlap. At last, she stood upon the floorboard where the City’s rats scratched on the far side and stomped twice.
“Your barn will become the city, the cornstraw quarter.” The lead rat chuckled. His breath reeked of sour milk. If Sami had been teetering on the brink of decision, he would have driven her two steps back, hardened her resolve.
“Step aside,” she said, “I have a message for the Mayor.”
“For the—what?” Confusion rippled down the line from the lead rat. “We don’t have a Mayor.” He turned to the rat behind him. “Do we?”
“If not,” Sami asked, “who sent you? Who decreed the cornstraw quarter?”
No one answered.
“I will appeal this—this rezoning, and get the farm declared a historic district—or the barn, at least, a protected landmark.” Her collection would be preserved. “Now, step back and make room. I’m on my way to City Hall. You shan’t touch a thing until I return, on pain of the Mayor’s fury.” She peered down between the floorboards.
The lead’s beady eyes gleamed in the faint moonlight. “We will wait, yes and when our Mayor gives the order, we shall take your barn.” To his credit, this rat was no diplomat.
Sami pushed aside the bent nails that held the floorboards in place. The city rats poured through, dozens of them, perhaps more than a hundred. Sami crooked one paw in the direction of the leader. “I have my eyes on you.”
“Oh yes,” the lead rat hissed as Sami slipped into the passage. Poor Tak, with his brood! What would happen to them? She didn’t want to abandon them to fate, but only a declaration from the Mayor could preserve them all.
Sami crawled through the Rat City, passage after passage, losing herself among the thousands of scurrying bodies. The air stank with hunger and fear, but no tentacles menaced, only the natural suffering of ratkind. Was a city of misery worse than a city of evil?
As Sami worked her way uphill, the scent of despair gave way to peanut shells and spoiled milk. In these neighborhoods, the sootblack rat provided for her young.
City Hall took up a whole block, twice the size of Sami’s barn. Its marble face twinkled in the flickering streetlight. She counted the steps to its front door until she ran out of toes. Here it was, the Mayor’s lair. The head rat, whose orders guided the city.
The steps were not made for rats. Along one edge, someone had chewed through the marble and spread the rubble across the flats, producing a nice, even slope. Sami worked her way up and squeezed her way through the hole gnawed in the heavy oak door.
The lobby’s ceiling arched higher than the barn’s loft. Colored shards of glass formed pictures, though the darkness outside swallowed the details. What a marvelous room: walls the color of butter and the smell of old dust. If the farm couldn’t be saved, perhaps she could bring the collection here. Turn this vast lobby into a sort of museum. A city with this wonder at its center couldn’t be the evil she’d feared, could it?
An albino rat sat at the information desk, beady red eyes burning out of white fur, navy cap askew. Sami’s claw-clicks echoed as she approached.
“Can I help you?” The officer’s voice was a bored snarl, his scent rich with bacon and kidney pie, onions fried in butter.
Sami cleared her throat and stretched her legs, tall as she could make herself. She held her tail and whiskers still.
“I’m interested in landmark status for my barn.”
The officer snorted. “Planning Office. Room 334L. That’s South wing, third floor.”
The elevator bell rang, and a twisting mass of rats piled out, tails all a-tangle, heading for the staircase. Sami followed up to the second floor, which looked down on the marble lobby.
There wasn’t a stairway here to the third floor. She might take the elevator, but the notion of cramming into a closed space with so many others made her back feet twitch. They might be cannibals, or worse. Some of the city stories must be true.
The elevator rats had dispersed, but several were still running by. She bit the tail of one with a luxurious grey coat.
“Hey!” the grey rat yelped. “What gives?”
“I’m sorry,” Sami lied, “I’m just looking for the stairs to the third floor. South wing, if you please.”
“There’s no third floor. Who gave you that runaround?”
“The albino officer at the information desk.”
“That’s Rolf. He knows nothing.”
“I’m looking for the Planning Office.”
“Planning Office? Never heard of that. Whatta you need done?”
“My farm—where I’ve lived my life—has been annexed.” The words tumbled out of her mouth like the rats from the elevator, panicked and wild with fear-scent. “I want to keep the barn safe. Preserve it.”
“Oh.” The grey rat scratched his nose. “You want Monuments and Preservations. That’s in the sub-basement. Room double-oh-oh-four-double-ell. Take the elevator. Now I’ve got a meeting, so if you’ll excuse me…”
“Thanks again.”
The elevator doors opened into a marvelous little room of polished brass, with pressed-tin ceilings and a light lemony scent, like cleaning polish. A shaggy, long-whiskered rat who smelled like raisins and slightly off almonds sat by the panel.
“What floor, please?” she asked.
“The sub-basement. Thanks.”
“Lower level.” The shaggy rat nodded. “Coming right up. Or down.” She pressed a button. The door slid shut and the elevator chugged. “What’re you going down there for, anyways?”
“Monuments and Preservations?”
“What’s that? Are you sure it’s down there?” The elevator dinged and the door opened.
Sami stepped out and the door closed behind her without answering. She struggled to banish all doubt.
Down here, thick white paint covered the walls. Busy-smelling rats clattered down the linoleum-tile halls. The few doors lacked numbers. None of the rats stopped, even when she tapped one’s arm.
Sami opened a door at random and walked inside. Linoleum gave way to green industrial carpet that smelled of mildew and something deeper. Sami’s heart sank.
A plump white rat sat behind a desk, smiling. She beckoned Sami closer.
“May I help you?” she asked.
“Yes, please. I’m looking for Monuments and Preservations?”
“I’ve never heard of it,” the white rat said. “Let me check my directory.” She turned the pages of a well-worn tome with a single claw. “Nope, no such thing. Are you sure that’s right?”
“How about the Planning Office?” Sami’s paws felt warm, like she lay in the sun.
“Nope.” She flipped through the book a bit more. “What are you here for?”
“My barn. The farm’s been annexed, see? I’m hoping—I’m hoping the barn can be saved? Preserved?” Her tail flushed. “I’m sorry, may I lie down?”
The white rat nodded. Sami rolled onto her back. Her paws, mercifully, began to cool. Still, as soon as she rolled back over and tried to get help for her barn, the heat would rise again, and with it panic. This white rat was her last hope.
“I’m sorry,” Sami said, “I’m Sami. I didn’t get your name.”
“Alexa. It’s no trouble. City Hall can be overwhelming, can’t it?”
“Yes. Thank you.” Sami sat upright. “Do you have any idea how I can get landmark status for my barn?”
“I’ve never even heard of landmark status. The truth is—” Alexa beckoned. Sami stepped around the desk to peer over her shoulder. Alexa opened her directory. Where the pages weren’t chewed through, nothing could be read. Smears of food and drink obscured the blotchy, bleeding ink.
There came a pounding on the office door.
“Hide!” Alexa squealed. “Run! There’s a hole in the back corner, behind the wastebasket.”
Who was coming? Guards? Cannibals? Whoever it was, Alexa looked worried. By the time she opened the office door, Sami was inside the wall.
“She was here,” came Rolf’s voice, distantly. “Find her!”
Sami galloped between the strips of lath until she came to a tall vertical run, and scrambled up to the top. When she arrived, she stopped to catch her breath. Were they still chasing her?
Her heart stopped racing and she fell quiet. Nothing beyond the walls moved. No guards shouted, no padded paws stomped down the halls. Sami spotted light from a crack in the wall. It was a tight fit, but at the end she popped into an office.
Dust lay on the carpet. Sami could barely make out the roiling pattern beneath. Dust lay paw-deep on the desk. Dust lay on the brass nameplate, too thick to make out the name.
Sami tromped to the desk and took a nibble from one leg. Mahogany. The good stuff. She scrambled up the chair, setting off a dustfall, and from its heavy arms leapt to the desk. A cloud rose as she landed. She left pawprints across the desk as she marched to the brass triangle, and wiped her paws across it until she could see. Mr. Dagmar Bumper. Mayor.
There was no Mayor. There hadn’t been for some time. Years—longer than one rat could contemplate. The whole building was nothing but a madhouse, rats scrambling here and there, the meeting-goers as mad as security. Surely there had been a Landmarks department at one time, a Planning Office at another—but no single intelligence directed the city. She would find no help here. She’d be lucky if she could escape.
Footsteps outside the door. Muffled voices. Were they after her? Best not to find out. Sami crawled back into the wall, searching for a sewer pipe she could follow out of the building. At long last she found one and emerged from a manhole just beyond the marble steps.
“There she is,” shouted a security officer posted at the door, pointing her long nose in Sami’s direction. She leapt down the steps, two at a time. Another guard followed, and another. Sami turned and ran.
Sami sprinted down the passageways, seldom with all four paws upon the ground at once. The guards behind her shouted, huffing loudly, their footpads stomping upon the floor, but she couldn’t afford to turn and look.
She swung around the corner. There, barely larger than an acorn, a gap between two stones. Sami slipped between them.
She’d expected nothing more than a place to hide, but the gap expanded into a narrow passage. Where did it lead?
She paused to catch her breath before continuing. They’d never find her here: the Rat City had too many gaps for the guards to search them all.
Sami had failed. Without the edict she hadn’t extracted from City Hall, they’d surely have started to undermine the barn. Perhaps it had fallen, and they were already constructing the Cornstraw Quarter from its beams and boards.
But maybe the barn still stood and she could save her collection. Even if the barn fell, much of what Sami kept had been well-hidden. It might be a while before they unearthed all of it. Perhaps it could survive, even if only in a crack like this one, the city within the city.
Breath caught, she slipped farther into the passage. Something tickled her nose, something old—older than the rat army, older than the tenements, older than the oldest cheese she’d ever tasted. The city had no mayor, but it had an animating spirit, and Sami felt certain this was its scent.
If the Rat City had no head, and its tentacles and claws wouldn’t listen to her pleas, perhaps its soul would. Sami would go to the chamber where it respired, breathing itself out into all the sewers and alleys, filling them with its will. She would prostrate herself before it. She would offer it the barn, but as refuge, a place to breathe—something more than another one of the city’s crammed districts, more numerous than the apples fallen from the tree behind the pigsty. The farm could be a park with a museum at its center: a place to document the history of the Rat City, to display the best it had to offer for all to see. Sami could be its custodian, its chief collector. In that way, she could keep her own squeak and serve the city.
The passage twisted. It branched like rivulets of rain through the straw where the roof had come down, woven together near as tight as her burlap. Sami followed the scent, always that old strange stink ahead. Not oiled metal, or potato peels. Not the ocean. Not even corpse-sour. Sami couldn’t name it, but she knew it.
More than once she rested. Closed her eyes for what might have been a moment, or hours. She dreamed of her old home, acorns pelting down from the oak tree in a rainstorm. She dreamed of her cousins, scattered to the farthest boroughs of the Rat City. But more than those, she dreamed of this selfsame journey. Several times she wondered if this entire descent beneath the tenements was a dream. Once she woke still plodding along one paw after another. And still the passage wove between rocks and sunken girders, behind a cavern full of bones and spiders, down and down to the City’s Heart.
She arrived at a heap of piled brass, a sort of low wall made from bits of old kitchens and plumbing. Plates prised from doorknobs and light switches. Whatever it was that galvanized the city, it lay on the other side.
Sami stopped. Her pulse drummed in her ears. Her claws chittered of their own accord. She sharpened her incisors, scraping them across an old housekey. Did she dare? If she didn’t, what would happen to her collection? To her family and its legacy? She didn’t have a choice.
Sami scrambled up the wall, her paws slipping as various chunks skittered away beneath her. She peered down from the top. The scent grew stronger, and with it a sort of low hum. A sparking buzz. She slid all the way down the other side, landing on the flattest, smoothest concrete she’d ever tasted.
Above her, gleaming white tiles formed perfect arches, vaulting over an open space as large as City Hall. The smooth concrete ended at a line of yellow rubber—matched by another stretch of yellow at the far side of a chasm, as though the City had been sliced with a carving knife. Water condensed on the tiles and dripped onto Sami now and then, or onto the platform, where it echoed softly beneath the electric lights.
One step at a time, she padded forward. Each paw out, feeling around before she put any weight on it, until she could peek over the edge of the canyon.
She looked down upon the railroad tracks, and the scent became what she’d not understood: lightning, ozone, burning fur. A rat, or something that had once been one, its fur burnt black, half the flesh on its face charred like bits of sausage fallen into a cookfire.
The City Rat, splayed across the third rail, opened its eye. Sami gasped.
“Welcome,” the City Rat croaked. Its eyes bulged.
“Hello,” Sami flattened herself against the nubby yellow strip, so that only her head hung down over the edge. “Are you all right?”
The City Rat spasmed and choked. It might have been a laugh.
“I’m sorry.” All Sami’s confidence had flown. “I just—”
The other rat jerked and twitched. The City groaned. Sami couldn’t see it, but she smelled a new tendril reach out through the earth, seeking.
The earth rumbled and the air hummed. Something was afoot. Sami’s ears perked up and she sniffed anxiously. Yes, a wind had begun to pick up. It carried no scent she could discern, only sheer speed.
The tracks hummed, and the wind grew. A train rumbled in the distance.
“So hungry,” the City Rat moaned. It didn’t seem to be aware of the train.
Sami frowned. She reached into her pack and dug up her next-to-last acorn. She tossed it at the City Rat, but it didn’t move to grab the acorn, which skittered along the rail and plopped into a puddle.
The wind sighed. Sami felt heavy, her weight pressed down on her paws. The concrete rattled her claws as the train burst into the station. The hair all along her back parted, and even the fur on top of her head ruffled in the wind that swirled hollowly through the station.
The train ran on without stopping. The City Rat still sat, pressed against the rail and somehow not harmed any further by the train. Had it really come through the station, or was it a dream of the City Rat, its desires made concrete?
He wanted to transcend his station prison, to stretch from horizon to horizon. The city stretched as he yearned. Never would it stop. His city ate and ate but he couldn’t feel that stretch-bellied joy, that sense of fullness, of enough. His heedless hunger could not be sated, his dream could not be fulfilled.
Sami’s wish to keep her collection safe, to keep her farm unchanged, untouched was nothing like the City Rat’s fetid dream, which if it hadn’t already would soon despoil her own. But, even, so, who did her dream serve? If her barn fell and tenements towered in the Cornstraw Quarter, merely another of the city’s numberless districts, what of it? Time rushed on. Only Sami’s hunger sustained the illusion that her collection mattered.
The City groaned again, and another passage crawled through the Earth to feed the City.
“So hungry,” the rat on the tracks moaned again.
Sami didn’t reply. She didn’t toss her last acorn. That thing on the rail wasn’t a rat anymore, only a gnawing hunger. Any hope Sami had of a negotiation, of a deal with the City followed her confidence out of the train tunnel, out far beyond reach.
She wiggled through passages, up and out of the city’s empty heart. It was a dead thing, perhaps, but what a marvelous dead thing it was! If she’d any faith left in her collection, she’d have taken a whole tile or brick from that chamber, not just the scrap of concrete she’d secreted beneath her burlap travel cloak. Relic From Heart of the Rat City (now fallen), she murmured, imagining a bona fide museum, each object preserved and labeled.
She arrived somewhere she hadn’t yet been, an open-air district where the rats in the street bustled, trotting from place to place as though they mustn’t be late. Useless activity, another sour flavor from the Rat City. None of the cool breeze or echoey drips from the city’s dead heart here on the surface, which went on, not knowing it was dead.
“Stop yer gawking!” a burly rat shoved past Sami and threw a dirty look over her shoulder as she hurried by. “We got work to do!”
Sami twitched her nose, smelling deep. Something familiar nearby. No, far away: the distant sea. Nearer, rye-straw and acorns. The buildings soared. Their bricks stank of mud only recently dry. Her stomach squeezed itself, threatened to empty, but she held.
This was the cornstraw quarter. It had to be.
Where had her barn been? On that slight rise, perhaps? Or that dip where the cobblestone streets forked? It had towered so far above the farm that the land beneath it had escaped her notice.
A paw clapped Sami’s shoulder. She reared on her hind legs and wheeled, hissing.
The paw belonged to a middle-aged rat, white streaking his whiskers. He wore a fine velvet coat and denim pants, both a green the color of slippery moss.
“Sami!” The well-dressed rat grinned, displaying his incisors. He licked the corners of her mouth clean.
“T-Tak?” Sami could hardly believe it. Her brother looked years older. “What are you doing here?”
“Didn’t I say we’d find each other again?” Tak thumped his chest with one paw. “Though I’d no idea it would be so long. I’m the Warden of the Cornstraw Quarter now.”
“What’s that mean?” It was easier than apologizing for abandoning him.
Well, Tak had come out on top despite everything Sami had done which might have kept him down—which should have kept him down, the way the Rat City worked. If Sami was being punished, she deserved it. Her brother deserved success. He’d risked it all, rolled the dice on the city’s beneficence, and he’d won.
Tak didn’t know the city like Sami. Nobody did. His faith had been misplaced. He’d merely gotten lucky. Even so, he’d played and won, fair as farthings. Only a churl could resent his success.
“—mostly ceremonial, like I was saying, but highly visible. And well-paid!” He clapped Sami on the back again. “I should get you an acorn or two, you were always so good to me.” He dragged Sami to the door of a tavern, but she dug her feet into the mud.
“I can’t, Tak.” She hung her head. “After the way I treated you. I abandoned you—”
“Forget it. I been treated worse. Far worse!” Tak adjusted his jacket. “Besides, look how it turned out. It’s all thanks to you, Sami.” Tak opened the tavern door and pulled her inside.
The tavern walls were lined with crowfoil, with gingham. Chunks of colorful rocks lay on display shelves. Candlelight flickered. Rats chirped quietly in every corner, the ones by the bar squealing more loudly. Glasses clinked. The sour beer smell lingered beneath the stink of so many rats so close together and the burning tallow.
Sami’s paws quaked. She sat on a stool before a long bartop of ash worn smooth by footsteps. The stairs to the loft.
“You want a beer?” Tak asked. “Or milk?”
“Just milk.” Sami sniffed. She didn’t want any favors from her brother. What was she doing here? She’d betrayed him, who surely couldn’t be as forgiving as he appeared, even as he brought over two thimbles full of buttermilk and sat beside her. The white-streaked rat lifted his thimble.
Damn him. Damn his fine clothes, his fancy beer and milk. Damn this tavern and its precious things. Damn the city that had taken Tak for its own purposes. Did he even know he spoke with the city’s squeak? That the clothes belonged to its streets and tenements, not to him? He was little more than its puppet, pompous and self-satisfied.
“Cheers to you.” Tak downed the sour milk in a single motion. “Drink up, Sami!”
Sami moaned.
“What’s eating you?” Tak stroked his whiskers. “I know this was our home—”
“My collection,” Sami moaned again and waved a forepaw at the walls. “My collection.”
“What’s the use in stashing things away? The crowfoil catches the candlelight. Isn’t that better than hiding it under a floorboard? Look at the way the pebbles sparkle. Here, everyone can enjoy them. Even you!”
Even her. Tak didn’t understand the time that Sami had put into her collection, the care.
“That one—” Sami pointed. “The round pebble, with the flecks of mica. You see it?”
Tak nodded.
“Our grandma dug it up, outside the chicken coop. She was looking for—well, it doesn’t matter, does it? Now your children will never touch a stone their great-grandmother saved.”
“Can’t they come here?” It didn’t occur to Tak that not every rat had the acorns to visit the tavern and buy a meal. He flicked a wood shaving from his green velvet coat, then combed through it with his paws. “Drink up, now!”
Sami moaned again, but downed her thimbleful of buttermilk. It warmed her. It felt nice.
“Let me get you that beer now,” Tak offered. “You look like you need it.” Before Sami could say no, he popped up from his seat and was at the bar again. When he sat back down, Sami had collected herself somewhat.
“Thank you,” she mumbled. “You must understand, this is all very difficult—”
Tak waved a paw as though he was preparing to answer at some length. Thankfully, he didn’t; he only sat, as though listening for Sami to continue.
Sami didn’t say anything, either. There wasn’t anything to be said: her home was gone, her collection scattered. She downed the beer and considered what Tak had once said: the rotten turnips and the tallow. Her belly full of beer and sour milk, the promise warmed her. Rats only squeaked when their empty bellies rumbled.
Without another word to her brother, she stepped out of the tavern, back into the streets of the cornstraw quarter. The buttermilk curdled happily in Sami’s stomach as the wind between the buildings ruffled her fur and gave her shivers. She felt—sick? Intoxicated? Perhaps a little of both.
Sami hefted her satchel. The sea air had never smelled so close, or so sweet.
The tentacles of the city stretched with endless hunger, but crawled slow. Perhaps too slow. They barely touched these wharves, the jetty beyond.
How long before those tentacles stretched across that sea, swallowed the wharves and piers on the other side? Sami’s boat moved faster than empires like the Rat City; she’d be there in days.
What was on the far side of the ocean? New trees, with nuts she’d never tasted. Shiny baubles—a new collection, if she wanted. And another city, or cities, with streets growing upward like vines and sour milk running in the gutters. This time, it would be different. This time, she brought the Rat City in her sack.
| Jon Lasser is a winner of Writers of the Future and has also had fiction published in Hybrid Fiction, Galaxy’s Edge, Diabolical Plots, Toasted Cake, Untethered, Darkfuse, and Zathom. |  |