Attempts to acquire or record the cat find different limits. No birth entry, license, continuation plan, renewal date or rationed sample supplies a handle. Men inventory the market but leave with their original list. Phone playback preserves awnings, water and gulls; where her voice should be, there is room-tone. These failures do not put everyone connected with her beyond reach.
Pressure moves to the listeners. Fines for unlicensed speech make stallholders turn toward their fish whenever she speaks. After a month, her ribs show. Children cannot be fined for this listening, so she addresses them. A girl is asked to learn the cat's unpaid remembering. This specific exemption does not remove charges attached to children elsewhere in the book.
Human voices carry what phones fail to recover. The ice-man's widow receives a sentence remembered from nine winters earlier, with its tone. The market memorizes sayings, errand boys carry them, and the girl speaks them to the water one a day. Cameras classify the cat's departure as weather. What she paid for speech remains withheld, and her departure does not identify another cat on the hill.