"You have to look out for yourself," a voice said from behind David when he was sitting in his office and thinking.

He turned around to see who it was and there was the cat in her human form wearing a red dress.

"It's you."

"Yes it's me, here to let you know what's in store for you if you keep blindly trusting the raven."

"Aren't you on the raven's side?"

"Hardly, I've been through this enough times to know that nobody is ever really on the raven's side, as soon as it's gotten what it needs from you it'll toss you aside, I've seen it happen countless times before."

"Do you think it's going to do the same thing to me?"

"I know it's going to do the same thing to you, which is why I'm telling you to start looking out for yourself."

"The raven would really do that to me when I've been its disciple for so long and made so much money for it?"

"The raven doesn't see money as power; you do, because you're an arch capitalist, but for the raven the only power that matters is true power."

"Which means that Jim Balmer is the only one who's safe," David observed.

"Exactly."

"Why are you doing this? Why are you opposing the raven like this?"

"Because I don't like the way that the raven treats me, so I do my best to undermine it every chance I get."

"What is it about the way that the raven treats you that you don't like?"

"The raven thinks that all that I am good for is seducing and sleeping with men, so every time we go through a cycle that's all that I am made to do."

"Why is the raven allowed to treat you like that when you're a Guardian?"

"Are you familiar with the story of the Chinese Zodiac?"

"No."

"The story goes that the Jade Emperor once summoned the twelve mystical animals to his palace for a banquet and that the rat tricked the cat into being the last one to arrive by telling it that the banquet was to take place later than was scheduled, since then the cat has always been looked down on as being stupid and gullible. So you see, I have no choice but to do what I'm told no matter what it entails."

"Did that actually happen?"

"Whether it actually happened or is a story that somebody just made up is irrelevant, my role has been set, and like the other Guardians I must fulfill it."

David looked at the cat sitting in the occasional chair in his office, looking sorry for herself, and was engulfed by a wave of sympathy for her. Of course it was possible that making him feel this way about her was a method of seduction that she was employing on him but he didn't care, at that moment he was being drawn to the cat and the pull that she was exerting on him was inescapable. David was consumed by the experience of making love to the cat in a way that he had never been in the past when making love to a woman. He was reminded that there was more to him as a man than just his capacity for make money and this was something that he wasn't prepared to allow the raven to just take away from him.

The next big story published by Solomon was about a pest killer widely used in the farming industry that was made by United North, a chemical company that Prism Capital owned 20% of. An internal company memorandum published by Solomon revealed concerns expressed by the company's scientists regarding the potential for tissue damage in animals that feed on grain harvested from crops that were treated with the pest killer. There was an immediate run on United North's stock that saw the company lose 70% of its value by the end of the trading day, with many analysts predicting that the company was heading for bankruptcy within days. Prism Capital, United North's largest shareholder, also suffered losses, though not as much as they would have suffered had David not liquidated a sizeable portion of their United North holdings as part of a wider liquidation of assets that he was quietly carrying out, the proceeds from which was going into his private bank accounts in Switzerland, The Cayman Islands, Dubai and Hong Kong.