By the casino's records, Brentley is a three-time poker champion, a beloved regular, and a legend of the felt. In reality, he's an orange cat who wandered in days ago and has never played a hand in his life.

Both are now true. That's the problem.

Brentley cannot stop lying, and the universe cannot stop believing him. Every fib he tells rewrites the world a little more—records, memories, entire histories—until reality itself starts buckling under the bookkeeping. On the run with the magnificent menace who upended his life, cargo hauler Jarik Venn only wanted one quiet hull patch at Theta Station. Instead he got a cat rigging a tournament that never happened, a casino cheering for a champion who doesn't exist, and the Familiar Reclamation Bureau—forms in triplicate—arriving to collect one very specific fugitive.

But the Bureau doesn't just want Brentley back. When the paperwork clears, Jarik finds his own life rewritten—three years of crimes he never committed, in places he's never been—and a broken transmission whispers a name even Brentley doesn't remember.

The house always wins. The Bureau always gets its cat. First, everyone has to survive the filing.

Nine Lives, One Witness is Book Two of Nine Lives, Infinite Lies—an absurdist space comedy about lies that come true, a cat convinced he's magnificent, and the very bad things that happen when the universe starts to believe him.