Nine Lives, One Witness (Paperback or Softback)

Brentley has never been to Theta Station.

He's also never won its annual poker tournament, never posed for the commemorative photo in the bar, and never accepted the trophy currently sitting in a glass case with his name engraved on it.

Except now he has.

A quiet repair stop turns into an existential crisis for the station's records-keeper-because Shuhna Teks remembers awarding a trophy she never gave and filing records she never wrote, and none of it makes sense. That's the trouble with Brentley: the magnificent orange menace cannot stop lying, and the universe cannot stop believing him. Every fib rewrites a little more of the world to keep his stories straight. The longer he stays, the less anyone remembers it being any other way, and reality is running out of room to disagree.

The Familiar Reclamation Bureau notices. It always notices. Agents arrive, forms in triplicate, to collect one very specific cat. But they don't just want Brentley back. When the paperwork clears, cargo hauler Jarik Venn 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 Bureau always gets its cat. And the universe is getting... flexible.

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.