They're not posted anywhere. They're not enforced by any authority that admits to existing. But break them, and Meowtown will let you know. Quickly.
The Gazette has spent time with cats across the city — in the Dockside quarter, the east side runs, the canal stretch, the warehouse district — compiling the code that every alley cat absorbs through proximity and consequence. Here, for the first time in something approaching writing, is what we found.
You don't touch another crew's territory without the conversation first.
The conversation doesn't have to be formal. It doesn't have to be long. It can be as brief as a look across an alley that both parties understand. But the conversation happens. The cats who skip it don't last long enough to skip it twice.
You pay your debts before they become stories.
In Meowtown, a debt unpaid doesn't stay private. It becomes a story. The story gets told. The story gets embellished. By the time the story has made three or four rounds of the alleys, the original debt is unrecognisable but the reputation attached to it is permanent. Pay early. Pay clearly. Don't let it become a story.
You don't make noise about what you know.
Information is the actual currency of the streets, and the cats who understand this best are the ones who say the least. What you know, you keep. What you share, you share deliberately, to a specific cat, for a specific reason. Broadcasting knowledge is the fastest way to make yourself useful in the short term and expendable in the long term.
You respect the neutral places.
There are corners, stalls, and establishments in Meowtown that operate outside the usual rules by mutual agreement. No business is conducted there. No scores are settled there. No cat is touched while they're in those spaces. This agreement has no paperwork. It works because everyone benefits from having somewhere that works like this, and everyone knows what happens to the cat who violates it.
You don't lie about what you can do.
Overstate your capabilities in Meowtown and you will, eventually, be put in a position to demonstrate them. The alleys have a way of finding the gap between what you claimed and what you are. Arrive accurately labelled and everyone saves time.
If you take the job, you finish the job.
This one has no exceptions. Meowtown has room for cats who make mistakes. It has no room for cats who walk away from what they agreed to do. The distinction between a difficult job and an abandoned one is the distinction between a setback and a reputation.
You look after your crew.
This is the one that doesn't need explaining but gets said last because it's the most important. Meowtown will test you on all of the above. The crew is how you pass.
These rules aren't written down because they don't need to be. Every cat who's lasted in this city knows them. The ones who didn't, learned.
— The Alleyway Gazette, your independent dispatch from the streets of Meowtown