Dedicated to the memory of Adrien Douady.Abstract. Let P be a polynomial of degree d with Julia set J P . Let N be the number of non-repelling cycles of P . By the famous Fatou-Shishikura inequality N ≤ d − 1. The goal of the paper is to improve this bound. The new count includes wandering collections of non-(pre)critical branch continua, i.e., collections of continua or points Q i ⊂ J P all of whose images are pairwise disjoint, contain no critical points, and contain the limit sets of eval(Q i ) ≥ 3 external rays. Also, we relate individual cycles, which are either non-repelling or repelling with no periodic rays landing, to individual critical points that are recurrent in a weak sense.A weak version of the inequality readswhere N irr counts repelling cycles with no periodic rays landing at points in the cycle, {Q i } form a wandering collection B C of non-(pre)critical branch continua, χ = 1 if B C is non-empty, and χ = 0 otherwise.