1 #2
The light closed over my head like water.
I felt myself come apart at a level too small to have nerve endings.
Every cell of me politely informed that it would be needed elsewhere.
The last of me that still knew anything knew the burnt-coffee smell and my own voice still going, stupid and automatic, the three low notes I'd been singing into the bottom of a cage.
There you are. There you are. Nobody's going to touch you.
I came back together cold.
The cold was the first thing, because the clinic was always too warm.
Wherever this was, it was not warm at all.
The second fact was the floor, which had come back under me but had changed.
It was stone, dark and warmer in patches than rock has any right to be, polished by a very long time into a low shine.
It was nothing a veterinary clinic in Ohio had any business turning into.
I was on my hands and knees on it. I was still wearing my scrubs. There was still orange cat hair on my sleeve, three strands. I stared at it because it was the only honest detail in my whole field of view.
Then I did what I had always done in a place I didn't trust, which was to read the room before it could read me.
Exits. Two I could see, both tall enough to drive a truck through, both guarded.
Light. Low, which I approved of, though I doubted anyone had dimmed it out of kindness.
Cold for them, I guessed, watching the nearest figures hold themselves tight and contained.
And fear everywhere. It was in the flattened postures and the high tucked shoulders and the far set of doors that none of them would quite turn their backs on.
A whole hall of apex predators, and every one of them was scared out of its skin.
I'd walked into wards like this before. Never one where the patients could pick their teeth with my femur, but the fear was the same, and fear I knew.
The chamber was enormous.
I got that much before my brain would let me have anything else. Enormous, and dim on purpose, lit low from sconces that burned without smoke, the ceiling lost somewhere up in the dark. The air smelled wrong, layered over itself in a way clinic air never managed.
There was warm stone, and something green and resinous, and under it, sharp and unmistakable to eleven years of nose-training, the reek of a frightened animal. A big one. The musk-and-copper note a body makes when it has been afraid for a long time and hasn't been allowed to stop.
"It does not understand," a voice said, from above me and to the left, in English that arrived a half-beat behind itself like a badly dubbed film. "Look at it. We have spent the realm's last hope on a creature that crawls."
I lifted my head.
There were people around the edges of the chamber, except they weren't, not quite.
My eyes kept trying to make them ordinary.
They were tall. Really tall. The nearest one stood a careful distance back, chin lifted, loose-limbed and unhurried, watching me like a parcel delivered to the wrong address.
The light moved on his skin in faint rosettes laid over the brown, the pattern of another shape worn underneath.
His eyes were slit, vertical, the gold pulled down to a thin hard line as he looked at me.
His upper lip had peeled back off a tooth longer and more serious than anything in a human's mouth.
Every fear reflex I owned stood up at once.
And then, on top of the fear, riding it the same as it always rode, the other reflex stood up too. The one I couldn't switch off if you paid me. The one that had kept me on a clinic floor past quitting time for a cat with a red-marker death sentence.
Because I knew that posture. I knew those pinned shoulders and that peeled lip and that gone-hard stare.
I'd been reading them off bodies a tenth this size for my whole adult life.
Whatever he was, however far from home I'd just been dropped, the creature standing over me with his teeth showing wasn't doing what he believed he was doing.
He thought he was threatening me.
He was terrified.
"Hi," I heard myself say, from the floor, in the low even voice I used on everything that wanted to bolt or bite. Boring as old paint. "Hi. It's okay. Nobody's going to touch you."
The lip came down off the tooth, half a degree.
A low sound moved through the tall ones, more felt than heard, the noise a roomful of big cats made when one of them had seen something it couldn't understand.
The nearest one went very still. He hadn't expected the small crawling creature to speak to him as though he were the one who needed gentling.
I watched him fail to know what to do about it.
Offense, and underneath the offense, fighting it for the same square inch of his face, was something else.
The air to my right folded. A person who wasn't a person blinked into it. A tidy blue figure, edges humming, no taller than a child, holding a slate that also wasn't quite there. It beamed at me with the bright, blameless cheer of pure paperwork.
"Welcome, welcome," it said. "On behalf of the Bureau of Intergalactic Resource Acquisition, congratulations on your selection.
Your contract runs thirty standard days.
Transport home is guaranteed upon resolution of the assignment.
There is a non-interference clause, which you have already technically violated"—it consulted the slate that wasn't there—"twice.
That's quite good for the first minute, actually. Please sign here, here, and here."
"Wait, what? And sign with what?" I asked, confused.
"Intent is sufficient." A line of light slid across the not-slate where my name apparently now lived. "Lovely. The realm thanks you for your service. Do try to keep the mortality to a minimum this rotation."
"The mortality?" I asked.
Somewhere beyond the chamber, past a set of doors I hadn't let myself look at yet, an enormous body in agony threw itself against stone. The whole frightened hall of predators flinched as one.
The roar that came after them was nothing any cat on Earth had ever made. All of it, every raw terrified decibel, told me exactly one fact I understood completely. That was the patient, and they had pulled me across the galaxy to walk into the room with it.