"It's all wrong." Ash stared morosely at the vitals display on the screen above his head, and worried at the base of his thumb claw with his teeth. How could it all be wrong? He tapped for a refresh of the readouts, knowing it was going to look exactly the same as the last five times he'd done it but unable to resist the impulse anyway.
He cancelled the screen before it told him what he already knew, and curled lower in the big chair, kneading absently at his knotted shoulder muscles and sighing deeply. This job had been different all the way along; it was no use expecting a sudden outbreak of normality now. So the ...thing in the Tank was exhibiting the sort of vitals that would have meant it was in deep traumatic shock and nine-tenths dead, had it been human. Ash felt tenderly around the matted wound below his collarbone, and shivered. Definitely not human.
Well, whatever it was, straight Hybrid or a Type Two Manipulation like him, he needed to know more about it if he was going to treat it successfully. He went back to nibbling on the rough spot at the base of his thumb claw, and called up the recording of the radio signal that had started all this, five days ago.
"Am I speaking to the Keeper of the ...facility?" He remembered now, her voice had the same weird harmonic that had so unsettled him when the male spoke.
"This is Ash." His own voice, sounding thin by comparison and rather sibilant. "How can I help?"
"I have one who may require your services, depending on the outcome of certain tests."
"Is he sick?" Ash could hear his own dislike of this woman's roundabout phraseology. She ignored his tone.
"He is physically strong, but his mental state is ...questionable."
"And you want me to fix him for you." Ash heard himself sigh. "That isn't how the Mirror works."
"You misunderstand." The woman's tone sharpened. "If I am unable to discover and correct what ails him before I have to leave this system, I will be forced to quarantine him. There is no question of him remaining on board unless he is whole, it would be far too dangerous. All I require from you is to contain him until my return. I understand that your ...abilities permit this."
There was a long pause before Ash's own voice said, reluctantly, "What do you have to trade?"
In hindsight, perhaps he should have asked a few more questions before agreeing to the trade. Like, questionable how? And what do you mean, whole? And dangerous in what way, exactly?
Ash sighed again. The tip of his tail was twitching back and forth, and he stilled it, irritated by the extraneous motion. Even after the payment had been agreed, it had been a further two days before the Snoops woke him at some unholy hour of the morning with the news that an aircraft had risen from the sea off the Watchers.
He could hear it by the time he got to the Caves, a thin dragging scream of sound that set his teeth on edge. He peered out through the observation slit, wincing from the twinkling brightness of sun on sea. It took a moment before he spotted the craft, making a slow turn over the ruins. It was unlike any aircraft he'd seen before, a pale arrow-shape from this distance, like a splinter of bone. The sun wasn't up over the mountains yet, and the eerie shape moved with a strange grace in the morning shade. A beam of white light suddenly lanced down from its underside, then winked out, and the whistling scream of its engines rose as it accelerated away towards the hazy dotted line of the Skywatchers, marching along the horizon to the south-east. A flash, magnesium-bright, as it passed beyond the shadows, and it was gone, diving into the water neat as a kingfisher.
It had left behind a dark figure huddled on the sand. Ash watched dispassionately as the creature first roused, then gazed about itself in apparent shock. It lurched to its feet and stood swaying for a long moment, then shook its head in a curiously resigned gesture and plodded off up the beach to investigate the bleached ruins of the city.
So her tests, whatever they had been, had failed. Ash sent a couple of Snoops to keep an eye on the creature from a distance, and went back to bed wondering peevishly why he had accepted this trade.
Three days later, it was still a good question, and he was no closer to a satisfactory answer.