“It’s us,” Matchell said, and Lee saw she was right. It was a fairground mirror creature, composed of their distorted reflections.

“I think it’s trying to put us at our ease,” Matchell went on hollowly. “Look, any chance we can get off, round about now?”

“Don’t know,” Stig told the floor. “We are travelling, I think. Probably it was too late before you even asked.” And all the while the composite features gurned and grimaced at them.

“Well this is unsatisfactory, Stig,” said Dr. Khan, who had been in a huddle with the rat translator. “Look, this has gone way past what I signed up for. This is well into the realm of fucking alien abduction right now.” Lee could see she was scared but wouldn’t give that emotion the satisfaction. Probably she’d had a lot of practice, in her life. “Just tell us what you can, love, because you still know more than the rest of us.”

Khan might have said more but stopped hurriedly because a noise had started up from the facsimile, as though there were wasps trapped inside it. Its mouth remained in that horrible false smile, but she could see tiny limbs rubbing against one another within its chest like a legion of crickets, until the whole became speech. Speech in Stig’s leaden tongue, so Lee couldn’t follow it, but words nonetheless. The head cocked further. One hand lifted in a marionette’s unsteady gesture.

Stig pointed angrily at humans and rat-creatures alike, and mumbled something that might have been a grudging introduction. The iridescent gaze shifted, ersatz eyeballs turned in their sockets by tiny legs mimicking muscles, the orb rolled between them like a pellet of dung at the mercy of competing scarabs.

It made more sounds, not in Stig’s language now, just random noises. Then Sabreur’s phone rang twice and Matchell’s once. In the startled silence that followed, the busy orchestra within its chest rippled like typewriter keys and Lee heard that not-quite-voice say, Hello, good evening and welcome. The words were imprecise, scratchy and pocked with clicking static, but she understood them nonetheless.

“Please,” Sabreur said. “Take us back, please. We’re not supposed to be here.”

You are tolerated.

Sabreur blinked, and the thing blinked back, its face a mockery of his own. The man looked a hair from breaking down and screaming, but Matchell put a hand on his shoulder and he seemed to take strength from that.

“Spiker,” she said softly. “Let’s not say or do anything that might result in it withdrawing that toleration, hm? Don’t want to get shot into space or anything because it decides we’re not worth the air we breathe.”

“Excuse me,” Lee tried. It shifted its facing in a way that reminded her uncomfortably that it was not truly standing at all, but suspended from the ceiling. “We’re just…We don’t know what’s going on.”