“The precious kin of Dr. Rat have been accommodated,” it explained when Lee asked. “Our hosts have rendered duplication of the architecture of my implant. Communication will be feasible, at first through the mediation of your own language.”

A strange compromise, that English should be the lingua franca between two separate species, but perhaps Rove’s dealings with the rat lords had done some peripheral good.

“I thought you were Dr. Rat’s…slave? Experimental subject? When we met you, anyway.”

The translator shook itself. “In early years that was approximately the case. He was not good. He was good. He was not bad.” The creature considered what it had said. “There are shades of qualities your language does not accommodate. Between us there was not love or love but love. Love is pain sometimes. Sometimes pain is good.” It crooked its four thumbs at them, perhaps trying to express its frustration. “Complicated things,” it finished, leaving Lee to wonder what gradations of sentiment the rat-creatures knew, that English—or perhaps humans—simply had no words for.

II

The rain had exhausted itself by nightfall. Though the skies were still hung heavy with cloud that promised more before dawn and which swallowed all the stars. Julian had dragged a rug outside and was sitting there, looking down the hilly country to the river that was emphatically not the Thames. Being under the Cousins’ roof seemed too much like complicity in what was going on. He was aware he was being ridiculous, but it was hard. He’d strayed beyond all the comfortable borders and rules he’d surrounded his life with to date. Above, just below the clouds’ blanket, he could just make out the dark shape of their living vessel—the thinking entity—that had brought everyone here. And that wasn’t even the maddest thing he was being asked to accept.

“Spiker.” Alison dropped down beside him, shoving him over on the rug as if it was her couch back home—and they were about to watch some new thing on Netflix.

“Matchbox.” The nickname was something he could still cling to.

“Holding up?”

“Not really.”

Alison put an arm around his shoulders, and he was surprised at how comforting that was.

“We left a hell of a mess back home,” she said quietly. “They’re trying to spin it as a terrorist attack—three separate packs of opportunists have even tried to claim responsibility. But people saw. You can’t cover up some crazy airship materializing through three tower blocks. You really can’t cover up a woodlouse the size of a borough, hanging over London. But the world was breaking up before then. Because there really is a bigger problem, and the Cousins really are trying to fix it.”

“You got all this from your…woo.” He waved a hand in the air in a manner he hoped approximated “ancient alien ice-computer mind.”