‘I am. Look up. That’s it, a little to the left, now up a little more, too far to the right, no, up, you stupid girl. There.’

Trying to follow these directions, Alice stared up into the overhanging canopy of branches. One twisted, leafless limb crooked a few feet over her head, and she found herself looking into another pair of shining yellow eyes. A sleek feline body was only barely visible behind them.

‘You’re a cat,’ she said automatically.

‘Your powers of perception are astounding,’ the cat drawled. ‘Although I feel obliged to point out, in the interests of ontological exactitude, that I am in fact only half cat. Personally, though, I have always considered it the better half.’

‘And you can talk,’ Alice said, working her way through the situation.

‘Better and better! With brains like that, I can see how you monkeys took over the world.’

Alice closed her eyes for a moment and took a determined hold on herself. You followed a cat in the library and it led you to the fairy, she admonished. Hearing one talk should not be such a shock. She could feel a tiny worm of ecstatic excitement, deep in her gut, and she tried to fight it down. The thing to do, she thought, is think about this logically.

She opened her eyes, and realized she had absolutely no idea what to say.

‘I must say, if you’re practising for an “impressions of lower life-forms” contest, you’re a shoe-in. That “slack-jawed cow” look is spot on. Can you do a giraffe?’

‘All right,’ Alice said. ‘All right. You’re a cat, and you can talk. What are you doing here?’

‘A vocal reaction at last! But still not a very clever one. Under the circumstances, don’t you think it is I who should be directing that question to you?’

‘Me?’

‘I, after all, live here. I am a library cat, and this is the library, and so I am in my domain. You, on the other hand, do not belong. So allow me to put the same question on the table, in reverse: What are you doing here?’

‘I live here,’ Alice said. ‘There, anyway. In the house. My name is Alice Creighton.’

‘I know that. But what are you doing here?’

There was a moment of blurred motion as the cat dropped to the ground, landing in a crouch. In the moonlight his fur was a dull, rippling silver. His yellow eyes stayed fixed on hers, but she noticed that his mouth remained closed when he spoke, the clever voice emerging apparently from nowhere.

‘Politeness demands,’ he said, ‘that I introduce myself. You may call me Ashes.’

‘Ash?’ Alice repeated.

‘Ashes.’ The cat bristled. ‘Or, in full, Ashes-Drifting-Through-the-Dead-Cities-of-the-World, but Ashes will do.’

Alice dropped to her knees, to put herself closer to the cat’s level. ‘Pleased to meet you.’