The body was stinking up the main room already, but Raven found the food in the back and took it all. It was bread, different kinds and shapes, but all bread, dry and unsatisfying. For drinks, there were canisters of something Raven called ‘pop’. Kane’s analyzer told him it was sugar-and caffeine-saturated, but otherwise harmless. Not great, in other words, but like the bread, it was better than nothing.

Kane followed his human from the motel’s storeroom to sleeping quarters to linen room and back, watching with quiet amusement as she stripped the bed and replaced the sheets. A far-thinking human. She was past worrying about living and was already thinking about avoiding arrest. That took an admirable amount of wit and will. She cleaned every inch of every surface either of them had touched, and then took what she did not clean—the bedding, the bottles of soap from the shower, the towels they’d dried with—to the groundcar’s cargo hold and put them inside. A very far-thinking human.

“Forget anything?” he asked, when she’d thrown the cleanser in on top of the pile.

“I don’t think so. It’s a motel, lots of people have touched the shower curtain and the room key…and the bed.” She gave him a hollow-eyed glance full of weary humiliation and blame.

That look clenched on him with all the pleasure of her pussy on his cock. He grinned. “You make me wish I had all day just to play with you,” he said regretfully, and she flinched. “But I need to get to work.” He slammed the cargo hatch and handed her the groundcar’s keys. “Let’s go.”

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Chapter Six

Tagen had been led to believe that humans lived in social groups. The one point on which the misinformation from five hundred years past and present experience agreed was that humans collected in large numbers. He had been prepared for difficulty in isolating one. He planned for nothing but that as he spent the next three days grimly clawing his way eastward over Earth. When he came out of the woods and found a single building set in the middle of wilderness, it came as something of a surprise.

It had the look of a well-maintained building. Certainly the grounds surrounding it were exceedingly trim. Grass grew in a deliberate square before the wooden porch, cut short and colored deep green in defiance of the sun, and fenced by stones of matching size and color. There were bushes, some flowering, and trees, well-kept. The porch itself looked, from this distance, clean and orderly. It could only be a residence. No other building had quite this same look of regular inhabitation.

The similarity between this house and that one in which Kolya Pahnee had bought to raise his son was staggering. It was not the same design, of course, not even the same color, but the overwhelming neatness and organization of the place was an exact mirror to the house in which Tagen had been raised.

As Tagen marveled, the door of the house opened and a human emerged. Only one human, for all that the house was of good size. Tagen actually felt a little disappointed as he realized that he had wasted all those plans and preparations for isolating one from a group.

The human was small, as all humans were. It had long hair, nearly to its waist, loose and wavy and brown. It was the only feature he could see clearly from this distance, and while hair wasn’t necessarily a reliable indicator of health, it was a good sign. The human was fussing with the door, no doubt making it secure against intruders. There were bars protecting all the lower-floor windows, but Tagen shrewdly noticed that the windows above the overhanging porch appeared to be open.

The human, satisfied with the security of its home, turned away and moved off the porch. It entered a groundcar, and soon the sound of an engine started up and the human drove away.

Tagen didn’t know how fast a human groundcar could travel, but he did have a pretty fair notion of how isolated this building was. He walked openly across to the house and climbed to the porch roof. The windows facing him were indeed open, although they were screened. Tagen was ready to cut the mesh with his claws when he realized that the screen could simply be pulled away. He did so, and then began to place the screen inside the house where it was in no danger of falling from the roof. He stopped when he saw the state of the room he was invading.

From the outside, the house had been trim and organized. On the inside, it more resembled a smuggler’s cargo hold. The floor was unreachable; stacks of boxes and crates blocked more than half the room to any access. Unused furnishings took up the rest of the space. There were human-sized desks, chairs, a long sofa, even potted plants. Everything was stacked on top of everything else, and every surface was coated with dust.

Tagen knew he couldn’t wait out here on the overhang all day and no other windows were within reach. He set the screen on top of a tall pile of boxes and slowly negotiated his way inside. He tested his weight on every box until he found one that seemed like it would hold him, and then stepped down onto a thin strip of floor. There was just enough of a path to take him to the door and just enough of a clearing there to open it. Still staring around at the clutter, Tagen grasped the stubby handle and pushed, pulled, then finally twisted it.

He took two steps out into the hallway that revealed and then stopped and had to look behind him to make sure that, yes, this was the same house. The hall was empty, the walls washed, the carpeted floor utterly free of markings. There were flat panels of artwork on the walls, enclosed in wood and glass, and the glass was spotless. There were glass bulbs hanging from the ceiling and they were spotless. The bulbish handles on the three doors that faced the hall were shiny and untarnished. The rails that lined the stairwell down were newly-oiled.

Tagen spared the cargo room one last puzzled look, and then shut the door and opened another.

There was a strong astringent smell and then his eyes were dazzled by white. White tiles on the floor, white walls, white ceiling, white patches of carpeting on the tile, white cupboards and white countertop, shiny white furnishings of unknown function, white globes of glass on the wall, white cloths folded on white shelves, white bowls holding white soapy-smelling blocks. And wherever there was not white, there was steel, all of it brilliantly-cleaned. On impulse, Tagen dropped to one knee and looked under the counter. The kickboard there was white and utterly without blemish.

Tagen sat back on his heels, a little unnerved. Trying not to think about the mental state of the human who kept this place so scarily clean, Tagen tried instead to determine the purpose of the small room. Half by reason, half by guess, he pulled at a steel knob that protruded over a bowl-shaped indentation in the counter, and water flowed from a control arm beside it. Hidden pipework. Plumbing. With a shock, Tagen realized he was standing in a human bathing room, and that it was the same room they used for a privy. He had never seen anything so unsanitary in his entire life, not even in smuggler’s dens or Kevrian slave pits.

‘Then again,’ he thought, looking at all the immaculate white. ‘How unsanitary could it really be?’ You couldn’t accuse the human of not keeping it clean.

He left the white room and opened the last door, braced for anything. Here, he found a bedroom, and for the first time, it struck him that the human who lived here really lived here. After the sterility of the bathing room, he found the colors—ocean green, grey, and slate blue—soothing, almost cooling. He moved around the room, lingering to look at objects that caught his eye, marveling that humans could live so…so normally.