Bubochka (Rabbit, Smart Pet, Trainee)

The second supply drop came down on a grey morning, and Bubochka went out to watch it because watching arrivals was on her exercise list. Crates, instrument cases, the delegation's mail. And one more thing, riding down the chain of hands the way cargo does — except it was not cargo, and nobody was carrying it so much as passing it along, each person glad to help with something somebody earlier had clearly approved.

She knew it before the last pair of hands. Small. Warm-looking. Exactly as easy to describe as it needed to be and not one detail easier.

Muffin.

Her training log already had a Muffin section. It recorded the weeks she had spent being worked by the galley door, and the week she had stopped being worked, and Barsik's one comment on that entry, which was good; now log what it does next. What it had done next, apparently, was find the one route off Eden that was shaped like a small adorable animal — the route her own paperwork had made. The manifest said the delegation travelled with a courtesy animal. Nobody on a loading dock counts courtesy animals. She understood, with a cold little drop of feeling she noted for the log, that her cover had a shadow, and the shadow had used it first. The word for that would come later. The fact went down now.

What she could not do was say any of this. File, not volunteer did not have an exception for feeling responsible, and she had checked. She could not hand a warden a hazard report from a rabbit, for the same load-bearing reasons Barsik could not hand one to a bureau from a cat.

But Barsik's other lesson was that a report is just a finding standing where the right reader already is. So Bubochka did the one thing her rules left her. When the last pair of hands set Muffin down in the yard, she went and sat where the warden could see them both at once — one small animal beside another, side by side, holding very still — and let the most accurate reader on the planet do the reading.