Sorcha Nic Dhiarmada (Human, Drithane)

Sorcha took delivery of the second drop the way she took delivery of everything: by the list. The list was a good one — the Survey people itemised their cargo down to the spare gasket — and the morning ran to it, crate for crate, until the chain of hands passed her something the list did not have.

It arrived the way well-vouched things arrive, which was the first wrong note: every hand along the chain had plainly assumed the hand before it knew. The clerk thought the quartermaster had cleared it. The quartermaster thought it was the mascot's — companion, he said, the word arriving a half-second late, like a man reaching for a rail that wasn't there. Nobody had brought it, in the sense that mattered. It had been helped, the whole way down, by people who would each have said they were only being kind.

She looked at it properly, because looking at animals properly was the trade.

Forty years of it, and the trade had never once come back empty. Sheep, dogs, hill hawks, the delegation's strange still rabbit with the working eyes — everything landed somewhere, told her what it wanted and what it would do about wanting it. This landed nowhere. Not the shape, which was fine, and was a rabbit, or was mostly, or had been a moment ago — she noticed her own account of it sliding and stopped trusting the account. The asking was wrong. Every animal she had ever fed had asked from inside some arrangement — earned, owed, bargained, begged. This asked the way rain gets into a boot: no arrangement at all, just the assumption of entry, worn smooth by never once having been refused.

Her mother's rule covered it. The rule had never needed to know what a thing was, only whether she could read it, and it had four words and took four seconds, and she said them in the yard, out loud, in front of the clerk and the quartermaster and the chain of helpful hands, in the tone she used for weather.

"Not from this house."

She set it down outside the gate herself, courteously, the way you'd return a parcel misdelivered. The quartermaster looked relieved in a way he could not have explained and did not try to. The clerk wrote something down. And the delegation's rabbit, she noticed, sat exactly where she had sat through the whole of it — beside the thing, still as a fence post, watching not the thing but her, with the unblinking professional attention of a colleague confirming that a job had been done right.

Sorcha had been noticing that rabbit for days. She revised the noticing upward, said nothing to anybody, and went back to the list.