#6

Welk Barramay eyed the Bee cautiously. Business was slow, but not so slow that he was going to drop everything to ask a Bee what it needed. He milled around the Bee for a few seconds and looked it up and down, purely out of curiosity – he couldn’t recall any other Bees visiting the shop before, and he had rarely seen any up close. He was faintly fascinated by its stick-like legs that ended in just the slightest horizontal turn to indicate a foot. The bulbous, hairy striped body that seemed impossible to balance on those legs. An ill-fitting gray coat was slung over his body, but Welk knew that Bees rarely wore clothes in their colonies. This vague concession to the proprieties of a Mammal city was surprising, almost as much as the Bee’s presence. The Bee’s massive head bobbed, its blank hexed eyes pointed at the racks of sound discs. One set of thin, hair-lined appendages flicked listlessly through the racks. His other pair of arms was folded over the torso, visible through the open coat, the hand-like claws rubbing at each other.
Welk glanced around. There was one other customer in the shop, a Ferret. He sighed. It wouldn’t look right if he helped the Ferret and not the Bee. He doubted that the conversation would go very well, doubted that the Bee – whose people generally scorned Mammal money – would even buy anything. But Welk was no racist.
“Can I help you, uh . . . my friend?” Welk choked out this final part, realizing that he had no idea whether “sir” or “madam” were appropriate.
The Bee swung its head around. The giant colorless eyes stared at him – probably. It was difficult to tell. The Bee emitted a number of words from its tiny mouth tube. Welk had no idea what the Bee said. Somehow the words sounded interested, even polite, if somewhat distant. All of them had a different tone inflection, and all of them were “buzz”.
“My friend,” said a voice from behind the Bee, “he says he is just browsing.”
Welk jumped back, alarmed. Then he moved to the side and saw a very short Dog standing behind the Bee, his head barely reaching the sound disc racks. He was no bigger than a pup, but clearly an adult. Welk tried not to stare at the long scar along the Dog’s left cheek, or the patchy, torn fur that grew sporadically around it.
“Oh . . . oh,” Welk replied. He hadn’t seen the Dog before – probably hiding behind the Bee or one of the racks. He found himself unable to not stare at the scar, or more specifically, the grin next to it, the gleeful, bared-teeth snarl that arced up the Dog’s face. He shivered, suddenly feeling something pressing on the back of his head, the back of his brain, some sharp feeling that was not quite pain but not at all pleasant. But he could not move, or even react, he just stared at the Dog’s grin, his yellow eyes narrowing –
The pain snapped away from him, like a power cord disconnecting from a socket. Welk blinked. The Ferret he had seen earlier had appeared behind the Dog, and placed one calm hand on the Dog’s head, a gesture of subordination that Welk could not imagine the Dog accepting without a sudden flurry of teeth and claws and blood.
But the Dog just kept staring at Welk.
“Leave him alone,” said the Ferret. With a chill of surprise, Welk realized that the Ferret was probably Rogue, one of very few that Welk had ever seen. Like the Dog, he was obviously fully grown, but he carried himself with the same rowdy carelessness as the rich teenage Ferrets that came into the shop, that irresponsible quality that all Ferrets had before they were fed through their Business Academies. This one was still irresponsible; he had clearly never seen the inside of an Academy. He had, however, managed to teach himself a few Ferret qualities, or perhaps had unknowingly inherited them from his ancestors: his grin was pure Ferret. Not malicious like the Dog’s, but unpleasantly plastic. Welk felt a twinge of alarm, feeling the natural obsequiousness that he had been taught since birth to feel around Ferrets, mingled with shame and hatred.
When this passed, he noticed that the Ferret had some kind of grotesque hunch on his back: his brown coat, buttoned nearly to the neck, was bulging outward behind him unnaturally in every direction. On a second look, it looked too ridiculous to really be part of the Ferret’s body, but this was just one detail in an already completely baffling tableau, and he glanced helplessly between the Bee, the Dog, and the Ferret, unsure how he was supposed to react to any of this.
“Just having some fun,” said the Dog, tilting his yellow eyes up at the Ferret. “He knows I’m kidding. Don’t you, pal?” Without waiting from an answer from Welk, the Dog slipped out from under the Ferret’s hand and disappeared into the rows of racks.
The Bee had watched all of this blankly, his hard little hands impatiently tapping the plastic of the sound disc cases.
“Pardon us, sir,” said the Ferret, his words spilling out of him in the classically smooth, arrogant, condescending Ferret manner. Welk felt the twinge again, and his fists unconsciously clenched in anger. Then, with some amusement, he wondered: if all of this came naturally to Ferrets, what exactly were they taught in the Academies? “You had an employee here, did you not, by the name of Kyla Orflandore?”
“Yes,” Welk replied, startled.
“You have not seen her recently.”
“No . . . she . . . she was taken.”
“Taken?” the Ferret replied, more plastic spreading across his face. Welk realized that the Ferret already knew all of this, already knew everything he needed to know, and that he and his partners were just checking out the scene, and doing Welk to unnecessary courtesy of pretending he was useful.
“Sparrows. And, uh, a Rat. He asked her a few questions, then she left with them, without even telling me she was going. I didn’t hear any of it.”
The Ferret nodded. “What level?”
“I’m sorry?” Welk was not good at this kind of forced politeness. He was good at joking around with his regular customers, putting up with and/or kicking out rowdy teenage Ferrets, and sucking up to the Ferret owner of the shop.
“The Sparrows, Mr. Barramay,” the Ferret said coldly. They knew his name: this did not surprise Welk, in retrospect, but it alarmed him all the same. “The squadron. What level?”
What did the three of them want, Welk wondered.
The three of them . . .
“Green. Green,” Welk replied. Oh no, he thought.
“Hmm. Yes.” The Ferret grinned some more. “Thank you, Mr. Barramay. I trust we can return if we have further questions?” It was not a request. The Ferret turned and started back toward the entrance, the Bee immediately dropping the sound disc it clutched with a clatter, and following him. Welk watched the Ferret’s strangely bulbous back walking away, dimly noting the shreds down the side of his threadbare coat.
The Dog emerged from between some racks and followed them out into the Mall, shooting Welk one last hatefully grinning glance as he disappeared. Welk did not like the glance, and he did not like the brief sharp pain that seared through his skull, sending him crumpling into a rack, knocking a whole shelf of sound discs onto floor. He rubbed his head and grunted in pain, absently watching the random flurries of music and colored light that erupted from a few of the sound discs as they broke open.