"Now what?"
Thyaar approached slowly. Like she was the one with claws.
"I scan him first," he said. "Then we treat what I find. The ring will move overhead, but it won't touch him. He will feel nothing."
She snorted. “He won't believe that."
She didn’t believe that, eyeing the medical contraption.
He tapped something on a panel set into the wall. The ring of white metal above the bed hummed soft and began to move. She felt the air shifting around them and so did Barnaby. He opened one eye, registered the furniture was moving, and decided the change was not to his liking. She gathered him closer with both arms before he could leap.
"I've got you, baby boy,” she murmured into his ear, very quiet. "It's just a fancy x-ray. We've done x-rays before."
She had no idea if this was a fancy x-ray. It was probably nothing like a fancy x-ray. And Barnaby didn't speak English, and what he understood was the tone of her voice, so she kept it low and calming.
The ring stopped a hand's width above them. Light pulsed across it once, soft as a blink, and was gone.
That was it.
Barnaby blinked twice, looked offended on principle, and went back to glaring at Thyaar.
"It's done?"
"It is done." Thyaar was reading something off the panel across the room. His face shifted — the easy, still-amused look slipped, and what replaced it wasn't anger exactly, but it wasn't far off. His jaw worked. He scrolled something. He didn't look at her.
"What?" she said.
"Your cat has the sugar disease."
“I…. Well, yeah. I know that.” She hadn't meant for her voice to go tight, but it did. “I told you he had diabetes. He's on insulin. I do the injection every day. There's a vial in the fridge at the apartment. I need to?—"
"You will not need it."
"You don't understand, it's expensive, and I can't?—"
"You will not need it," the big alien repeated, looking at her over the top of the screen. "Because I am going to cure him."
She stared at him. Then she laughed. “Yeah, right. Sure you will, handsome.”
“Wait there.”
“What… like there’s somewhere else I have to be? Look, if you really are going to take us to Emily, I need to go and get Barnaby’s medication.”
And a change of clothes for herself wouldn’t go amiss either. She couldn’t go around wearing his underwear… She looked down at herself. If that’s even what this stuff was. Thermal underwear, maybe?
He ignored her, rifling through one of the drawers built into the wall behind him, before producing a small instrument she didn't recognize. It looked, more or less, like a stubby silver pen. He held it up so she could see it.
"This will repair the part of him that is broken. Do you wish me to continue?”
She opened her mouth. Closed it.
A cure. Not a treatment. Not the fifty-credit-a-pop injections she’d been giving to Barnaby out of pay she didn't have to stop him becoming a furry ginger corpse… and this man… alien was going to fix it with a pen.
“And it won’t hurt him?” she asked, her arms tightening around the purring bundle in her arms.
Thyaar shook his head. “He will not even feel it. We have similar lifeforms… we call them deearin. They are bigger but essentially the same.”
She tilted her head, looking up at him to search his face. She wanted to believe him, she needed to believe him. If the only thing that came out of this sorry mess was that Barnaby was cured, then that was a good thing. Right?
