Book One – Chapter 19

Yu tossed the last spoon into the drawer, shoved the drawer shut with his hip, and took three attempts with his right talon before he managed to hang the towel back onto the rod beside the sink. Then he turned toward the suicidal stunting stool. He had pulled it out again to stack the re-washed dishes. He wanted to push it back beneath the grand workbench, but hesitated. For a moment, he hesitated to get back on again.

But then he pushed it into place.

What was there to see in the surgery anyway, now that they were done with the human?

Bubs or Deltington tidying up?

                             The shaman standing just on the other side,
                                                      right in front of the window,
                                                                                    expecting him?

                                                                                                        Surely not.
                                                                                                                                              Surely, there was
                                                                                             nothing to gain from looking again.

Also, there was more to do.

Yu dragged himself up the stairs.

The bathroom was the perfect visualisation of everything that had gone wrong today. Yu had no idea where to start, or how to start, but somehow he did. Well, he went to the toilet first.

Sitting there by himself, he started to push around the filthy, sodden pieces of cloth in front of the toilet. He nudged them with his talons, rather aimlessly. Eventually, they all ended up in the same corner, and then, somehow, that one miserable mound of everything became two. There was one heap of trash and one heap of towels that might, theoretically, still be salvageable. The trash made its way down into the kitchen bins, and as Yu crossed back through the common room, he even figured out what to do with the towels. He gathered them on the closed toilet cover and then wrung them, all at once, by stepping on top. His weight and some deliberate stomping did well enough to squeeze out what they had soaked up — which promptly splattered right back onto the floor. After that, he scooped them up in one messy bundle, carried them down to the common room, and dumped them in that one bin next to the garderobe.

He hesitated only when he noticed the bin was empty. The towels the borman and krynn had used during acclimatisation were gone. The one Yu had used to dry himself was gone too. But by the time he noticed, he had already dropped his load. And he really, really did not want to ask Bubs whether they belonged somewhere else. Also, there was just so much more to do. So Yu left them and hurried back up the —

He turned around at the top of the stairs.

Yu went straight back down.

On this next run-around, the cleaning supplies he had used throughout the day made their way upstairs as well.