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leaf-skin bandages, Corsi suspected they’d never seen woven fabric before. Certainly they’d never had need of clothes given their thick coats of coarse—well, it wasn’t exactly fur. More like two-centimeter-long flexible scales or fused feathers. She was sure there was an official Starfleet exobiological classification for their body covering, but for the short term she was going with hair.
    At any rate, it was likely the thinner elastic materials of her underwear would have thwarted the experimental resewing process. The chiptaurs probably lacked the technology to repair her synthetic boots once they’d cut them off as well.
    Her socks were undamaged; the chiptaurs evidently had no trouble figuring out how to get them off. However, bare feet offered better traction than stocking feet. She resolved to keep them handy in case the nights turned cold.
    Though now that she thought of it, she had no way of knowing if it were day or night outside her little room. It was possible the current temperature, which she estimated at twenty degrees, represented the dead of their winter.
    Filing that speculation under “find out later,” Corsi spent a few moments demonstrating how the clothes fastened and unfastened to the chiptaurs. This seemed to release a swarm of ear-annoying bugs. She decided the gesture meant something besides “no.” She let them practice a bit with the fasteners, ensuring the next human they encountered would escape with his or her wardrobe intact, if nothing else.
    Watching the intelligence with which they examined the new technology and the way they evidently discussed it among themselves, Corsi decided the chiptaurs weren’t barbarians. She’d already suspected that—nonviolence was a pretty sophisticated cultural concept—but there was a civility to their behavior that reassured her.
    Evidence was tipping the scales in favor of her hosts being rescuers rather than captors.
    Now if she could only remember how she got here.

Chapter
5
    P attie woke to the stench of rotting bog plants and an unpleasant sensation of moistness. The clatter and caw of what sounded like a dozen disparate animals in close proximity echoed flatly as though they were in an enclosed space.
    She knew the situation wasn’t good before she opened her eyes.
    A cage. About twice her body length square, standard low-tech metal frame and floored with peat and mud. There was a rectangular box, evidently an overturned packing case of some sort, just big enough to hold her with an opening cut in the near side. Several varieties of what she assumed were local wetland plants were arranged in neat piles along one side of the cage, no doubt a selection of potential foodstuffs.
    â€œLet me guess,” she said, addressing the humanoid shape beyond the bars. “You found me sticking out of a hole in the mud and assumed I’m a large burrowing insect.”
    The animal keeper, if that’s what he was, started at the sound of her voice and moved closer.
    He—Pattie based her assumption of gender on the fact that the alien appeared to be both mammal and flat-chested—had charcoal gray skin and a thick helmet of copper-red hair. If he had external ears they were hidden by the hair, but the thin nose, generous mouth, and widely spaced yellow eyes were all classic humanoid phenotypes. Another descendant of the ancient progenitors who’d spread their DNA over so much of the galaxy.
    The keeper made cooing and clucking sounds. Not language, Pattie realized, but nonsense noises meant to soothe a possibly hurt and probably frightened animal. Reaching through the mesh of her cage he picked a sprig of a plant from one of the piles and offered it to her.
    â€œThere is no way a collapsing tunnel of peat moss knocked my combadge off.” Pattie tapped her thorax to indicate where the device had been. “That means you have it.”
    The keeper froze, his eyes locked on the bare