“NO!” Ofelia stamped her foot; they stopped as if she’d hit them with something heavy and stared at her.

“This is not for you/’ she said. “You’ll break it. You’ll ruin it.”

The one in front gave a long rolling churr and waved its forelimb at the room. Ofelia shook her head. “No. Not. For. You. Dangerous.” She wondered how to mime danger to them. Did they know about electricity? “Zzzzt!” she said, pretending to touch something and then jerking back, shaking her hand.

“Zzzzt…” It was the first sound of hers any of them had copied. What did zzzzt mean in their language? More importantly, would it stop them from poking around in here and destroying things? Ofelia tried to remember childhood lessons in electricity. Lightning was also electricity; they had to know about lightning. Could she get that across?

The one in front slowly extended its long dark nails toward one of the control boards. “Zzzzt…” it uttered, more softly than Ofelia had, and yanked its limb back as if stung. Ofelia nodded; at least they had that right.

“Yes — zzzzt. Hurts you. Big ouch.” She felt silly, talking to them as if they were babies just reaching for trouble, but it had worked.

The creature extended its limb to her, not quite touching. It tilted its head to one side, presenting her with more of one eye than the other. “Zzzzt…” it uttered again, and then touched her very gently on the chest. Ofelia frowned. It meant something, she was sure of it. It wanted to say something to her… but she could not think what that meant. She rehearsed it in her head. She had tried to convey that the things in here could hurt if you touched them — and the creature had copied her actions, which might mean it understood, although she had known plenty of children who couldn’t learn from a pretense like that, who had to be hurt themselves before they understood that fire would burn. Then it had uttered the sound, while almost touching her, and then had touched her.

Was it saying that she might hurt it, the same way as the machines? That she did hurt? But no — they had touched her already, and as near as she could tell, it hadn’t hurt them. They hadn’t jerked or jumped back or shown any other sign of pain. If they showed pain the way people did. “Zzzzt…” the creature uttered, repeating its earlier sequence. Then it seemed to point to the machines behind her, with an emphatic little stab on the end of the gesture. “Zzzzt.” Then it pointed at her again. Oh. Ofelia laughed aloud before she could stop herself. Of course. It wanted to know if the machines would zzzzt her. Or it wanted to see her get a zzzzt. Or something that connected her with the machines and the action she had claimed they had.

She held up one finger; the creatures stared at it. “The wrong place will go Zzzzt,” she said. She walked over to the outlet where the cables linked to the power system. “Here it will make anyone go Zzzzt.” Again she pretended to touch it, made the noise, and jerked back. “But here — IF you know what you’re doing, I can touch it.” As she spoke, she mimed: finger tapping head… knows… a careful approach, looking all over the control board before deciding which button to push… a careful touch with one finger on one button. No zzzzt. The lights blinked; she had enabled a warning circuit that put all the center lights on slow flash.

Squawks and grunts and gabbles, restless stirring in the hall behind the frontmost creatures. Ofelia prodded the button again and the lights returned to a steady glow. While she was there, she touched other controls, storing all monitor displays for later analysis, disabling all but the board she was using, choosing the most resistant of systems to run things. Just in case they got eager and tried to poke around, she could prevent much of the trouble they’d cause. They would be unlikely to hit the enabling sequences with random attempts to get something to happen. And she would disable this board when she was through. Let them have another scare first. “If you aren’t very careful,” she said. “If you just swipe at the controls, bad things will happen.” She laid her hand on the board, carefully across the emergency alert panel. Sirens wailed outside, higher and higher; bells rang in every room in the center; the lights changed to a different flash sequence, from normal to brighter and back. Ofelia turned it off, and locked the board down. “And that’s why you shouldn’t mess—” But they had. At least half of them had left stinking piles on the floor they had just cleaned. All of them stared at her. She didn’t have to know their language to know they were angry. Ofelia glared back. It wasn’t her fault. She hadn’t meant to scare them that much — only to convince them to leave the controls alone. And they’d dirtied the floor.

“I’m not cleaning that up,” Ofelia said. “Get the brooms.” It would take mops. It would take… but it didn’t. One of them grunted something especially emphatic, and the guilty parties — as Ofelia saw it — bounced away at high speed, to return with scoops that she recognized too late as the big stirring paddles from the kitchens. Oh well. They could be sterilized. She didn’t care that the biochemistry wasn’t supposed to be compatible: she was not going to use stirring paddles that had picked up alien waste until they’d been properly disinfected.

The creatures picked up their messes and went down the hall in the direction of the outside door. Perhaps she should have told them about the toilets. She looked back at the ones still staring at her. Perhaps she should not upset them any more. A lifetime’s experience reminded her that upsetting those who outnumber you and have weapons is a bad idea. It was because they hadn’t hurt her yet… she had begun to think of them as harmless, or at least not immediately threatening. The cleanup crew returned; she noticed that the stirring paddles looked clean, as if they’d been scrubbed in the rainwater. Looks weren’t everything; she’d put them through a hot water cycle. With a little shudder, the others relaxed; their intent gaze left her, and Ofelia felt herself relaxing too. Perhaps they weren’t going to kill her. At least not now. At least not if she kept them pacified. If they had been children, she would have cooked something sweet, but they had not seemed attracted to the food in the kitchen.

She moved toward the door, and the creatures moved back. They followed her down the passage, and into the sewing room where her wet mattress lay under the long work table. She counted — all of them. No one was lurking in the control room, tinkering with the switches.

As in the kitchen, they moved around, looking at everything making soft noises that she could not help but assume were language of some sort. Ofelia squatted down with a grunt of her own and tried to drag the wet mattress out from under the table. It had absorbed enough water to add kilos to its weight, and it stuck to the damp floor beneath it. She yanked harder, wishing she had had the sense to prop it up on something in the first place. Of course, she hadn’t meant to have the door open and rain blowing in. She still couldn’t remember whether she herself had left it open when she went out to walk in the calm at the heart of the storm. Not that it mattered, really.

She tugged again and again, and the mattress resisted. Suddenly, four bony odd-shaped hands with long dark nails gripped it; it slid suddenly towards her and she fell backwards. The mattress landed on her feet. She looked over; two of the creatures, still holding the mattress, were watching her. “Thank you,” she said. It was important to thank children, if they were trying to help, even if they got it wrong. That way they would keep trying. She dragged her feet out from under the mattress, levered herself up to a squat again, and tugged. They tugged. With her guidance, they got the mattress out from under the table and up on end, propped sagging against a wall.