"The pen is on the book," said Bright, speaking slowly to emphasise each word as she pointed to the items on the bench in front of her. Beside her, her laptop, now connected to a power socket by a spare lead she'd found, had a list of the words she'd already taught the Visitors. About five hundred of them. The list included the proper names of all the humans present.

The Visitor standing beside her made a series of sounds each of which, she assumed, corresponded to one of the words she'd spoken. Her laptop recorded them and added them to its vocabulary. Then the Visitor reached out a tentacle, picked up the book with the cluster of tendrils on the end and put it down on the pen. The creature then made the same sounds but in a slightly different order.

"The book is on the pen," the laptop translated for her, speaking with an artificial voice.

The Visitor made another sequence of sounds. "The pen is untranslated-word the book," said the laptop.

Bright grinned with excitement. "Under," she said. "The pen is under the book."

"Sounds like you're making progress," said Duffy, looking across from his chair further along the workbench. Bergman was showing him some files on his computer. Notes he'd made on Knot theory and the workings of the Furnace. Hopefully the creatures thought they were helping to translate their language and not looking for a way to end the anomaly.

"Getting there," the linguist replied. "I'm teaching them our language while Bhatt works on picking apart theirs." She nodded her head towards where the mathematician had a page full of arcane symbols on the screen of another computer in front of him.

"I'm afraid my work is going far slower than that of my esteemed colleague," said Bhatt, though. "The task I have set myself is the work of generations and probably several nobel prizes."

"But they're teaching you their language," said Costanzo, looking confused.

"No, they're not," said Bright. "Between us, we're creating a version of English made of words in their language that we can both understand, but it doesn't seem to bear any resemblance to the language the Visitors speak among themselves. Their language seems to have a structure unlike that of any human language. What I'm doing here is a far simpler task than the one Bhatt is working on."

"So for the foreseeable future at least, they'll be able to understand our language but we won't be able to understand theirs," said Costanzo, looking unhappy.

"That's right," the linguist agreed.

"Isn't that giving them a great advantage over us? They can eavesdrop on us but we can't eavesdrop on them."

"We have to take what we can get," said Bright. "The important thing is to be able to talk to them at all."

"Have you got to the point yet where you can ask them to get us some food?" asked the soldier.

"We haven't done the word for food yet," Bright replied.

"Then it's time you did."

Costanzo made his way to a litter bin that was stuffed full of empty food wrappings. All that was left of the food the interns had brought down for Bergman before they died. The Visitors watched him as he crossed the room, making sure to keep his hands in plain sight. Some of them producing clawed tentacles but they made no move to stop him. Reaching the bin, he rooted around in it until he found some plastic wrapping that the label declared had once contained a pair of tuna sandwiches. The professor evidently didn't like tuna much because half of one sandwich was still in the wrapper. Dry and stale but hopefully still edible.

He returned to Bright and the Visitor that had been working with her. "Food," he said. Then he took a bite from it and chewed. It was pretty horrible but he made himself swallow it. "Food," he said again. "They have to eat, don't they? Everything has to eat. They know what food is."

"Try to avoid long sentences," Bright replied. "We don't want to confuse them." She turned to the Visitor. "Food," she said, pointing to the rest of the sandwich. "Food."

The Visitor made a sound. Hoping it was their word for food, Bright added it to the dictionary. "Ricky, this is going to be hard for you," she then said. "For all of us. Can you go bring one of the dead soldiers over here? I need to teach them the words for alive and dead."

Costanzo stared at her, but then he nodded and made his way slowly to the stairs, the creatures again watching him every step of the way. He went up the stairs, but then he came down again. "They're gone," he said. "Their bodies are gone. They better not be eating them."

"Never mind," said Bright. "We'll just have to do the best we can with what we've got."

She typed on the laptop's keyboard. 'Human plus food equals true. Human minus food equals false.' "Hopefully they'll understand true and false to mean alive and dead in this context," she said. "Looks like you were right to want to teach them some maths words, Bhatt."

"The universal language," the mathematician replied without looking up from his work.

Around them, the creatures made their chalk-on-a-blackboard sounds as they discussed the request. The humans waited as it went on for several minutes, but then it stopped and Bright's student made a series of much simpler sounds. The laptop provided a translation. 'Costanzo plus two Visitor get food."

Bright stared at the creature in astonishment. "I never tought them the word for get," she said. "How do they know that word?"

"They've been listening to what we've been saying to each other," said Duffy, who was now looking scared. "And understanding it. God, they must be way more intelligent than us. Way, way more intelligent."

"Probably not them," said Bhatt. "The intelligence that created them. These creatures may be little more than foot soldiers, obeying orders from their superiors in there." He pointed to the window to the other world in the centre of the Furnace. "Something we haven't seen yet."

"Some kind of big brained emperor creature," said Duffy, nodding. "Or a big, powerful computer. God, I hope so. I really do, because the idea of these creatures being that smart is bloody terrifying."

Two of the Visitors, meanwhile, were approaching Costanzo and took up position on either side of him. One of them, not the one Bright had been working with, made a series of simple sounds that the laptop translated in its mechanical voice. "Costanzo get food."

"It must have been eavesdropping on you and your student," said Duffy to Bright.

"Or it's the controlling intelligence you've really been working with," said Bhatt. "It may be like how translation apps work on a smartphone. The phone doesn't do the translation. It sends the words to a big computer somewhere to do the translating. The phone just sends the words in one language and gets them back in another."

Support creative writers by reading their stories on Royal Road, not stolen versions.

The Visitor made another series of sounds. "Costanzo goes goes, humans equal false," said the laptop as it translated.

"I think it's saying that they'll kill the rest of us if you try to escape," said Bright. "It's also worked out how to pluralise a word all by itself."

"Don't worry," said the soldier. "I'll be back." He moved towards the ramp up to the car park and the two Visitors followed him. They went through the door into the slanting evening sunlight and passed out of sight.

"In the meantime," said Bright, "I think we need to work on our adjectives. I really want to teach them the proper words for alive and dead."

"And freedom and prisoner," added Duffy. "You might want to teach them those words as well."

"I'll see what I can do," the linguist promised.

☆☆☆

Evening was fast approaching. The sun was dropping towards the rooftops as Costanzo and his escort walked across the car park to the street. The wagon with the generator on it, as well as all their other equipment, was still standing where Summers and Bhatt had left it. The soldier glanced at the crate containing the rifles and handguns and wondered whether, like the computers, they would work in the vicinity of the Furnace.

He put them out of his mind for the time being and gave some thought to where he would find a supermarket. In the city centre? Or was it more likely to be on the edge of the city? He looked this way and that, but there was nothing to be seen to the west but open ground and half-built accommodation. He turned east, therefore, back towards the centre of the city. The creatures flowed beside him, moving on myriads of tiny tube feet almost hidden by the glistening pile-of-fish-eggs bodies they emerged from.

Reaching the main road, he saw that all the traffic lights had fallen to the ground, their metal supports no longer able to support their weight. He went over to the nearest and crouched down to examine it. The bare metal glittered with crystals like a shard of granite. On an impulse he gave it a hard kick with his boot and it shattered as if it was made of glass.

"Do you have metal on your world?" he asked the nearest of his Visitor companions. "What do you build things with?" All three of the creature's flower-heads stared back at him, its eighteen eyes blinking one at a time. "Right," said the soldier. "Food." He carried on along the road and the two creatures followed.

There were no more of the creatures visible as he made his way to a large group of commercial-looking buildings at an intersection ahead of him. If a Visitor had emerged from every corpse in the city, he mused, then there should be sixty thousand of them, so where were they? If Bhatt was right and they were little more than drones, then maybe they just slept or went dormant when they weren't needed. He wondered if an opportunity would come to let him go into one of the houses and look for them.

The shadows grew as the sun dropped lower. Along with the silence, broken only by the sound of the wind in the trees, it gave the city a sense of emptiness and loneliness that gave him a sudden craving for companionship. He'd never liked being alone. He enjoyed being with other people. When on leave from army duties he spent every evening being raucous and noisy with friends in a bar or a nightclub, staying until the small hours of the morning. Only when fatigue finally threatened to overwhelm him did he go home, to the house where he lived alone since the breakup with his wife who, it turned out, had also enjoyed the company of other men.

His head filled up with thoughts that he would ordinarily have shared with any other person who happened to be nearby, whether he knew them or not. Thoughts of how the city reminded him of war-torn cities to which his army career had taken him. Cities whose inhabitants had either fled or were cowering in basements. The similarity was accentuated by the fact that several of the buildings he was passing were in ruins, having collapsed because they were no longer capable of supporting their own weight. Because their load-bearing steel supports were crystallising, if the scientists were right. Even as he walked, the sound of a collapsing building came from somewhere nearby and he spun around to see a cloud of dust rising into the sky some distance away.

"See what you've done?" he said to the two Visitors accusingly. They just stared back at him as before.

As the sound of the collapsing building faded, he became aware of another sound from somewhere nearby. Something shifting, rubbing on the ground as if being dragged. Curiosity drove him to investigate and he found the corpse of a large dog lying in the gutter. No doubt once a beloved family pet. It was being torn open as something emerged from inside, and as he watched a flower-head rose into sight, its six eyes blinking one at a time as they fixed on him.

How many large pets had there been in the city? he wondered. How many cows, sheep, pigs had there been in the farms around it? How many wild animals had there been living in the surrounding desert? If each one was giving birth to a Visitor-creature, then there might be a lot more of them in the city than they'd originally thought. Anxiety gnawed at him as he imagined the Generals and politicians in the outside world sending another force of men into the anomaly, only to be destroyed as it met a far larger enemy force than it had been expecting. He had to get word of what he knew back to his superiors, but how?

The large building he was walking towards did indeed turn out to be a supermarket. As he emerged onto the main road he saw that the entire front of the building was made of sheets of glass, but instead of being clear and transparent, as they no doubt had been just a few days ago, they were now riddled with tiny cracks that made them hard to see through. Reaching it, he gave the nearest pane a fhump with his fist and it shattered into a million tiny fragments that fell around him with a sound like a waterfall. He stepped inside, the broken glass crunching under his feet, and the two creatures followed him.

It was like walking into an oven. Without the air conditioning, the glass front of the building had turned it into a greenhouse. There were bottles of mineral water rolling around on the floor. He picked one up, opened it and took a long drink. Then he poured the rest over his face and the back of his neck, gasping with relief at the coolness of it. "Want one?" he asked, opening another and offering it to one of the Visitors. The creature extended a string-of-sausages tentacle ending with a cluster of thin tendrils and waved them over the opening. Then it produced a long, transparent tube from somewhere inside its body and inserted it into the bottle. Costanzo watched as water was sucked up the tube into its body.

The other Visitor picked up a bottle and turned it this way and that as it tried to work out how to open it. It held the bottle with one tentacle and tried to twist off the cap with another, but it didn't have the strength. It held the bottle up to Costanzo with what the soldier imagined was an almost embarrassed expression in its eighteen eyes. Costanzo took the bottle, twisted the top off and handed it back.

The creature took the bottle and inserted its own drinking tube. "No need to say thanks," said the soldier. Then, picking up another couple of bottles and tucking them into the pockets of his uniform, he went further into the supermarket.

Most of the shelves were empty, he was disappointed to find. He supposed there'd been panic buying when the inhabitants of the city found that they were being quarantined because of plague. There were signs of violence everywhere with non-food items scattered on the floor and trodden on by frantic shoppers. He stepped over a pile of washing powder cartons and past a pile of broken vinegar bottles to where a sign hanging from the ceiling said the canned food would he found. There wasn't a single can left on the shelves.

Not in the least disheartened, he went to the back of the shop where shutters blocked the way to the storage rooms. He pushed the metal shutters and they fractured as if they were made of thin wood. Inside he found what he'd been looking for; pallets loaded with boxes of soup and canned meat, delivered by the last truck that had visited the store.

He went back to the front of the supermarket to get a shopping trolley and loaded it up with cans, the only food he trusted to still be safe to eat with the refrigeration out for several days. He also picked up a can opener and a small microwave oven. "No need to take too much," he muttered to himself as he packed the cylindrical cans into the trolley. "We can always come back for more." He wondered how long the canned goods for a city of sixty thousand would last five people, but then he remembered the Visitors and wondered what they would be eating. Have to make sure they don't figure out how to use a can opener, he thought as he pushed the loaded trolley back to the broken window.

The sun was now below the rooftops of the nearest buildings and it was beginning to get dark. The streets were still empty, the city's new inhabitants still remaining hidden. I must find out where they are, he told himself as he pushed the trolley along the street, back towards Kensington Labs. The lads will need to know where to find them when they come to re-take this place.

Beside him, the two Visitors followed, occasionally chirping to each other in their chalk-on--a-blackboard language. They were each holding a couple of bottles of mineral water in their tentacles.