Jeannie stared at the night sky for a while. Sure, the moons resembled the real ones pretty closely, but that barely made this a work of art in her opinion. Many stars could be confused for the small moon in real life. That’s part of the reason why looking at the night sky was interesting in the first place.

But Jean had a different opinion. He clearly wanted to know something very specific about the painting. The only problem was he had no idea what it was.

“Take a closer look. You can’t fool me. I know this is the one,” Jean said. He was pacing around the room nervously, careful not to leave Jeannie out of sight.

“What exactly am I looking for?” she replied. Every second felt like agony.

Jean stopped in the middle of the room and bit his lips for the third time today.

“I just told you a minute ago. Anything. Anything from that stupid Resistance. Don’t act like you don’t know about them.”

Jeannie nodded and focused her eyes on the painting again. This task was somehow incredibly hard and easy at the same time. Finding “anything” felt like the easiest thing to do. Yet she knew very well that’s not what Jean meant. There were no other hints what it was the humans were looking for.

The painting had two layers of paint on it. Jeannie wondered what might have motivated someone to paint an entire new layer over the original image. The deeper, first layer didn’t have any stars or moons on it. It was clearly an image of a sunset, the outline of the sun was still visible if one were to focus really hard on the painting. Yet some monster had taken a brush, dunked it in several layers of black and purple and had turned the sunset into a dark night.

The second layer of paint was pretty fresh and covered one fourth of the painting. It struck Jeannie that the human eyes were probably too weak to notice there was an entire layer hidden behind the black paint. It only made sense that this was what Jean was after.

“Is there something hidden behind the paint?” Jeannie asked bluntly. Any tips were going to be useful to her.

Jean nodded instantly. His eyes were cold and lifeless as usual, but, in a split second, Jeannie could have sworn she saw a spark in there.

“What kind of reason would someone have to paint something over the original image?” she asked.

Jean didn’t answer, but it was easy to tell that he was enthusiastic. His jaw relaxed slightly and he stopped pacing.

“Those filthy idiots have no idea who they are trying to deal with. Messing with the government… I’ll get the Commander on the phone. Can you see the hidden message?”

Jeannie nodded.

“Good. Finally!” Jean replied and let out a sigh that clearly signalled he was relieved.

So was Jeannie. Being given to a human just like that was bad enough; having him walk angrily in the room in such a horrible mood was a whole other level of unpleasant experiences.

At the same time, it did strike Jeannie as strange that nobody had ever mentioned anything about a Resistance to her. Even Jean seemed reluctant to share any additional information with her, apart from them being “filthy monsters” and “the lowest of the low”. Frank must have had his reasons to not prepare her for this.

For now, Jeannie didn’t need to know more. The situation wasn’t great, but she needed to slowly figure out how things worked here. Helping Jean was a good first step.

At least she now knew what she had to do.

Jeannie extended her proboscis and licked the painting. A large chunk of bitter, black paint got stuck on her tongue, but that wasn’t going to stop her from recovering the hidden image. She was going to please Jean and help him stop whoever was betraying him. Jeannie closed her eyes and took another lick, then another, until she reached the two moons. By then tears were running down her eyes from the taste of the paint; it was one of the most unpleasant things she had ever tried. The stench of the fungus on her branch was nothing compared to eating paint. She rolled up her proboscis and waited a few seconds for this horrible sensation go away.

“Commander, sir. We have recovered the message. Yes, most helpful indeed. The animal is working on it as we speak. You have my word, sir…”

Jean continued talking on the phone for a few more minutes, but Jeannie was pretty sure he had somehow dialled other people as well. Even she started feeling relieved about recovering the original layer.  

Jeannie pulled herself together, unrolled her proboscis and licked the painting one last time across the entire right corner. The two moons disappeared as if they had never been there in the first place.

A flock of pigeons revealed itself behind the moons. Jeannie was a bit surprised by that; she had noticed some strange, hidden shapes behind the moons, but their outlines weren’t clear enough. The sky was dark red instead of black, of course; it was nature during sunset. Now one could clearly see the rivers and tiny animals that were previously hidden behind the black layer.

The paint left such a bad aftertaste in Jeannie’s mouth that she unrolled her proboscis again and spat out a ball of paint. Jean got startled and jumped instantly from his chair, dropping the phone on the ground.

“What did you do?” he yelled.

“I recovered the hidden image. Like you wanted,” Jeannie replied, even though she was starting to feel like Jean was not as pleased as she thought he would have been.

“You idiot… there was a message. A message in fresh paint. Where was it? What did it say?”

Jeannie looked at him in confusion.

“Something was written there, wasn’t it? A name? A building? A location? What was it?” he insisted, but Jeannie just spat out another ball of paint.

“I can’t read human scribbles. Why would you expect me to read a message?” she replied coldly.

Jean stared at her for a moment without saying a word. Jeannie would have thought her device was broken, if it wasn’t for the heavy breathing that the machine translated as mild curse words.

“You can’t read? I assume you also can’t write?” Jean finally asked.

Jeannie nodded. Something told her this was not at all what Jean had expected.