Raz tore free a tarp that had been lashed over a loose crate and folded it around the woman, rubbing her shoulders through the cloth. He spoke to her, first in a smooth language heavy with l’s and aspiration, and when that produced no response, in a more halting, guttural tongue, then a third with singsong tones Cat could barely classify. No answer.

He tried another seven languages then swore. “That’s all I’ve got.” The hold was filling slowly with woken, silent people. Raz turned from the woman to the others. “Anyone here speak Kathic? Talbeg?”

The woman quaked in Cat’s arms. Not shivering, or at least not shivers as Cat knew them. Heaving spasms. A seizure?

Cat tried to lay her on her back, but the woman shook her off. Then she looked at and through Cat, and opened her mouth too wide. Her teeth were long and narrow.

“Cat?”

The others from the hold stood before Raz: tall and short, muscled and fat and lean, male and female and those not obviously either. Their mouths hung open.

Cat looked back to the woman she held. Sticky darkness seeped between her teeth, and sharp glass gleamed within, swelling as if it approached down a tunnel much longer than the woman’s throat. Reflective tendrils skittered against enamel, caught and cut her lips, tensed—

Cat threw herself to one side as a mirror shard shot from the woman’s mouth. Raz hit the deck too—shards burst from all the open mouths, a storm of crystal darts unfolding wings and legs, and unfolding again, like those creased-paper birds kids from the Shining Empire made, that when you undid them formed a bird larger than the one they had been. The people from whom the crystals flew all fell like string-cut marionettes.

The glass that missed Cat struck the bulkhead arrow-deep and quivered there as claws tore gouges in the wood. Sawdust and wood chips and scraps of cloth filled the air, and all around the hold there were these things, huge winged bugs, reflective carapaced and slick and growing. Their mouths held fangs and twitching blade lips. They were hungry.

Blood seeped from the corner of Cat’s ear, from a cut she hadn’t felt.

“Demons.”

Cat raised the truncheon from her belt, just in time. The nearest demon-bug flew toward her; she batted the glass insect into a bulkhead. It bounced off a tarp, reversed its legs, shook itself, and launched at her again. The second’s relief gave Cat’s hand time to reach the Justice medallion at her neck, and the cold perfection of service carried her away.

This time, when she swung the club, the creature shattered to smoking shards. One down, forty-something to go.