She had also resisted all of my efforts to release her back into the wild once she was healthy. And she’d taken an instant dislike to being left behind, which meant many of our missions were accompanied by a white shadow. My commanding officer had looked the other way only because Luna turned out to be an excellent tracker and early warning system.

Kee popped her head out of the large utility closet she’d converted into her personal engineering control room and systems hub. Her pale skin and rainbow-colored hair glowed in the overhead lights. “Don’t believe her. I just fed her thirty minutes ago.”

I pulled back and looked in Luna’s eyes. “You sneaky little devil. No more food for you until dinner.”

Luna chirruped at me, a lilting trill that sounded like no animal I’d ever heard, and sent me another wave of longing. I shook my head at her. “Not going to work. Dinner.”

Luna squirmed in my arms and I put her down. She sent me a baleful look and leapt two and a half meters straight up to the narrow walkway I’d installed along the top edge of the hallways for her. She liked to be tucked up against the ceiling—the better to ambush her prey.

After Luna stalked out of sight with a final twitch of her tail, I turned to Kee. “Find anything interesting?”

She grimaced. “Not much. Whatever is going on, Torran’s people are keeping it close.”

Eli came in behind me. “Or nothing is going on and it’s an elaborate trap.”

I held up a hand before they could devolve into arguing again. “Assuming it’s not a trap, who do we need to hunt a thief?”

“Lexi,” they both said at once.

“I agree. Kee, track her down, see if she’s available, what her current rate is, and where she is.”

“You know she’d do it for free, if only to see the look on the Valoffs’ faces when a human does what they couldn’t,” Eli said.

Lexi had been in our squad during the war, and she had no love lost for Valoffs. When it became clear that bounty hunting wasn’t going to make us rich, she’d struck out on her own with my blessing. We still helped each other out occasionally, but Lexi was doing far better than we were. If many of her jobs were questionably legal, we all pretended not to notice.

“I’m on it,” Kee said. “You want me to go to the meeting with you or stay here and keep an eye on things?”

An extra gun would be handy if things went sideways, but Kee was even more powerful when she was plugged into her systems. “Stay here. If things go wrong, be ready to launch in a hurry.”

She nodded and disappeared back into her room.