She had her eyes open by then, and wished she didn’t. Up until that point, the nastiest thing this whole misadventure had brought her had been the weasels as they squirmed their way from their reality into hers.

Now she’d taken the reverse trip.

She was in a claustrophobic room, the ceiling low enough that Gym Bro was stooped almost double. Dr. Khan sat at his feet, looking dazed, and Lee reached for her, trying to snag her hand again. It wasn’t a rescue attempt; it was a bid for human contact. The weasel-rodent-people were all around them in the cramped gloom.

Most were in constant motion, scurrying into and out of the chamber through doorways barely a foot high, pattering along on four feet quite naturally. Others crouched at instruments that were a vast maze of buttons, levers and sliders. She saw no screens, but several operators wore whole-head masks. She had a sudden realization about the lack of space: there was no point in having big-screen TVs in this place; you’d never have the vantage point to look at the picture. Instead, everything was reduced to the invasive and immediate. The rodents were over and under each other, at everyone’s elbow, under everyone’s feet. They didn’t look healthy either. Most of their ears had been cropped close to their skulls. Many were tailless and didn’t look as though they could stand upright without something to hang on to. They wore grey, simple smocks, and the fur she saw was mangy and skewbald.

“Fuck,” Gym Bro said. He looked less than delighted himself. Then he seemed to see Lee for the first time and pointed his gun at her. “If you give me any of your dinosaur shit,” he spat, “I will shoot you in the head, you got that?”

Lee wished she had some dinosaur shit to give him, but she didn’t see how one would fit in here.

Then the stormtroopers arrived. That was the only way she could process what she was seeing. A dozen rats in that rubbery black armour turned up, like the invaders in the museum or those under Mount Pleasant. There, the creatures had been disoriented and in pain from being shunted between realities. Now they were all brutal efficiency, shoving through the eddying throng of weasels and not sparing the rod when the menials didn’t get out of their way. Lee saw flashes of dagger-sharp incisors in the dim light, the bludgeoning fall of gun barrels and truncheons. Gym Bro brought the gun round as they approached, not pointing it at them but not quite not pointing it at them either. Lee heard a chittering demand from the lead rat, which raked the air at them with a demanding paw.

“Sure,” Gym Bro muttered. “You better be taking me to your boss, right?” He spoke loudly, as though the creatures were deaf and not inhuman. “Mr. Rove, you hear me?”