The rat captain screeched and yattered back at him angrily, but then gaped its jaws wide and shrilled something that did sound a lot like “Rove.” So maybe Gym Bro knew what he was doing after all.

He grabbed at Lee’s wrist, before hauling Khan to her feet. He shoved the pair of them before him, and the military rats eddied back to give them room. She had a sudden, disconcerting idea of what the encounter might be like for them: three gigantic, stooping hominids thrust into their close quarters—every footstep shaking the ground, every careless gesture enough to knock them off their skittery little feet.

Then Gym Bro shoved her forwards with the pistol butt. Lee reckoned that he was emphasizing the difference in status between him and his prisoners. The soldier rats formed a close escort, their clammy armour and bristling fur pressing against Lee’s knee and hip, unpleasantly intimate.

She had to drop to her hands and knees to leave the gallery, even though they were trooping through the largest door in the place. The room beyond was even dimmer and lower, and she crawled onwards besides Khan, feeling that she’d reached some hitherto undescribed circle of Dante’s hell. Right in the corner of her eye was the bleak mask of one of her captors, so close that when she turned her head her eyelash brushed the flat plane of its goggle lens. Snaking rodent bodies pressed against her, big as dogs, jabbing her with their sharp elbows and their brutal-looking weapons. Her breath was coming fast and ragged, and there were sobs mixed up in it. She’d have broken down if it hadn’t been for Gym Bro, to whom she wouldn’t give the bloody satisfaction.

Abruptly there was a ceiling high enough that she could stand upright, and the rodent guards spread out into clumps of two or three, as though even with space around them they couldn’t bear to be alone.

“You took your time, Lucas. Any longer and we’d have to discuss it at your next performance review.” It was a human voice, and Lee instantly disliked it; it dripped with smug satisfaction.

There was a little more illumination here: three long skylights in the ceiling revealed a gloomy sky of umber and gunmetal that lent the scene a bleak, funereal radiance. Seated beneath them were three figures, one of whom was a thin-faced man in a grey suit. He had an actual porcelain teacup in his hand, a saucer in the other, and there was a stooped rodent at his elbow holding a tray. She was only surprised there wasn’t a towel folded over its arm, a waiter’s pad tucked into a pocket.