“She got in the way,” said Lucas. “She’s involved with the others.”

The chief rat leant forwards again. It had enormous whiskers, Lee saw; no, it had whisker extensions, more gratuitous taking up of space. She almost laughed. And then it yattered something, and the unseen translator stated, “Kill her then.”

“What?” Khan exclaimed. “Don’t you dare, you fuckers!”

Rove’s lip curled at the language, as though mere murder was nothing compared to being rude. “We could keep her as leverage…?”

“She’s trouble, sir,” Lucas pronounced. “I recommend getting rid of her.”

Rove spared Lee a direct glance for the first time, and in that moment she knew him: a man born above, silver spoon and all, for whom the world had always been his by right of inheritance.

“Do it, then,” he agreed.

Lucas took out his gun.

There was a shrill alarm even as the pistol made its reappearance, and the air was briefly full of nickering voices. Gravity seemed to shift, and Lee’s stomach yawed one way and then the other. Mal, from nowhere, cannoned into her as she was clutching for balance. The pair of them pitched out from under the barrel of Lucas’s gun, bowling over a couple of rat-weasel soldiers. Lee had half a second of watching Mal take in what was going on, bunched into a knot of muscle and ready to explode in every direction. Her eyes sought Dr. Khan—out of reach and with Lucas in between. And as gravity twisted again, she mouthed the word sorry.

Then they fell, not down but in a sidelong direction to elsewhere, leaving the stale air and the rat stink and the gun behind them.

Interlude: The Hunters

Excerpt from Other Edens: Speculative Evolution and Intelligence by Professor Ruth Emerson of the University of California

Out of the blizzard they come. You’d hear their voices first, if you were there, because when they are not on the hunt they talk all the time. It makes for a raucous babble of sounds, the building blocks of a language with a vocal range exceeding every human tongue put together. You’d hear them, and imagine they were complaining to one another, bitching that they should have stayed home until this blew over, and they’re hungry, and their feet are sore. And “Are We Nearly There Yet”—because there are children with them and the children never shut up either. You’d hear the bellow and grunt of their pack animals too, who also complain about the cold, but with brute sounds that indicate how very hard done by they feel about this domestication business…But mostly you’d hear the rhythms of language within the beast-tamers’ yammering, and you’d apply human meanings. As often as not you’d be right to, because they are like us, these hunters. Despite all the differences, they are our close cousins, within the skull.