In their spare time, she and Dr. Rat had been feeling out the extent of Rove’s plans, none of which looked good. She had seen recordings from this Earth and her own, which had been instructive. She now knew that, over in her Earth, Rove kept a whole training ground of what she thought of as Rovetroopers—a uniformed youth corps keen on drills and combat training and survivalist exercises. They were all clean-jawed and nouveau Blackshirt. She wasn’t sure where he’d got them from, but likely Billy White’s mob hadn’t been the only pack of neo-Nazis on the clandestine payroll. Doubtless they would be the pioneer corps for Rove’s brave new world. He had them hunting rats back home too, she’d seen, luckless rat-weasels released onto the Scottish Highlands. Rove’s people were rewarded for every tail they brought back. A couple had died, but he wasn’t exactly pitting his men against the rat kings’ special forces, just the starving poor and destitute. It made for easy victories and bloodlust to bind them together and to him. And anyone who got cold feet about killing rat-things that cringed and begged at their feet got cut from the programme, and probably from existence. Besides the Rovetroopers, Rove had stockpiled food, tools, petrol, vehicles: a man prepping for an apocalypse he certainly had no intention of averting.

She had wondered about that, because what if it really couldn’t be averted. Surely Rove and his goose-steppers surviving in some fascist paradise was better than nothing surviving? There was a rational case to be made, but she couldn’t bring herself to accept it. And besides, who says we can’t save everything?

The figures, she suspected unhappily, didn’t support her hopes, but she wasn’t giving up yet.

Dr. Rat partook of another glass with her. The rodent liquor was potent, and she dreaded to think what it was made from. But the receptacles were little more than thimble-sized, enough to take the edge off with no danger of getting her indiscreetly drunk. She took the chance to change, too, out of the drab suit and into clothes that she and Dr. Rat had arranged to be fabricated. They let Kay feel like herself again for a bit.

“Fuck the lot of them,” she tried experimentally. She heard the discrete chitter of the translator and wondered if what Dr. Rat heard preserved the sense or was bewilderingly literal.

It helped that she got on roaringly well with the little doctor. He seemed to be exactly that kind of death-by-ulcer, anxious supervisor type she’d met back when she was amongst humans—save that he could also walk the walk, science-wise. And he was a quisling, of course, which also helped. Rove wasn’t to know his star performing rodent was already booked into someone else’s circus.