Stig shrugged and seemed to lose interest, looking at the huts ahead. She had known his people long enough to understand that they didn’t confront one another, that they always gave each other space to think and feel. Easy enough when there aren’t a million of you crammed into the same conurbation. Maybe this was Stig being too polite to say that no, her strain of humanity wasn’t capable of regeneration. Still, she put a hand to his arm, feeling him twitch, and said, “Thank you.” They seemed to be a very polite people, and she wanted to show them it wasn’t purely a Neanderthal trait.

The domed buildings were just outside the rain shadow of the trilobite vessel. They looked fibrous, closer up: grown, and yet not wood or anything Lee could identify. They were bigger than she’d thought, two storeys high. The upper reaches were covered with tessellating transparent sections of irregular shapes, veined like a dragonfly’s wing, plenty of light passing through to the interior. A trio of Nissa had come out to watch them approach, a man, a woman, a child of indeterminate gender. They wore hooded robes like druids, yet the garments were of some thin fabric that shrugged the water off like a duck’s feathers. Their faces, in the shadows of their cowls, were intimidating in their alien commonality. Seeing them together, kin to Stig, no kin at all to Lee and Mal, brought home just who didn’t belong here.

Probably there was a solemn and ritualistic greeting in the works, but it was scuppered when Dr. Khan let out an outraged shriek, pointing back the way they’d come. Lee’s stomach lurched to see Daniel Rove and his man, Gym Bro. Lee saw Stig’s expression in that moment, entirely legible as someone who had previously spotted this coming and then forgotten about it. He interposed himself between the incandescent Khan and Rove. But the rat translator darted past, shrilling furiously, while the calm voice of its implant intoned “Murderers!” over and over.

Rove’s man had a gun out and was pointing it at the little creature, as though about to finish what he’d begun on the airship. Khan physically shoved Stig, trying to shift him, while Mal tried to restrain the translator because Gym Bro’s gun was entirely too steady in its aim. The two government types were squaring off—to Lee’s surprise—against Rove, apparently with their own grudges. For a moment the whole thing seemed about to kick off in all directions.