“Quite,” said the doctor. “I’m thinking of introducing the cells of this mollusk into rats.”

“Why rats?”

“Why not rats?”

Duke didn’t have an answer to this question, except to say, “Who wants a cuttle-rat?”

Finally the man straightened and looked directly at Duke. Not many people were brave enough to look directly at Duke, especially not skinny doctors with bulbous, greenish-brown eyes the color of pond scum. You’d think a doctor would want to do something about those eyes. They seemed to be about to fall out of his head.

He looked like a newt.

The doctor said, “I’m not making pets here, Mr. Goodson. No one will be custom-ordering a cuttle-rat.”

“Call me Duke,” said Duke, with a flash of his white teeth. He would refer to the doctor as “Dr. Newt” to anyone who asked.

“I’m researching the properties and features of certain animals, and whether those properties and features can be successfully transferred to other species while maintaining the health of the test animal. In this case, I want to see if rats can manifest the ability to change the color of their fur the way a cuttlefish can change the color of its skin.”

“How would that work?” Duke said. “Fur is dead and skin is—”

“I don’t have the time to explain the science, Mr. Goodson.” The doctor looked at his watch. “And I don’t see the specimen I was promised.”

The gall of the little salamander, to interrupt Duke Goodson, the fixer’s fixer, as if he were a nobody. Duke was tempted to fizz the man and leave him on the floor to be eaten by his cuttle-rats. But Slant wanted to work with the doctor, and it was Duke’s job to arrange such things, no matter how irritating a job it was. And he’d had a lot practice working with cold-blooded creatures. Possibly more practice than the doctor himself.

So Duke took a long, slow stroll around the lab. Small cages lined the periphery and he took his time scrutinizing each one. There was a guinea pig with a strange, long-furred tail rather like a monkey’s. A snake with a dozen tiny pink feet. The smallest mice that Duke had ever seen that flew around their cage on bright blue butterfly wings. And then, there was a cage full of rabbits that looked perfectly normal.

“What’s with the rabbits?” he asked. “They don’t look any different to me.”

The doctor sighed a dramatic, overlong sigh and marched over to the wall. He flipped off the light. The bunnies that had appeared normal glowed green in the dark. “I injected a naturally glowing jellyfish protein in the embryos of rabbits. Now they glow.”

“That’s quite—”

“Nothing. It’s nothing. Or rather, it’s something that impresses investors but nothing more than that. Not yet.” He flipped on the light, and Duke Goodson squinted at the sudden brightness.