Turo’s backhand caught Niko by surprise, driving the skin of her lips against her teeth hard enough to split it in two places. Dabry’s eyes narrowed; Atlanta and everyone else winced. Niko touched her tongue to the swelling pain.

“Point acknowledged,” she said.

He hissed at her. “I don’t have to give you to him in perfect shape. Told me that himself. But you know what?”

He stared at her and she stared back. Their eyes locked like two blades shoved edge to edge, grinding till sparks showered. Her lips were pressed thin despite the off-kilter appearance that the bruised, puffed side gave her face.

His voice was low. The menace in it raked across the nerves of every living being in the vicinity. The other group had caught up and they were consolidated again, but stood, frozen. Even the constant whine of the drones’ engines, ever present and shrill, seemed to take on a frightened glint. “Same holds true for all of you. I’m thinking that hurting one of them will hurt you even more. So which one would you like me to hurt? The little girl? The fluffy pastry cook? Your favorite sergeant? Maybe the Squid. They burn real easy—ever seen that? So easy.”

Niko’s eyes dropped. Turo laughed. He stepped closer. “That’s what I thought, yeah? Big bad woman with a bounty, not so big, not so bad. Got your own … weak points.”

“Captain,” Dabry said urgently.

The door behind Turo opened. “Come along,” a voice said. “I’ve been waiting long enough.”

Turo turned to the voice. “Sir, yes, sir—on our way.”

Atlanta saw what Dabry had been trying to speak to, the detail that Turo had not noticed: the slender bone dagger that gleamed in Niko’s hand, its edge pressed near his privates seconds earlier. Before Atlanta was even entirely sure what she was seeing, it disappeared back up Niko’s sleeve.

They passed into the Zookeeper’s main room under Turo’s angry stare.

The door itself was unassuming; the space beyond it much less so. It spanned perhaps a hundred meters, might have been a vehicle hangar at some point. Now it was crammed with cases and cages and glasses and tanks, all occupied. Pillars of light were filled with jellyfish, minnows, living scarves, rippling ribbons in shades the humans could not see, but the Squid could, standing enraptured for a moment before a shove from Turo sent her to the floor in a sprawl of tentacles.

Atlanta had never seen a space so thronged with stuff: cupboards and incubators, terrariums and vivariums, a dissecting table surrounded by glittering instruments in the hands of stilt-necked robots. Beings hanging suspended in tubes of light and liquid, most moving slowly, a few not. Mechanical creatures, from crude clockwork to more sophisticated automatons whose eyes glistened with intelligence and emotions from the souls magically implanted in them.