Gio came over to stare at it, too, nostrils flared thoughtfully. Over in the corner, Milly was finishing the last of her cakes, stacking them on their plates before using a small hose to remove the excess sugar from the counter where it had fallen.

“I suppose you’re not going to let me touch that,” Gio signed in the direction of the eggplant.

“Nope,” Dabry said.

Gio’s wrinkled lips pursed in amusement as he traded glances with Niko. She grinned back. Over the course of their long time together, her quartermaster’s skills had provided more than one vital ingredient for the restaurant.

He was one member of the crew Niko would have trusted anywhere at her back.

Everyone she’d brought out of the Holy Hive Mind was that, really.

With a sole exception.

As though summoned by the thought, Lassite appeared in the doorway, his narrow, scaled face a brown gleam half hidden in the folds of the bloodred velvet hood he always wore. His grayish mystic’s robe hung in loose folds around his small form, half as tall as Niko; he was habitually skinny and not prone to regarding his appearance overmuch. Niko counted herself lucky she’d been able to impress on him the importance of better grooming if he was to serve as the restaurant’s maître d’. His tongue flickered out, sampling the air, which was full of the smell of the onions that had just been lying under Gio’s flashing knife.

“Heavy portents, my captain,” he said, voice a low, compelling whisper that always reminded Niko of a villain in a childhood viddie. “Dense and inexorable as a black hole’s grip, pulling us down into dreadful doom.”

“Goodall’s tits, say what’s coming or better yet, how to keep it off,” Gio signed. He darted a glance at Niko and added, “Not that I believe in prophecy.”

She ignored him. “Your prophecies were wrong the last three times,” she told Lassite. “You need to stop sharing them with people. They’re always discouraging. You are a swarm of negativity. I’ve told you this before, it doesn’t do us any good when you make customers afraid by hissing doom.”

“I haven’t done that for days and days,” he said sullenly.

“That’s not true. You told that Venorian triad last night that they would ‘come asunder as though torn by lightning, just as sudden and fierce these forces.’”

“Captain, I feel compelled to tell you when I sense that the fates are stirring.”

“But let them get all the way out of bed next time, at least!”

Unlike the delivery bot, Lassite was not immune to the power of Niko’s stare, and she unleashed it on him in its full, cold force. He took a pace back.

“I will do better,” he muttered.