“Would you? Seems to me with a man like Last, that’s just asking for him to hurt worse.”

Turo’s eyes fell away. He patted through his pockets with an absent motion before he looked again at Niko, having summoned back his bravado. “Doesn’t matter. Tubal Last does what he wants, and so does his crew.” He swaggered back to the door.

“Ask them,” Niko said.

“Ask them what?”

“If it hurts.”

Turo hesitated, taking a breath as though to say something, then shook his head and exited.

“What was all that?”

“He’s in love with them,” Niko said. “I wasn’t sure until I saw the two in the same room, but he loves Petalia.”

“Do they love him back?”

Now Niko shook her head. “I never could read them well.”

“And how do you plan to put that to our advantage?”

Niko’s fingers described a long arc in the air as she thought. “It’s something in our pocket at least.”

She slumped back against the wall, despite the hope in her words. Tired, wounds throbbing, the droop made Atlanta feel even worse. It discouraged them all. All except Dabry, who simply said, “Sir,” at which Niko straightened.

“I cannot help it,” she said to Dabry. “Pet thinks I abandoned them. Maybe I did?”

Dabry shook his head. “All this time you have been working toward an end, getting them back. But we had to get out of the Holy Hive Mind’s army before you could begin to start scheming for that. We’ve been trying to make the restaurant keep us afloat—making it pay enough to fund a rescue expedition? We still had at least a year or two to go in that.” He gestured around himself. “And now, in actuality, you have somehow discovered a shortcut and trimmed a few years off the timeline. Well done, sir.”

Niko pulled her knees up to her chest and put her head on top of them. At first Atlanta thought the captain had given way to despair entirely, but then as the muscular shoulders heaved and Dabry cracked the smallest of smiles, she realized Niko was laughing.

They spent two days in the small room. Two days in a confined space was hard on all of them but hardest on Thorn and Talon. Atlanta thought that if it didn’t end soon, they would wear a track in the rugged flooring with their pacing.