Thorn and Talon never went anywhere alone. It was one of their greatest anxieties, being separated, and they had not been apart since the moment their mother, Patha, first brought her twins to the Holy Hive Mind. She did this knowing that they would pay her well, and that they would do to those children what had been done to her: expose the small forms to arcane forces that would twist them, change them, make them able to shift. Transformed from something that seemed as human as the next into a battle lion, one of the Holy Hive Mind’s shock troops, fierce and nigh unkillable, with a lion’s ferocity armored by nigh impenetrable magic, fangs and claws metal augmented, deadly.

And so they were changed. In human form, they were pretty men, full of the charisma that shifters naturally hold. In lion form, they were magnificent: amber manes falling long and silky, over a meter tall at the shoulder.

These were the forms that they chose to range over the bottom half of the ship, and the fascinated ship, which had never seen transformations like this before, had no objection, despite the fierceness of their deliriterium-reinforced claws or the fact that they could have shredded the inner hull. They explored in the manner of cats: using their whiskers to survey corners and get their dimensions, employing their sensitive noses to map the zones, the rise in humidity and organic scents that signaled a food space, the drier, more metallic smell of weaponry, the electric tang of living circuitry.

Eventually they came to a cargo hold where one side was lined with shelflike structures and abandoned themselves to play for a while, chasing each other back and forth across them before they curled up together and washed each other’s ears before shifting back into human form to talk.

“This place is ultra-weird,” Thorn said.

“So, so ultra-weird,” Thorn agreed. He stretched. “But better than being on a station that’s being torn apart.”

“You say that now, but Scourse is supposed to be a bad place.”

“A bad place that punishes bad people,” Thorn said. “We’re not bad. The captain’s not bad. They’ll sort things out.”

His placid reassurance conveyed itself to his twin. They stretched out in their sleeping forms, not quite human, not quite lion, amalgams of human and animal that both found more comfortable than either extreme, and napped.

Above them, the tiny drones and wall-ears that had been watching and listening and analyzing went back to other tasks. The ship put the data in a special section, along with the rest it was gathering.