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I didn’t have time to evaluate it further, because Yani grabbed me by the arm and hauled me right past them and into the hall. Their burning eyes watched me go, and Kurt looked both uncertain and pissed off. Dazed, I rubbed sweat off my face as we retreated to my quarters.

“What—” I started to say, but broke off when Yani shook her head. Right. I pulled a device from a drawer and turned it on.

It immediately lit up red.

Yani’s mouth straightened, and we spent half an hour searching the tiny quarters. We finally found the listening device under Yani’s stool. Lucky for them she wasn’t inclined to farting.

When I inserted it into the deadzone canister the Drolgok had given me as a birthday present, the monitoring device went green.

Yani nodded in satisfaction. “What are they listening to?”

“Piano music,” I said. I would have preferred recorded belches, but apparently it didn’t make the top 100 list. I pushed my hair off my face, as it had, once again, escaped its pins. “Maybe the effing Drakes can use it as an insomnia cure.”

Yani pulled her hat a little lower over her pointed ears and curled her lips back from her teeth in her best approximation of a human smile. “Perfect. ”

My general state of malaise only increased my angst. “Where did those guys come from?” I asked.

“They could have loaded an entire troop on board while we were in that room, and we wouldn’t know,” Yani pointed out.

“This mission stinks,” I exploded. “They are very worried about us discovering what they are up to. Why not just fly this cargo to the Nirzks themselves? Why involve us at all?”

“That is an excellent question.” Yani agreed, taking a bite of her now-cold wrap. She chewed while I waited for an answer. Eventually, I took a bite of my own. For the first time in days, food didn’t turn my stomach.

Yani had been thinking while I consumed. So had I.

We exchanged a look.

“We need to know what they’ve got in that storage bay,” I said.

She nodded. “Yes. Yes, we do.”

“But they’ll have everything locked down,” I pointed out.

This time, in her effort to mimic my human grin, she showed me all her teeth. They were pointy and impressive and totally blew the cheerful vibe she was no doubt going for.

“No one,” she said, “knows this ship better than me. And we have a secret weapon they are not privy to…”

Yani dashed off to her own quarters before returning.

It turned out that her secret weapon was Sookie.

“I’ve trained her to help me inspect the ship’s wiring and ductwork,” Yani explained. “She can get places I can’t. I found a badly frayed coupling just a few days ago by sending her along the service conduits.”

I peered at what she held in her hand—her datapad, and a little harness with something attached to it.

A camera .

“But—can you direct her? ”

“Oh yes,” Yani stated. “She knows the word for every room on the ship. I just pick the section of conduit or duct I want checked, put her at one end of it, and she’ll follow it to that room.”

The ship had air ducts throughout, of course. Including the ones servicing the aft storage area. My gaze rose to the ten-inch grate on the wall above our heads. Far too small for anyone to crawl into, but no problem for the hedgegopher.

Yani strapped the harness on before she attached the camera to it. Sookie fluffed her pale fur. Had the tips always been so pink?

The Drolgok fiddled with the orientation until the camera sat in the center of the hedgegopher’s chest. “If she lowers her head, it gets blocked,” Yani said. “I’m not usually looking ahead of her. With any luck, it will give us a glimpse of what those Drakes are hiding.”

“It will likely just be a crate,” I theorized.

“Can’t see them going to all this trouble keeping us away if it’s just a crate,” she replied.

That was true. We pulled the stool beneath the grate and Yani wrestled with the cover, pulling it off. I handed her Sookie.

“Aft bay,” she told the little hedgegopher.

Sookie wiggled her nose at Yani, and then vanished into the duct.

“I hope they don’t spot her.” I bit my lip, suddenly uneasy.

Yani wasn’t as worried as me. “Even if they do, they aren’t likely to think we’re using her as a spy. They’ll just think we have a rodent infestation.”

We huddled over the datapad, staring at the tiny screen as Sookie hurried through the ducts. My quarters were in the ship’s midsection, but the ship wasn’t huge, so it wasn’t too far for her to go.

The hedgegopher only took one wrong turn. There was no lighting in the duct, but every time she passed a vent into a room, it cast illumination into the duct itself.

Therefore, periods of darkness interspersed with brightness.

Sookie paused at each vent, before moving on.

We got rapid glimpses into the rooms they serviced, including one of Kurt sitting with the Drakes in the galley.

I figured they’d be still ignoring him, but instead they seemed to be engaged in a conversation.

Before we could get a good look, Sookie moved on. A moment later she peered through another grate, and I saw Senaik and one of the guards leaning against the wall to each side of the aft storage bay door.

The screen went dark again, and I think we both held our breath.

Then she was there. The storage bay was serviced by five different ducts. Sookie paused briefly at each one, before moving on.

I narrowed my eyes, trying to see all there was to see. And there was a lot to gawk at. The first glimpse revealed a cage mounted in the center of the bay itself. An actual cage, with thick bars and a metal grate floor with waste containment beneath it.

But it was what was suspended within them that I couldn’t wrap my mind around. Three Drakes, with manacled wrists stretched and fastened above their heads. Metal mesh wrapped their wings to their bodies, and their tails were similarly strapped to one leg.

It was like getting kicked in the gut. My heart hammered and I couldn’t breathe—surely, I had to be wrong.

The screen went dark again, as Sookie turned around to make her trip back.

“Can we get still photos?” I requested.

Yani punched a few buttons, and called up a pic of the cage with its occupants. She studied my face.

“Have you seen them before?” she asked.

As I avoided her gaze, my heart raced so hard that I shook. Because it was as though everything in my life had come together to arrive at this very point.

People had a word for it. And it echoed now through my very soul.

Fate.