He reached in to grab one of the Lizards. It hissed and snapped at him. Also unlike Jonathan as a newborn, it had a mouthful of sharp little teeth. He jerked his hand back. “Where are those leather gloves?” he asked.

“Here.” Barbara handed them to him. He slipped them on, then caught one of the Lizard hatchlings behind the head, as if it were a corn snake back on the Nebraska farm where he’d grown up. It couldn’t get away and it couldn’t bite, though it tried to do both. He carried it up the hall to the spare room that wasn’t spare any more. When he set it down, it scurried into one of the many hiding places he’d set up in the room: an upside-down bucket with a doorway cut into the side. Carefully closing the door behind him, he went back and captured the other hatchling. “All right, we’ve got ’em,” he said as he started up the hall with that wiggling little Lizard. “Now we get to make something of ’em.”

Felless was doing her best to talk sense into an official from the Great German Reich ’s Ministry of Justice: an inherently thankless task. “If you do not do more than you have to control ginger smuggling into lands ruled by the Race, it is only natural that we have retaliated as we have,” she told the Big Ugly. “Is it not just that we should assist the passage of Tosevite drugs into the Reich?”

The official, a deputy minister named Freisler, listened as his secretary translated Felless’ words into the guttural language of the Deutsche, which she had not bothered to learn. He spoke with what sounded like passion. The secretary’s reply, however, was all but toneless: “Herr Freisler rejects this equivalence out of hand. He warns that drug smugglers seized inside the Reich, whether Tosevites or belonging to the Race, will be brought before People’s Courts and will be subjected to the maximum punishment allowed by law.”