I watched her swallow then crack her eyes open. Then those big jack-o-lantern eyes went wide as she looked at the Indigo Minister, kneeling before her with the Dreamer-bots swarming over his hand.

I swung my jacket over Indigo’s hand, trapping the nanomachines; he pulled his hand out as we had done before, and I pressed the jacket to the ground and put my weight on it. Several things snapped and crunched beneath my hand.

The sound of humming that had pervaded the room abruptly ceased. It was not just the swarm attacking Tamara that went silent—all sound, all movement, in the room went silent.

“Ah, shit,” I sighed.

The humming started up again, fierce and loud, a war-cry at static pitch, coming from every direction at once as every Dreamer-bot in the room rushed down upon us.

CHAPTER THIRTY NINE:

Impromptu Electrodynamics

There aren’t any swarming insects on Kystrom; what wasps and bees exist there had been domesticated into passivity over the years. Beekeepers had to keep their hives under tight guard, otherwise—speaking purely hypothetically, of course—badly behaved teenage boys could walk right up to a hive and come away with a handful of delicious, delicious honeycomb at zero cost. I’d only ever been stung once, but I’d thoroughly deserved it.

I’d never seen insects swarm. But I had, once, stood atop a hill while the weather changed. It was sunny where Brigid and I had stood, but I’d seen a veil of glittering shadow rush across the distant fields: the front of the oncoming storm.

“We need to take cover,” Brigid had said to me, because she was always attuned to the changes in the wind. I’d wanted to linger, fascinated by the ominous speed of that grey veil. By the time I agreed to run, it was far too late to escape. The rain fell upon our shoulders like a curtain dropping, driving us towards the ground, engulfing us at once.

Kneeling in the middle of the trashed library with Indigo and Tamara and hearing the humming of the swarms surrounding us felt like standing upon that hill and seeing the rain approach over the fields below. Knowing, deep down, that even with our little bit of warning, there was not enough time to escape before it hit.

Even so, I wasn’t just going to stand around and wait.

“Okay, we’ve got to fight,” I said. “I need a big flyswatter, or something.”

“We can’t fight them,” Tamara said. Her voice was hoarse, probably because of all the metal insects that had been trying to crawl down her throat.

“Sure we can; Indigo and I just killed a bunch!”

“There’s too many,” Tamara said.

Indigo stood up. For one stupid moment I thought he was going to run and leave us to our fates, but instead, he spun on his heel and swept his sword through the base of the nearest set of shelves. And his sword did go through: the metal parted, sizzling, as his blade passed by.