Right, I’d forgotten. Indigo’s sword could, if necessary, cut through metal: he’d cut through the outer hull of the Nameless twice already. The blade must be more than a simple alloy. It was, in fact, glowing faintly reddish in his hands with heat, a fact I would not have noticed had the Nameless not been so damn dark. Glowing blue at his throat and red at his hands, Indigo said, “Grab that shelf.”

It was a peculiar sentence to sound so ominous, but I supposed any sentence spoken by a Minister holding a burning sword was liable to sound threatening. “So I can use it as a flyswatter?” The shelf was wide and flat, but it looked a little heavy to swing.

“Just grab it!”

And then Indigo was off, moving like lightning across the floor—not towards the door or any sort of escape, but, oddly, towards the lifelike statues standing in alcoves behind where Tamara had been trapped.

The humming that came from all sides became abruptly louder, as if the Dreamer-bots had reached the edge of the stacks, and there wasn’t anything between us and them anymore. I stopped thinking and did as Indigo said, wrenching the shelving unit from its ancient position with a scream of metal.

A crash from behind me, even louder than the removal of the shelf. Indigo had swung his superheated blade through the feet of one of the statues and the statue itself had fallen, smoking, the acrid stench of plastic biting the air. On its side, the statue’s oddly animate face seemed to stare at me, as agonized as a theatre mask. With the statue fallen, the alcove behind the statue was exposed—an indent in the wall, enclosed on three sides, and just about big enough for a Minister and two humans.

So Indigo didn’t want to fight, either.

Tamara looked a little wild about the eyes, but she strode across the floor towards the alcove where Indigo waited, her broken arm tucked against her chest. She paused only once, stooping down alongside her club and flashlight. I expected her to snag the club, but her bloody knuckles closed around the flashlight.

I was only a step behind, the metal of the shelf shrieking against the floor as I dragged it without a care for caution or stealth. It was discolored by age, but the metal seemed solid, and it was heavy enough. I made the mistake of glancing back, over the shelves I carried, and saw the Dreamer swarm approaching like the line of rain across the hills: glittering and shadowy, massive and all-engulfing, approaching me faster than I could run.

And then Tamara’s good hand was yanking me back by my jacket, and Indigo deftly took the shelf from my grip, shifting it so that it completely covered the entrance to the alcove. He lifted his sword and ran the blade over the edges of the metal. It was so narrow in the alcove that I felt the heat of the blade as he reached past me. The metal edges of the bookcase sizzled and melted to the walls of the alcove, and, for the moment, sealed us into an airtight tomb.