My shoulders brushed the walls on either side, and I had Tamara pressed against my spine and Indigo against my chest. The only light source was Indigo’s collar-light, but that was more than enough to show how tiny our hiding place was. I tried both to stand very still and to find some more space by shifting, my heart pounding hard against my too-tightly-compressed ribs. We should’ve just run; that would be better than sealing ourselves up in our own little coffin. I cleared my throat, but my voice came out several pitches too high nonetheless. “Uh, how are we going to get out?”

The deep blue light from Indigo’s collar flickered with invisible motion, and then his sword slammed into the wall near my ear, carving straight through and slicing down. I gasped, overwhelmed by the heat and the stench of burning metal and plastic, and by the time I exhaled the wall behind Tamara and I gave way.

I landed half atop her, half on a metal floor. There was already significantly more space around me than there had been before Indigo had carved a hole in the wall, but I groped around for the flashlight I’d shoved into my pocket and flipped it on to confirm. We’d cut our way back into the hall.

A successful escape. I cleared my throat and said, “I think we could’ve taken them.”

Indigo stepped elegantly out of the alcove on his own, upright and glowing blue. The effect was only a little bit ruined by the exasperated look he cast me.

“We couldn’t have taken them,” Tamara said. She looked like crap—aside from the broken arm, there was blood trickling down from her hairline—but she was sitting up under her own power, a grim set to her mouth. “There’s no beating the Dreamer.”

“You saw us crush a handful of bots,” I reminded her.

“A handful. There are more nanomachines on this ship than you can imagine, and they’re self-repairing. The ones you crushed are probably reassembling themselves right now, and manufacturing more to meet their needs. You could fight them, but nothing you could do would stick. You’d be overwhelmed in minutes.”

“So we ran,” Indigo agreed.

Tamara shook her head. “In another few seconds, they’ll eat through the metal.”

As if to confirm Lantern-Eyes’ ominous prediction, a screeching crack echoed from the barrier Indigo had made of a shelf in the alcove—like metal splinters dragged across metal. I grabbed for Indigo, as if he hadn’t heard it, and we all turned to look back inside the alcove just as a tiny, coin-sized hole opened up in the shelf. At first it admitted only the warm glow of the electrical fires beyond. And then a line of Dreamer-bots fed themselves through that hole. So narrow was the hole, so tightly compressed were the nanomachines, that they looked like nothing so much as a ghostly, silver finger sticking itself through the wall.

Indigo shook me off, then reached into the alcove to set his palm over the small opening. His expression twisted, as if with pain. “I need something to close off this opening,” he said.