Something to close it off. Okay. He needed a barrier of some kind. I swept my flashlight around the floor, looking desperately for a piece of debris large enough to use.

“Here.” Tamara handed Indigo a sheet of metal from inside the wall that he’d cut open. He tore his hand back—I saw red on his palm—and slapped the sheet over the coin-sized hole in the wall, crushing the Dreamer-bots that had already come through. They rained delicately down, glinting silver shards in my flashlight. Indigo ran his heated blade over the edges of his metal patch, melting it into the back of the shelves, and snatched his hand back quickly.

My heart was pounding unsteadily. “God of Blood, don’t tell me they actually eat metal,” I said. This ship already had people-eating children and spectral, vengeful manikins; not to mention the acid-spitting rocks. That was a full deck of horrors. I didn’t need the eye-eating bees to start chowing down on solid metal, too.

For some reason, Tamara was rummaging around inside the wall that Indigo had cut open. “I don’t know if they eat it,” she told me tersely, “but they can certainly get through.”

Indigo was breathing harshly to my right, and leaning against the wall. He looked more exhausted by the past ten minutes than he had during the entirety of our struggle with the manikins. Fear spiked through me. “What’s wrong with you?” I asked.

He took a breath. “This sword uses metabolic energy to reach a heated state.”

So making the blade hot enough to carve metal was exhausting him? Kind of a design flaw. “Didn’t they put that through beta testing?”

“It’s meant to be a backup system, but the primary batteries ran out several hours ago.”

And there weren’t exactly any places to pick up fresh batteries on the Nameless. Also, was I imagining it, or was the sound of the buzzing behind the shelf growing louder?

“So we can’t fight,” I said. “Let’s pick up and run!”

“No good.” Tamara’s voice was muffled, head and shoulders inside the wall. “They’ll break through that before we can get more than a few feet away.”

“So we put up a stronger barrier first!”

“They won’t just stop chasing us!” Tamara emerged from the wall clutching what looked like a pipe and a length of wire. “The bots are in hunting mode. They detected a threat to the ship—us—and they’ll chase the threat until it’s eliminated.”

The humming of the Dreamer-bots on the other side of our barrier seemed louder than it had before, whether because they were chewing their way through the metal, or because of the profound silence that had fallen on our side.

“So what are you saying?” I asked. “Those things are going to follow us until they kill us?”

“Until they kill something.” Tamara was—incomprehensibly—wrapping the wire around the little pipe or screw or whatever it was. “They’re not that sophisticated. They know there was a threat; they know they need to kill it, and they won’t stop until they do. They don’t remember exactly who or what the threat is.”