Indigo said, “So if one of us remains behind, the other two can escape.”

“None of us are dying to those things!” I snapped.

An audible crack, and part of the bookshelf split open, admitting a sheet of Dreamer-bots like a slice of light through a gap in a curtain. I scrambled in the wall for another sheet of metal while Indigo swept his sword through the swarm. No effect: they moved around his blade like leaves on a current, and advanced all the faster.

Nothing. There was nothing in the wall. I felt something very light settle against my shoulder. “Indigo—”

“Move,” Indigo gritted out, and I flinched back just as he carved through the wall overhead, and a large sheet of metal crashed down where I had been leaning. I grabbed it and, using it as a shield against the Dreamer-bots, shoved it up against the deteriorating metal shelf. Even as I did, I felt more nanomachines crawling on my back, on the shell of my ear. I tried not to shudder or flinch, and I didn’t dare to let go of the metal sheet that was the only thing holding back the rest of the storm. Indigo leaned in past me, his face pale and drawn, and sealed this sheet of metal the way he’d sealed the others; I fell back onto the hallway floor and grabbed at my collar and head. Indigo’s fingers were narrow in my hair, drawing the machines away; he threw them onto the floor and stomped on them before they could rise. I knelt, panting, trying to decide if the creeping feeling on my spine was a Dreamer-bot or my own trembling.

Indigo said, sounding very calm, “If not one of us, then we need to find one of those creatures—manikins—and seal it up with the nanomachines.”

Tamara made a thoughtful noise. “Could work,” she said, speaking around the now wire-wrapped pipe she’d pulled from the wall, and disassembling her own flashlight one-handed.

“Or we could find a solution that doesn’t involve sacrificing another living creature!” I said, just as the Dreamer-bots broke through the barrier at the bottom left corner.

Indigo carved off a piece of the wall overhead immediately, and I slapped it over the weak spot, my heart pounding. No sooner had he sealed it than our first patch broke, the Dreamer-bots drifting in lazily, like the first tendrils of smoke preceding a house fire. We sealed that, too, but it didn’t matter, because the shelf split open down the center.

I could swear that, right after the shelf split open, in the instant before the Dreamer swarm burst through, everything was frozen. The cloud of Dreamer-bots glittered and revolved, in some subtle and incomprehensible way; I could not have traced the paths it made. The longer I looked at the movement of the glimmering nanomachines, the more convinced I became that the paths were untraceable—and that through the million glittering eyes of the nanomachines, a single eye, a single mind, alien and incomprehensible, watched.