The manikins hated me, but the Dreamer felt nothing for me at all.

And then the swarm of nanomachines rushed down upon us.

Tamara had been right. I knew it as soon as they descended. We had no chance of fighting them: there were simply too many. I swung my arms, but they evaded my clumsy swings as deftly as they’d dodged the blows of Indigo’s sword. No matter how I twisted or writhed, I could not stop them from settling on me. They were all so light individually, so weighty all at once; I felt little feet pricking their way across my face. Would it hurt when they dug through my skin, through my eardrum, down my throat and past the membrane of my eyes? They prickled against my skin, but I could only imagine how much more they would hurt when they finally crawled and ate and dug their way inside me—

And then they all fell off me like dust. I blinked open my eyes and found the floor around us was covered in a glittering snow of knocked-out nanomachines. Indigo had reached out one arm over my shoulders, for all the good that had done; he blinked, looking just as surprised as me.

In the midst of the fallen nanomachines, Tamara Gupta crouched and panted, a pile of wires and metal on the floor in front of her. It reminded me of the messy circuit projects Brigid had liked to make.

“What’s that?” I asked, swallowing sour fear around an unwanted spike of aching grief.

“EMP device,” Tamara said.

She’d made an electromagnetic pulse weapon out of scrap metal and a flashlight. That was… well, unreasonably impressive, except that I kind of wanted to kill her. “Why didn’t you say so before?” I demanded.

“It wasn’t done and I needed to focus. This will only knock them out for a moment. Get up and follow me if you want to stay alive.”

She got up, leaving her disassembled flashlight on the floor, her broken arm grimly tucked into her shirt. Indigo and I hurried down the hallway after Tamara while she ran, lightless, with the certainty of one who knew these passages like the back of her hand. We ran through hallways, taking quick turns, until finally she led us into an empty room, where she pulled a grate off the wall overhead and exposed a very narrow ventilation shaft.

“Give me a boost,” she said.

“You want to go in there?” I asked, horrified. The shaft was too narrow for hands-and-knees; it was another belly crawl.

“Yes, and I can’t get up there one-handed. Hurry, or we’re all dead!”

Indigo had shut the door behind us, for whatever good that would do. I knelt beside the wall and offered Tamara a stirrup of my hands, hoisting her up into the ventilation shaft like an acrobat. Her heels disappeared seconds later.

Was I imagining the distant sound of buzzing? Maybe I was, maybe I wasn’t. That ventilation shaft looked incredibly narrow—I’d already been in enough tiny places in this ship; twenty minutes ago, even, I’d been in that little alcove. “Maybe I should take my chances out here,” I said. “I don’t think—”