“I can’t understand you,” Tamara said.

Light flashed over my shoulder, a familiar dark blue. Indigo stood downhill of me, staring over me at Mara Zhu. She babbled on in Ameng, something pleading, and Indigo flashed light at her urgently, quickly.

“Can you understand her?” I asked Indigo, who flashed no at me.

“What are you telling her?” I asked, but he only flashed blue light at me, and the grammar was too complex for me to understand.

There were too many languages being spoken. My brain was struggling to translate them all, even in the dream, and the effort was bringing me closer to waking.

“You can understand me, though,” I said to Indigo, and wondered why a Minister would speak Kystrene.

“I can’t tell what you’re saying,” Tamara Gupta complained.

“Typical Republican,” said a familiar voice, in merciful Kystrene. “Doesn’t bother to learn any other languages.”

Benny stood a little distant from the rest, opposite Tamara.

“Oh, thank God,” I said when I saw him. “Someone to talk to.”

He shook his head, resentful. “You don’t understand at all.”

Mara Zhu was suddenly speaking louder than the rest. She had something important to say. Lantern-Eyes fell silent; Indigo’s light went dark. When I looked for Benny, he was gone. Mara Zhu’s voice got louder and louder, the Ameng shouted, but it was a dream, the words weren’t real words, but I struggled to translate them anyway, and the struggle of strange phonemes and foreign syntax drove me awake.

I woke with a jolt in blue-lit dark. My shoulders ached, my neck stiff. There was no longer a humming sound coming from the other side of the vent door. I could no longer hear any buzzing noises at all, in fact.

A pang of pity struck me. Unable to find us, the Dreamer-bots, it seemed, had come across a different victim. Whether that had been a manikin, or a Child, or something else I hadn’t yet seen, I would never know.

Tamara and Indigo sat exactly where they had been when last I saw them, their weapons in their laps. Neither of them was dead. Some sort of miracle, I thought, sleep-fuzzy.

Tamara said, “I can’t believe you slept through that.”

She would be too high-strung to sleep. “I knew you’d protect me,” I said.

Lantern-Eyes’ one functional hand had gone white around the hilt of her knife. Indigo had his impassive expression back in place but not quite concealing the currents I’d learned how to recognize in his dark-water eyes.

No one was moving, no one attacking. No one was speaking.

Well. It wasn’t like the imp was going to let me stay silent for long.

I cleared my throat. “Maybe,” I said, “the three of us could come to an arrangement.”

CHAPTER FORTY ONE:

Three Strangers and a Desperate Offer

Eight years ago, Benny and I had met on the streets of a dying city. We’d been relative strangers, but we’d fought to survive and escape together. And after we’d escaped, we relative strangers had made each other a promise—a promise to keep each other safe. And that promise had held through all these years.