Intrigued, I glanced in the other direction down the hall. My flashlight showed nothing but the gaping mouths of old doorways.

“Why?” I asked, once I had reached my count of ten. “Does the counting mean something?”

I heard her rustling and moving around out of sight behind the door. “It means that if you don’t notice something the first three times,” Tamara said, “you’ll notice it the fourth. Take this. Keep counting.”

She passed me a ragged bag through the crack in the door. It had the Republican military insignia on it, but where the owner’s surname should have been embroidered, the fabric had been cut out. The cut was very neat and precise, even though I knew Tamara must have done it with a knife.

Tamara wove her way out, two more bags on her arms. She clicked her tongue to get Indigo’s attention and he came towards us without any sign that he resented being called like a dog.

“Here,” Tamara said, holding out a bag to Indigo at the absolute extremum of her reach. “I had enough trouble getting supplies on this ship in the first place, you’d better not lose them.”

I poked through the bag she’d given me. Everything had been packed together very tightly for maximum compression. Inside I found the same kind of ration packets I’d stolen from her before, alongside bottles of water, a box of matches, another flashlight, rope, and a knife.

“Where’s the salt and pepper shakers?” I asked Tamara.

“What?”

“Well, you’ve got everything else in here,” I said.

“If only. I’d kill a man for a packet of salt.”

“Just for salt? What would you do for some sugar?”

“You don’t want to know,” Tamara said.

I flicked on the flashlight she’d given me. It wasn’t as bright as the one I’d taken from Indigo, but it worked. I held out Indigo’s flashlight to him.

He shook his head. “Keep it,” he said, and to Tamara, “How many of these caches do you have in the ship?”

“Some twenty, twenty-five. My team left caches throughout the ship,” Tamara explained. She’d zipped open her own bag of supplies, checking over the contents. She probably had some strict system for checking that, too, like maybe she had to count all the water bottles three times. It didn’t escape my notice that she’d acquired a new club to beat up monsters with, too. I wondered if she’d restocked the hidden caches of huge knives about her person. “After it was only me left, I tried to survive on what I could steal from the farmlands so I had these for emergency.”

“That was wise,” Indigo said, and it might have been a compliment, but for the absolute neutrality of his tone.

“Done,” Tamara said, and swung her bag up over her shoulder. “Now, both of you, follow me.”

She led us to a door, not far from her supply cache. It was a fairly large door, and heavily rusted. It groaned and complained when Lantern-Eyes tried to haul it open, and only really came free when I got my hands in next to her and added my weight to hers.