As soon as it had opened, Lantern-Eyes stepped through, peering up towards the ceiling.

“Here we are, gentlemen,” she said, her voice echoing. “The passage to the far side.”

I looked past Tamara and my jaw dropped.

The Nameless was a massive ship. I’d known that from the start—hell, I had been the one to fly the Viper to the Nameless to begin with. I had a very clear understanding of the size of this ship.

It was one thing, though, to see a ship the size of some moons through the glass of the Viper’s front windows. And it was another thing entirely to see the size of the ship as a small, squishy human, standing small and exposed beneath a space so massive it constricted my lungs, made my heart pound harder with awe and wonder.

The strut was perfectly straight, piercing directly through to the other side of the ship. It was so tall that I could not see the end of it, the staircase spiraling upward vanishing into a single point in the hazy diffusion of my flashlight’s beam. People had built this monster of a ship, had constructed something so vast and incredible it rivaled planets, something so strong and wonderful it would only be destroyed not by age and decay, but by the nearby supernova. It was awe-inspiring. It was unbelievable. It was immortal.

We had a lot of climbing ahead of us.

CHAPTER FORTY THREE:

The Worst Camping Trip of My Life

The journey upward started out all right. The way up was a mix of mesh stairs and narrow ladders, platforms and levels and layers, spiraling up.

Oh, no, sorry. What I should have said was that the journey upward would have started out all right, if not for the Children.

Apparently, we were not the only creatures on the Nameless to have realized that the central struts were a faster way of crossing the ship, and a relative safe haven from the more dangerous creatures like the manikins. I wasn’t positive I was seeing the Children at first—the walls of the strut were heavily reinforced, but the layers of reinforcement had decayed over the millennium; there were alcoves and holes in the walls around us from which little faces could peep, black eyes shining like ink.

It was only when Indigo said, “Should we do anything about them, lieutenant?” that my ability to pretend I hadn’t seen tiny fingers poking out between pipes was totally destroyed.

Tamara’s shoulders were high beneath the stiff shoulders of her uniform jacket, tense. “Not yet,” she said. “There’s too few of them; they shouldn’t attack.”

I didn’t like that verb, shouldn’t. It was a particular verb tense in Sister that implied they very well might. “You told me they were scavengers.”

“And vultures will eat live meat, if there’s no dead around. Nothing on this ship is harmless.”

“Precisely how dangerous are they?” Indigo inquired. He might have been asking about the price of a glass of wine he wasn’t sure he’d like. Over his shoulder, I saw a small shape curled up in an alcove in the wall, gumming its teeth on the metal edges, its attention fixed on the back of Indigo’s neck.