I waited for a while longer, fiddling with the flashlight, wondering when Indigo and Tamara would wait up, when I heard the scrape of a bare foot against metal to my left.

I swung the flashlight around sharply and the light blazed on the face of a Child that had been creeping into our camp. It froze when the light touched it, staring at me, mouth parted just enough to show the blunt edges of baby teeth.

I swung around quickly and found that three more Children had gathered on the upper staircase. They crouched down when my flashlight beam swept over them, hunched like frogs on the metal, watching me in eerie unison.

The one to my left was still frozen where I’d left him, far closer than I liked.

Okay. I wasn’t going to let them creep closer and closer until one climbed into my lap, all small cold limbs, soft and corpse-like. How had Lantern-Eyes gotten rid of them, again? Ah, yes.

I gathered myself, seated on the floor, taking one deep breath after another. In the darkness, with my flashlight averted, I heard the one to my left take a tiny, creeping step closer.

I filled my lungs, braced my legs, and then lunged to my feet and roared.

The Children scattered. I lunged at them so that they ran faster, shrieking, scrabbling on the ancient metal. I shone the flashlight after them and they ran like the Devil was after them, grabbing at their scabbed ankles, ready to bite their tiny little necks.

When I turned back around, Indigo and Tamara were both sitting up and staring at me. Tamara looked like a teacher on the verge of demanding a five-hundred-word essay detailing the choices I had made and why they were wrong. Indigo looked at me like he had never expected much of humans, and yet somehow we kept disappointing him anyway.

“Sorry,” I said, and my own voice sounded quiet after the screams I’d used to scatter the scavengers. “They were—I just—I think what really threw me off was that every time I looked back, they were a little bit closer.”

“We should keep moving,” Indigo said.

“Maybe they wanted to play cards,” Lantern-Eyes suggested, and slung her bag over her shoulder.

“I don’t like them either,” Lantern-Eyes said as we rounded the spiral of the platforms-and-stairs, climbing up another story towards the center of the ship, “but there were four or five of them and three of us. They weren’t going to attack with those odds.”

I was slowly realizing that I had been a victim of tricky perspective. The strut was massive, it was true, just as awe-inspiringly huge as it looked from the outside. But it wasn’t so long that it vanished away to a point in the distance, the way I’d thought at the base of the strut. Instead, the strut narrowed as it went, more of a cone than a tube.

On one hand, this was good, because it meant Indigo, Lantern-Eyes and I didn’t have to travel up impossible miles of stairs. On the other, each round further up the stairs was a tighter turn, the platforms briefer. The strut was getting narrower. When we got high enough, there wouldn’t be any more platforms, just a spiral staircase.