I wasn’t looking forward to that.

“They were looking at me, Tamara,” I said. The other thing was that with each foot we gained in altitude, the simulated gravity grew a little bit weaker; the Nameless didn’t have modern art-grav, but old-fashioned centripetal gravity. The closer we got to the center of the ship, the faster we were spinning, the less simulated gravity was exerted on us. At the center of the ship there wouldn’t be any gravity at all, but the whatever-it-was-called, the spinny force, that would be stronger than ever. I was already wobbling a little on the stairs, my body and my eyes disagreeing mildly on the definition of a straight line. I couldn’t imagine how dizzying it would get once we reached the center of the ship.

“They’re looking at you right now,” Tamara said.

“Don’t remind me.” The Children weren’t limited to the stairs, platforms and walkways. Oh, no. They were climbing in and out of the walls like cockroaches weaving through rotting wood. My flashlight glanced over a little body hanging upside-down by its ankles, face red and swollen with blood.

“There do seem to be more of them as we go along,” Indigo said, which was absolutely the last thing I wanted to hear at that moment.

“Hopefully it will thin out,” Lantern-Eyes said, her airy tone not quite hiding the unsettled edge. “Another thing to remember if they do attack is that they bounce. They’ve got the elasticity of children. You know how you can just hurl a toddler at a wall and it’ll bounce back up?”

I didn’t like that she sounded a little shaken. “How many toddlers have you thrown at walls?”

“I have six younger sisters, Sean.”

“Six?” I said. “I could barely manage one. We fought like cats and dogs, I mean—”

I clamped my jaw shut, painfully, spasmodically. A dull sense of panic threaded through me. I hadn’t been paying attention, and the words had slipped out, slurs on a memory, graffiti on a gravestone.

“You have a sister?” Indigo asked me, quietly.

“Had,” I said. “What about you, Indigo? Any siblings?”

“I was born from a test tube,” he reminded me.

Maybe that hadn’t been my kindest comment. “Yeah, but,” I said, and then I realized I didn’t know if he knew that his genes had come from the scientists aboard the Nameless, that Mara Zhu had been, after a fashion, his mother as well as his creator. “You must know… I mean… who shares your genes,” I finished lamely.

He didn’t reply. Figures.

“Who was that other Kystrene you came with?” Tamara asked abruptly. “Your cousin?”

“Benny? We’re not related. He’s just a friend.”

“I see,” said Lantern-Eyes, in a tone I didn’t understand and was afraid to question.

“What’s that?” Indigo asked suddenly, and when I looked where he was pointing, I saw something growing in the wall, all twigs and leaves.

No, not growing. There were twigs there, meshed together with tubes of plastic and metal, but the ‘leaves’ were scraps of fabric knotted through to create a sort of raft-like object.