I couldn’t seem to make my legs move. “Hey,” I said, trying to joke with Indigo, a silent presence behind me. “Maybe you could turn your collar purple and make a veiled threat.”

“Was fear of Number One what got you into the tunnel last time?” Indigo asked. His quiet voice seemed louder in the smallness of the strut.

Not so much fear of Number One as fear of what Number One was about to do to Quint, if Quint had refused to enter the tunnel. Somehow, knowing that Indigo would probably kill me if I refused to continue wasn’t as strong a motivator as One threatening Quint.

I stepped under the ladder and stared up after Tamara. It was even smaller than I’d expected. When she reached up for the next rung, her elbow bumped the wall; when she leaned back to glance up, her hair, floating in the microgravity, brushed against the tunnel beside her head.

There was no way I could do this. There was no air in there. I was breathing as quickly as I could down here and even then I couldn’t get enough air.

Indigo said something to me in Sister.

“What?” I said, the one word in Sister I remembered, and all I had breath to speak.

He spoke in Kystrene. “Number One raised me.”

CHAPTER FORTY SEVEN:

I’m Susceptible to Bribes, But Only in the Form of Grammar

“She—what? One? The Ultraviolet Minister is your mother?” Another thought struck me. “Wait, did you just speak Kystrene?”

Indigo ignored my last question. “She is not my mother,” he said, in Sister. “Ministers do not have families. Place your hand on the first rung.”

“I—what?”

“Your hand,” Indigo repeated, patient and somehow gentle, though his expression had barely changed. “Place it on the first rung.”

I stood a moment, baffled. Then I reached out and put my right hand on the rung at eye level, the first step towards ascending the ladder. I glanced up as I did—a mistake; the impossible length of the tunnel dizzied me. Tamara had stopped, obviously wondering where we were; the tunnel was too tight for her to even turn her head around properly—

“Ministers do not have families,” Indigo repeated behind me, calm as a deep, deep pool. “I know my genetics, who shares them and how far removed we are, and I was brought to term as an embryo with forty other Ministers, but neither the Ministers who share Mara Zhu’s genetics nor the Ministers who were raised with me are my relatives. Yes,” he said, seeing something in my expression, “I know that my genetics are primarily received from Mara Zhu.”

Mara Zhu’s last message, her grief-struck face, despairing in the dark. There was something of his ancestor’s despair, I realized, in Indigo’s mannerisms. I couldn’t tell exactly how or why—his expression, certainly, was serene—but it was like hearing snatches of a song in midair; much easier to recognize the song if you’d heard the tune before. Perhaps he was just a melancholy person. Number One had been somber, too; maybe that was what happened when you were several hundred years old, or maybe she’d taught him to be a little bit sad. I said, “But One raised you?”