“Our names are not for outsiders to know.”

“You don’t have to say it aloud,” I said. “That way I won’t accidentally call you by it in front of anyone. You can just show me in Light. Can you even say your name aloud? Or do you only have a name in Light?”

“My name can be spoken aloud,” Indigo said. “There is a transliteration system to describe spoken language in Light. Which I will not be teaching you. But I will make you a deal: If you can make it to the end of the ladder with me and Tamara, then I will show you how to speak my name in Light.”

I laughed. He was like a dentist offering a child sweets. “Bribery,” I said.

“A Minister doesn’t bribe,” he replied, gravely enough that I thought he was joking.

We climbed.

Each step upward lifted me, even as I found myself running into the left-side wall when I tried to climb straight. That was the spinny-force, and I knew it was the spinny-force, but it was hard not to let it disorient and frighten me, like maybe the wall was moving towards me, like maybe the whole space was getting narrower and narrower. Soon I was no longer climbing ‘up’ so much as I was crawling forward, up and down losing meaning as up and down ceased to exist. No horizon and no gravity. I shut my eyes against the disorientation and set my jaw against the nausea and climbed by feel alone, bracing myself in place with my ankles, pulling myself forward with my hands.

And then my next reach found no rung. I tumbled out into an open space, fumbling for my flashlight, and opened my eyes to the vastness at the center of the ship.

The walkway visibly curved around the central point of the ship—the walkway was a ‘ring’ around the central point, lined with handholds. Several ladders stuck out of the floor, identical to the one we had climbed up; all the struts of the ship intersected here, at the center of the wagon wheel—and beneath the massive, weirdly-formed monstrosity of the engine.

My flashlight beam glinted off it. An ancient thing, long dead. Cracks in the metal had been patched over by Dreamer-bots, gleaming like silver lightning against the old and blackened shell. But no heat radiated out at me; that engine had not been functional for a thousand years, ever since Mara Zhu had ensured that her ship would never escape the trap of the supernova she’d put it in. It was awesome, and terrifying. My momentum in tumbling out of the strut had me drifting towards that massive cracked shell, dizzy and awestruck; but my path towards the engine was curving mysteriously away from the center and towards the walkway some distance from where I had emerged; I floundered, baffled, in midair, until a hand caught my heel and dragged me down again.

I bounced off the walkway next to Tamara, flashlight beam flashing around the empty room, until I had the sense to latch on to one of the handholds and stop myself from flying out into empty space again. Indigo was clinging to the wall—floor—whatever a few feet behind Tamara.