I gave up. “Hey, Lantern-Eyes,” I said. “Do you have any rope in your pack?”

“What do you want rope for?” Tamara asked, but she was already reaching into her pack. It put her into a vulnerable position, head in her bag, but Indigo still stood between us and the Children. One of them, emboldened by his stillness, hissed a rasping breath over its palate and wavered on its feet like it was readying to lunge. When I turned my flashlight back the way we had come, the beam froze two Children in the act of creeping nearer.

Tamara had already found the rope in her perfectly packed bag. She zipped the bag shut and repeated, “What do you want the rope for?”

I took the rope from her hands, unwound it, and dropped one end into the open space over the edge of the railing. It bent with the invisible rotation of the ship—with the Coriolis force, as Tamara had been so helpful to remind me—until the end coiled on the platform several levels down.

Tamara’s eyes went wide.

“We’re not gonna make it through,” I explained, even as the first of the Children took another step too close to Indigo, and he had to lash out, cobra-quick, with his sword. The Child retreated, hand bleeding, pitch-black eyes narrowed. I started to tie the rope to the railing.

Tamara smacked my hands away. “Give me that,” she said, and took over the knotting, then hauled up some of the length of rope I’d dropped and made some sort of quick loop out of it. “There’s more down there,” she said, looking over the edge. “I’d better go first.”

Indigo jolted forward, driving off another Child. They were getting bolder. “Quickly, if you can,” he said.

Lantern-Eyes stared down at the long, long fall. I clapped her on the shoulder.

“Don’t worry, Lantern-Eyes,” I said, cheerful. “You got this. I’ll be right behind you.”

She looked at me and then, surprisingly, she laughed. She swung over the railing without another pause, her foot in the loop she’d made, and descended like a professional down and down and down.

I turned around in time to catch a Child reaching out for my pack with grimy fingers. “No,” I said, and swung the flashlight at it. I clipped its head and it staggered back.

“Sorry!” I said, horrified; the Child had fallen against the stairs and was blinking up at me dazedly. “God! Sorry—”

The Child lunged. Its teeth closed around my hand, tight.

If I wanted to name something with a deadly bite, I would talk about snakes and dogs, something that could really dig in there. But when human teeth close around your skin, you really understand that these are teeth made for splitting flesh and cracking carrots, which incidentally requires about as much jaw strength as breaking a fingerbone. The Child’s jaw did not latch on hard enough to crack the bones of my fingers, but I knew as soon as it closed around my skin that those teeth could, and would, split through my flesh and snap my bones.