I followed Tamara when she moved, hurrying down the stairs. The stronger gravity as we descended was somehow just as dizzying as the weaker gravity had been on the ascent. It felt like someone had their hands on my shoulders, pushing me down.

Indigo caught up to me several levels down, after we’d left the crowd of watching Children behind. “Are you all right?” he asked me.

A slow brightening, like a flower blossoming. A dual throb like a heartbeat. I knew his name now. And now I knew that he hadn’t always been what he was now, cold and brutally efficient. Number One had taught him that. I wonder what he would have been like otherwise.

“Yeah,” I meant to say, but instead I said, “My sister’s name was Brigid.”

His expression changed when I said her name. Like looking at my own face in a mirror. I didn’t care how he felt my pain and my grief, or even that it was a Minister who grieved my sister with me. It just mattered that he did. A slow brightening, a dual throb.

“Brigid Wren,” Tamara said, and I didn’t bother to correct her with the real last name, because when Brigid was alive she and I were Harts, not Wrens. “It’s a lovely name. Keep going, Sean. It’s all easier from here.”

She hadn’t been lying. I suspected Lantern-Eyes did not often lie for reassurance; she’d lie, probably, in the line of duty. Maybe she’d lie to all those little sisters of hers about how close they were to their destination on a road trip. But I didn’t think she’d lie just to comfort me.

We took another brief rest on the nearest landing, then continued on. Lantern-Eyes had been right—travelling through the center of the ship, as exhausting as it had been, was a lot faster than going around the edges would’ve been. There were still Children in the strut, but they stuck to the edges, watching us from safe distances.

It was a relief to be where the gravity was as it should be, though I wasn’t enthused by the possibility that we might run into manikins again. I thought I saw a little Child-sized shadow dart into a doorway behind us, watchful, following, but I wasn’t sure and I didn’t mention it to my companions. If we were in danger, Indigo would let us know.

We had not gone far from the exit to the strut when Indigo stopped.

I didn’t hear him stop. Indigo walked so quietly that there was very little auditory difference between him following me and him not following me. But I’d become attuned to him somehow, over the course of our time traveling together, and I knew that he was no longer behind me. I stopped, too, and when I turned I found him standing in the middle of the hall, staring through a doorway into a room I couldn’t see. His collar-light illuminated his face like a city illuminated the clouds at night, and his expression was stricken, sad and terrible.