I expected all through the impromptu lesson that Lantern-Eyes would interrupt, remind us that we were surrounded by monsters, that we had to keep moving. But she was silent while Indigo taught me a prayer in his native tongue.

At last Indigo seemed satisfied, and he turned away from me to face the body in the container. I stood shoulder-to-shoulder with him, hand on the dimmer to my flashlight, nerves jittering through my fingers. It was that old anxiety, that a god wouldn’t listen to a prayer poorly phrased. I had to get this right.

Indigo started the prayer and I followed him, keeping to his pace, my flashes as precise as I could make them.

“To you who have died, from we who don’t intend to die, your bodies will remain here, but your lives will be remembered,” Tamara said behind us, her voice rough but clear, falling in cadence with our flashing light.

It was my translation, smoothed out and strung together. Indigo dialed his collar-light back to its customary dark blue.

There was a question I’d been wondering since Indigo had arrived on this ship, that he’d never answered before. I dared to ask him again, in the weird fragile peace of the three of us standing there, surrounded by corpses. “Why do your people need the data so badly?”

Indigo looked at me, one hand still resting on his collar-light. His face was a mask.

“We should find a place to rest for the night,” he said. “We’ve traveled far today.”

Just like that, the fragile… whatever that had existed in the room between the three of us broke.

CHAPTER FIFTY TWO:

A Hot, Piping Cup of Coffee with a Side of Creepy Children

I woke up from a deep sleep full of weird dreams, about Brigid crawling around with a bunch of little ghost children and trying to tell me something important, but I’d forgotten Kystrene so I couldn’t understand. The sadness followed me out of the dream and I lay there for some time, letting it sink out of me like water into soil.

Finally I rolled my head around to look for my companions and found Tamara awake, sitting against the wall with the little campstove radiating heat in front of her. She’d led us to another of her saferooms, this one in what seemed to be an old pantry, shelves collapsed, and all the comestibles long gone. Indigo was on the other side of the campstove, curled up knees to chest.

Tamara had been on watch when I’d gone to sleep. Either I hadn’t been sleeping long, or she and Indigo had come to a different arrangement regarding the distribution of who would watch when.

I sat up, my head still cloudy with sleep, and cleared my throat. Tamara raised her brows at me, an unspoken dare.

My words died. I cleared my throat of them, and said instead, “I guess you don’t have any coffee.”

“I,” Tamara said, “would kill a man with my eyeteeth for a cup of coffee.”