I shone my light on the doorways around us. Most of them didn’t seem to have doors at all anymore, or never had; one or two had doors visible inside the wall where age had frozen the ancient mechanisms.

The first thing I’d done on this ship, to prove to One that I could read Ameng, had been to open and close a bunch of doors. “Are there any functioning computers around here? We can lock the doors behind us so they can’t follow.”

“Can’t we close doors manually?” Indigo asked.

“No. See?” I shone my flashlight at the nearest doorway. “The Dreamer isn’t maintaining any of the purely mechanical doors, so they’re rotten. Maybe we’ll find a few that we can open and shut but I’ll bet that the only doors that still work will be in an area with a functional computer system.”

“So we’ll trade one monster for another,” Tamara said.

“If the computers are working, the Dreamer has no reason to be there,” I pointed out.

I knew I’d made a good point by the way she rolled her head to the side. “If we go into the lab suite instead of walking alongside it, there should be more electronics,” Tamara said at last. “We might be able to find some functional doors there.”

“Someone should stay and stall the Children so they don’t realize what’s happening and find a way around the blockade before you can set it up,” Indigo said. I heard the sound of him drawing his long knife, leaving little doubt about who he thought that ‘someone’ should be.

I very much did not want to watch Indigo killing Children again, real ones or not. “You have fun with that,” I said. “Come on, Tamara. Let’s find a working door,” and left without looking back at Indigo.

Tamara caught up after a moment. “You’re going the wrong way,” she told me, and her hand was a solid anchor on my shoulder, turning me in the right direction.

The first few rooms were empty, dust and darkness. I shone my flashlight around in all the corners and saw no electronics. When I examined the doors I found them corroded, rotted into place inside the walls. We moved deeper into the labs. I didn’t hear anything from the hall, which meant either the Children had not attacked Indigo, or he was killing them very quietly.

“Every time I think I know your skillset, you show up with a new one,” Tamara said.

I glanced away from my examination of the lab door. “What?”

She waved her flashlight at the doorframe I was looking at. “You know Ameng, picked up enough Light language to impress Indigo without even trying, and you know what to look for to tell if these doors are functional.”

I couldn’t tell what she was asking, if she was asking anything. “It just makes sense,” I said. I knew what corroded metal looked like; Benny and I had done our own repairs on our starship for a while. This wasn’t all that different.