“On the other hand, you can’t throw a punch, are a horrible judge of character, and couldn’t navigate yourself out of a paper bag. You know you were going in circles back before the three of us joined up? That’s how I found you, probably Indigo too.”

“I can throw a punch.”

“No,” Tamara said, with finality, “you can’t.”

There seemed to be nothing to say to that. I straightened up. “This door will work,” I said. “We just have to find the switch.”

She shone her light past me. “Except the room it leads to is a dead end,” Lantern-Eyes said, like I’d somehow proved her point. “If we lock the Children out, we’d lock ourselves in.”

We kept looking. The next few rooms were dead-ends, or the doors were broken, or there was an easy way around them. We struck gold deep into Lab 1, when we found a room that was larger than the rest, and had the gleam of electronics faintly lighting the dim.

A quick look over the door showed that it was in full working order. The Dreamer-bots had been hard at work here. I passed my flashlight over the room and found something odd to my right: this room was adjoined to a second, much smaller room, separated from this other room by a wall of glass windows. I could see that the adjacent room was small and empty, my flashlight filtering muzzily through the old and misty glass. Beneath the glass windows was a counter that was covered in a complicated array of dials and screens. The source of the computerized glow. That was where we’d find our lock button, then.

I went in to check the console. It gleamed beneath the dust, no rust or mold, and the screens glowing at my touch. Still functional. The Dreamer-bots had been working overtime on this. I wondered why.

“Okay,” I said, because the self-repair had taken care of the panel’s functionality, but had left most of the labels to fade and warp with age. “Look at you. Let me see—”

“Will it work?” Tamara had taken up position at the door, her club upraised. I pictured her panicking and smacking Indigo in the face with it.

Stupid thought; Tamara didn’t flail when she panicked, she froze up. “Sure I can do it, but I need a minute. I mean, is the right button labeled? Does it say door, or lock, or close, or what? There’s a lot of buttons here.”

“So focus,” she suggested.

“Talking is how I focus.” There really were a lot of switches. And there were even more once I got the screens online. And nothing was helpfully labeled with something like ‘lock the front door so that ravenous monster-children won’t grind your bones into dust with their excess of molars’.

The main computer screen seemed the best bet. I started flicking through glitchy old menus when a burst of light blinded me.

“Sean?” Tamara said, and I lowered my hand from in front of my eyes to squint ahead. The light in the adjoining room had come on—it was not particularly bright on its own, but after how many days of no illumination but my flashlight, it was blinding.