There was something different than usual about her expression. It was hard to put my finger on it, weirdly hard to focus. I felt a little short of breath. Panic attack? The room was pretty small, but no, it was big enough, and I didn’t feel scared. Actually, I felt pretty funny.

She wasn’t trying to anticipate me, I realized, insight rising to the forefront of my mind like a bubble popping. Tamara usually looked at me with something like suspicion, trying to stay a foot ahead of me, to plan for whatever I might do next. She wasn’t looking at me like that now. She was just… looking.

Very closely and very intensely, too. I smiled at her sheepishly through the glass.

Another thought bubbled up, oddly disparate. “Wait,” I said, and my mouth moved a beat slower, it seemed, than I’d wanted it to. “Did the button work? Did it lock the door?”

Tamara gave me a thumb’s up. There was a dark bend to her brows—like Indigo, I thought. Indigo always had a little frown.

Where was Indigo? It had been a long time. I wondered what that meant. Was he dead? Or was he systematically lopping off all those little Children’s heads, one by one, like plucking dandelions?

The thought was so unbelievably horrible that I laughed again.

Slam. Something struck the glass, harder than before. I looked over to find Tamara leaning hard against the glass, her jack-o-lantern eyes so wide the whites showed all around. She pointed, frantic, down at something on the screen before her.

I leaned into the glass to peer out and onto the screen. There was some sort of diagram there, but it didn’t mean anything to me. “I don’t know,” I said to her. And then I thought maybe she wanted me to translate, so I took another look. All the letters were upside down, and it was weirdly hard to rotate them in my head.

“It’s not a word,” I said. “It’s just some letters. P-S-I. I don’t know what the graph is. Maybe it’s a mechanical thing. If it’s not grammar I can’t do it. I don’t know it.”

The slam of her palm against the glass, even muffled, jolted my attention back to her. She was mouthing something at me through the glass, frantic, intent. I tried to take a deep breath—surprisingly difficult—and focus.

She was mouthing a word at me in Sister Standard. Of course she was, I mused, thinking about common phonemes, the way Tamara’s particular accent affected the shape of her lips and jaw when she spoke. Tamara didn’t speak any language other than Sister.

Vacuum, she was mouthing at me. Vacuum.

Vacuum? I thought, and had the odd, irresistible urge to yawn. My jaw clicked, and like that was a signal, for an instant my thoughts were clearer.

Vacuum. The sealed door, the thick glass. My yawning and euphoria, my shortness of breath.

I was in a vacuum chamber, and the air was being sucked out.