“Okay,” Tamara said, pushing her hair out of her face, hands to her skull, looking down first one way, then another. I said, “What is it? Which way do we go?”

She flung one hand out to point down the right fork. “That way’s not safe. I mean it’s closed off. We had to detonate a small explosive—my team and I. The manikins were chasing us, and we collapsed the room to stop them. We can’t go that way.”

“So what about the other way?” I asked.

She pushed both hands through her hair again. “I don’t know.”

“What do you mean, you don’t know?”

“I mean I never went that way,” Tamara said. “If I’d been everywhere on this ship already, I wouldn’t need you, Sean!”

“Let’s see what we can handle here, then,” Indigo said, calmly, just as the first of the manikins appeared in the glow of his collar-light.

I backed up hastily to give him the space to swing his arm without hitting me, and watched him sever the first manikin’s reaching hand. Tamara swore and lunged forward, dropping her pack to free her reach and swinging her club at a second manikin, knocking him away from Indigo. I fumbled about my waist for the big knife Tamara had lent me and by the time I’d drawn it, Indigo had one dead manikin at his feet and Tamara was relentlessly beating the one at her feet while it tried to claw at her ankles.

The hallway where it branched was just a little too wide for Indigo’s reach to cover it fully, even with Tamara beating things to a pulp nearby, and it wasn’t long before one manikin slipped around him and came at me. I raised my knife as it lunged at me, snarling a thousand years of hate, then changed my mind at the last minute and hurled my pack into its face instead. The pack hit it in the face and it stumbled, falling back at the unexpected impact. I slashed at it while it wasn’t looking at me.

My aim was decent, and I knew to expect the resistance of skin and muscle, so I kept a tight grip on the hilt of the knife. A long dark line carved through the manikin’s midsection and it snarled in pain, fighting to pull my bag off its face. It lashed out at me and I smacked it with the knife, but this time my aim wasn’t so good. I got its knuckles with the flat of the blade instead of neatly chopping them off like Indigo was doing.

My companions were trained killers but this kind of fighting was not, how had Tamara put it, my skillset. I needed a different strategy. I turned my flashlight to shine overhead.

The ceiling was just as decayed as the rest of the ship, just as decayed as I’d expected. Old pipes and struts, most of which looked jagged and sharp with broken metal and plastic. I spotted the cleanest handholds and leapt up to grab them just as the manikin freed itself from my pack.