Indigo examined the collapse while Tamara pressed her ear against the far wall, like she was listening to find out what was behind it. I swept my flashlight over the area again, searching for something—anything. We hadn’t even passed any doorways on our way here, so there was no point in backtracking.

Tamara lifted her head from the wall. “This is a hull wall,” she told us. “We cut through, and we end up in outer space.”

Indigo returned to the hall from the mess of the collapsed ceiling. “It’s too unstable,” he said. “I can’t cut through.”

A dead end. We’d gambled and lost. “How do you lose poker?” I asked. “Would you say, like, we got a bad card? A pair of ones? Bad roll of the dice?”

“Sean, if the last thing I ever hear is you talking about poker, I’ll kill you,” Tamara said.

How unlike the logical lieutenant. “If you’re dead, you can’t kill—”

The metallic clicking of claws on the floor was joined, then, by a high and awful shrieking: the sound of a thousand years of hatred. The manikins burst upon us.

Indigo stepped between the manikins, Tamara and I. I saw the underwater blue of his collar-light shine upon the first row of hateful, rictus faces, and then he was overwhelmed.

We were overwhelmed, too. There were just too many of them. I fell back against the hull wall, the knife useless in my hands, while Tamara swung her club wildly around, searching desperately for space.

A manikin came at me from the side; I saw it in the instant before it hit me. I slashed at it wildly, uselessly, making it recoil but not actually hurting it. Tamara was still beating a manikin to my right, keeping the bulk of them away from me; I glimpsed Indigo in the midst of the crowd of manikins just as one caught him across the ribs.

Indigo staggered, the most graceless he’d ever been. The manikin attacking me lunged, taking advantage of my inattention, and I moved too late: its claws sliced white-hot pain through my jacket, down my back. A switch inside my head that I had not known was there flipped: I turned and sank my knife into its gut. The manikin fell, taking my knife down with it. I watched it go down, watched a living thing die, and felt the heat of its blood soaking my hand.

One of the manikins fighting Tamara grabbed her by the hair. She kicked him away, sending him stumbling, then headbutted the next. That got her just enough space to swing her club again, but she was going to be overwhelmed, and quickly. I lashed out, wildly, uselessly, and missed.

And then the manikin holding Tamara was flung away like the darkness itself had grabbed it, and the stench of cooked meat bloomed in the air in time with the monster’s agonized scream. Indigo stood where the manikin had been, his sword glowing with heat and his jumpsuit gleaming wetly in the light. For the barest instant, the space around the three of us was free of manikins.