Indigo was breathing hard. “Do you trust me?” he asked us.

That was surprisingly easy to answer. “Yes.”

“Do it,” said Tamara.

“Hold on to my waist,” he said, “and exhale,” and just as I’d grabbed his waist and put my other arm around Tamara, too, he plunged his sword through the hull wall and all the air rushed from the room, taking us and the manikins with it.

CHAPTER FIFTY FIVE:

Trust Me

PART TWO

I landed hard on solid metal and the lumpy shape of my pack, digging into my kidneys. I’d lost my breath as soon as Indigo had carried us into the vacuum of space, and I struggled to gasp it back now that there was air.

In the wall to my right there was a jagged hole cut in the starship hull, oil-slick surface sealing the opening. Blazing orange light shone through the oil-slick from the sun outside. It was the only light I could see. I’d lost my flashlight in the other room.

Something cold touched my neck, right over my carotid. I lashed out at it but it caught my arms instead of slicing my throat, and a shape appeared in my line of sight.

It was Tamara, mouthing words at me. She didn’t look too good. Her eyes were bloodshot from her introduction to the vacuum, and there were the beginnings of a massive bruise on one side of her face. Blood was drying in her hair.

Sound warped back into existence, and all of a sudden I could hear her saying, “Stop fighting! Sean, stop fighting! Are you okay?”

I could breathe, and see, and hear. I nodded at her, too breathless still to talk.

She nodded, but the tense expression on her face didn’t change. She looked past me. I turned to see what she saw and found Indigo braced on his elbows on the floor, his sword flat on the ground a few feet away. The material of the floor was bubbling around the heated weapon, raising a terrible acrid stench, even as the blade dimmed and cooled.

Indigo pushed himself up off his elbows—and then his arms gave way. He dropped his forehead to rest against the floor. There was a stain spreading beneath him, a peculiarly vibrant violet in the light from outside the hull.

Tamara scrambled over me towards him. It looked like although I’d kept my pack, both my companions had lost theirs. She bent over him, her oversized jacket obscuring my view. My ears were ringing again, but this time not, I thought, from any reaction to the vacuum.

The ringing was not so loud to cover up the sound of scratching nails further down the hall. Wherever Indigo had taken us, it hadn’t been far enough.

But maybe he’d taken us back into a part of the ship Tamara had been to, once. I pushed myself up. “Do you know where we are?”

“I think so.” Tamara was still bent over Indigo, the curtain of her dark hair hiding his face from me. She stuck her hand out behind herself, towards me. “Pass me the club.”