A twinge from the back of my neck felt like a rubber band snapping. I winced and lifted my hand to rub the base of my spine, around where the implant was. The skin felt swollen and hard.

“Are you hungry?” Benny asked. He was peeling open one of Tamara’s rations, wrapper crinkling.

I let my hand drop. “That one doesn’t taste good unless you warm it up. Is Quint around?”

“We can’t exactly make a campfire.”

“Where’s Quint?”

“Dead.”

Dead. I hadn’t liked Quint, exactly, and she hadn’t cared about me one way or the other, but I’d still known her. Thinking about her dead added another ache to the collection of pains that made up my physical form. “How’d she die?”

Benny finished unwrapping the ration, looking at it instead of at me. I wondered how long it had been since he’d eaten. “Ship’s full of monsters. Some of them got Quint.”

I wondered which monsters it had been. If it had been the manikins, swift and efficient, or if little Quint with the fussy hair and the frightened eyes had been torn apart slowly by a horde of black-eyed Children.

“What the hell happened to you?” Benny asked. “You were just lying there when I found you, bleeding. And what looks like something else’s blood down your front.”

I glanced down when he gestured and realized that I did, still, have a dark stain down my front from Indigo’s blood. It was smeared all over where he’d leaned against me, and spread in drips and streaks down from there.

I was alive, though. And conscious. I’d been infected by the Dreamer; there was no doubt about that. And Tamara had said that no one she knew of had survived.

“I’m not sure,” I admitted, looking down at my hands. There was blood flaking off them, too—I was a mess. “I thought I was dead. I was travelling with Lantern-Ey… with that woman who appeared out of the wall when we first arrived, remember? Turns out she’s a Republican officer… And with the Indigo Minister.”

“How the hell did you swing that?”

“We needed each other,” I admitted. “There are monsters on this ship.”

My hand twinged, in the same sharp rubber-band way as my spine. I rubbed at the skin—and stopped cold.

Beneath my palm, something was moving.

I lifted my hand quickly, holding it before my face. Maybe it was the poor light, but I couldn’t see anything on my skin. Just a myriad of little cuts accumulated on my journey through the Nameless.

Benny spoke around a mouthful of Tamara’s rations. He didn’t seem to have noticed my panic. “So they tried to kill you, left you for dead?”

I pressed my fingertips to the back of my hand. Nothing, nothing. “Uh, no. I stayed behind to fight off some monsters. Indigo was hurt.”

Then: there. Beneath my fingertips, under the skin of my hand, something moved. Something very, very small.

Out of habit, I turned to look at the second door in Tamara’s saferoom. In all my dreams, it had read LAB 17 on its front. In reality, there was no inscription at all.