“No, sorry for this,” I explained, and willed the door to close. There was a bright spark of pain in my palm as another of those little cuts in my skin was pushed open from the inside, and a tiny little machine emerged, smaller than my fingernail, barely a glint of light in the beam of Tamara’s flashlight. It vanished into the darkness of the wall where the door was hidden.

A moment later, the door slammed shut, cutting off my view of Lieutenant Gupta’s shocked expression.

I stood there a minute, staring at the shut door, inches from my nose. It was a very ordinary door, for the Nameless. Decaying man-made materials. No markings. A blank slate, right before my eyes, easy for my brain to project the image of Lieutenant Gupta’s face onto.

If I stared at that memory too long, I might see the betrayal in her expression. Why was she looking at me like that? This was what we’d said we’d do, all those days ago. I was just leaving in a way that didn’t get anyone killed.

I had to find my way back to Benny. If my sense of direction was correct, and I was pretty sure it was, I wanted to go thataway. I turned thataway and started walking, feeling my way through the dark. I wasn’t particularly worried about running into a manikin or one of the Children or whatever else was around; this zone seemed pretty abandoned and I bet every monster with a working brain—or single brain cell, or whatever the coral had—had realized very quickly that the wall was more dangerous than it was worth.

Several rooms later, my foot caught on something and I pitched forward, hard, to the ground. A bright bar of pain sliced along my thigh, just above my knee. I hadn’t been worried about the monsters, but it turned out I should have been worried about my own clumsiness. I sat for a second, examining the cut by feel. It was pretty deep, and bleeding enthusiastically. In a perfect world I’d say I needed stitches.

The pain of the gash didn’t compare to the solid aching of my skull. I probably wouldn’t live long enough to make stitches matter.

As I crouched there, examining my leg by feel, a pale glow trickled into the room like the first grey fingers of dawn. I went very still, as if that light hadn’t already heard me, as if its bearer didn’t already know where I was.

Indigo entered the room through the far door, serene and glowing, still wearing Tamara Gupta’s Republican Lieutenant’s jacket. He must have gone around, I thought numbly. While Tamara was chasing me directly, Indigo had figured out where I was headed and had gone to cut me off.

There was no hoping he hadn’t seen me. I was crouched out in the open, and he was staring right at me. We looked at each other in silence for a time, and then he reached out one hand towards me.