We wove through maze-like rooms, kicking up dust with our feet, and following the trail of other people’s footsteps through the decay. As we went I held my hand out, palm-up, letting nanomachines spill out of it like smoke from a quenched wick. Each nanomachine I sent out through my palm had one simple directive: disable the bombs in the hull nearby Indigo’s location.

At last Tamara and I ended up at a hole in the wall, carved through, where the footprints stopped.

“We’re going back into the main ship now,” Tamara told me, sticking her head through the gap in the wall. “Which means monsters. Keep a sharp eye out.”

“Yes, ma’am,” I said.

“Stop ma’aming me. I’m a deserter now.”

“You’re still a ma’am to me,” I said.

I thought about that as I followed no-longer-Lieutenant Gupta through the hallways of the Nameless. I hadn’t asked her to desert her post, or Indigo to turn on his own people. But they had done it, both of them, because they trusted me.

No matter that Tamara had lured me and Benny here as bait, or that Indigo had led the army that attacked my planet. I wasn’t going to lose either of them here on this ship. Not like I had lost Benny. Or Brigid.

We were walking together down a dark and narrow hall when I said, “The last thing I said to my sister before she died was that I wished I was an only child.”

Tamara’s steps did not falter, nor the alert sweep of her head, checking for monsters. “Did the two of you fight often?”

The memory came free bitterly, like pulling a stone free of tar. “Yeah. We were really close in age, so I think that’s why we… we fought a lot.”

“If you were close in age you must’ve played together a lot, too.”

“All the time. I mostly played with my sister, when I was a kid.”

“Brigid, right?” Tamara asked. “Sean, I have six siblings. I’ve fought with all of them at some point in our lives, sometimes fought with them continuously. Sometimes I said or did things to them, or vice versa, that as an adult I would never stand from a stranger. It sounds to me like you and Brigid had a pretty normal relationship. If the Ministers hadn’t attacked Kystrom, you would’ve grown out of your fights. Or maybe you wouldn’t have. Either way would’ve been normal. Did you love her?”

Not until after she died, I almost said, the echo of the Dreamer’s interpretation of my deepest nightmare, but I swallowed the words back and thought about it: Brigid, annoyed, posting signs on her door to keep me out; Brigid, calling me down for dinner, her voice a high playful taunt; Brigid, smiling at me conspiratorial at night while our parents bustled on, assuming we’d both been successfully put to bed.

“Yeah,” I said.

“Did she know that?”

The last thing I’d said to her had been I wish I was an only child, cruel and stupid, and I would’ve forgotten about it if it hadn’t been unintentional prophecy. I’d probably said things like it before, only I couldn’t remember, because none of them had resulted in me being an only child scarcely eight hours later.