Not a colorless light, I realized, as we peered around the last corner that separated us from that glow. A light of many colors, glowing softly together.

The Ministers were between us and the Viper.

CHAPTER EIGHTY SIX:

Improvisational Linguistics

We’d turned off our lights as we approached, so they hadn’t seen us; Tamara, so attuned to the ways of the Nameless, had detected their presence before they’d heard ours, so they hadn’t heard us either. They were waiting in the room before us, some standing still, some pacing. There were only three of them present: Green, Orange, and Red. A fiery orange light flickered up from a portal in the floor where they’d cut through the hull and sealed the opening off with the oil-slick; their starship must be docked just outside. The Blue Minister was probably in the spaceship. Yellow and Ultraviolet were dead, and Indigo was on my side now; of the seven Ministers who had come aboard, only four were left.

If it had been just a matter of their presence, we could have retreated and snuck around them. But not far away from the oil-slick hole in the floor I could see a familiar shape sticking up out of the floor: the Viper’s docking chute. They’d force-docked the Viper to the Nameless in this very room.

There was no way we could sneak into the Viper without being seen.

I felt Tamara move next to me in the dark and knew, even without seeing, that she was reaching for her gun. I put my hand on hers to stop her. She was a good shot, I knew that. She had enough bullets now to take them all out. But I had seen the way the Ministers moved in battle before; I did not think even someone as good a shot as Tamara Gupta could take them all out at once.

And if she could—even if she killed only one of them—I did not know if either of us could face Indigo knowing that she had. Somewhere, somehow, the bloodshed had to stop.

I stood up slowly, lifting my hand to my borrowed collar.

The movement, or the sound of my clothes rustling, caught the Ministers’ attention. The Green Minister, who seemed to be the ranking color, ceased her pacing and snapped out something sharply in white collar-light aimed at our direction.

I didn’t know precisely what she said, but I knew it was a question. There was one question a human would ask in this situation, and that question was: Who goes there?

And the Ministers were human, after all.

I crouched down a little, from standing at my full height to standing at a height closer to what Number One’s height had been. Then I lifted my hand to my collar-light and flashed out my answer to Green’s question: two sharp flashes of ultraviolet light, like the twin blades Number One had worn. Who goes there? Kora.

It was too dim with only the collar-lights for us to see each other’s faces, and the room where the Ministers had docked was fairly large. Even so, I saw Green’s shoulders relax. She flashed out some other question at me, this time addressing me in ultraviolet light. The only word I recognized was a slow blossoming of light followed by a dual throb: Shay. She was asking about Indigo.