Tamara and I waited a beat after she’d vanished, but none of the Ministers resurfaced from outside. My breath rushed out of me. I flicked the flashlight beam back on, drowning out the eerie corpse-glow of the collar-light I’d used to impersonate the dead.

“Well done,” Tamara said, sounding just as breathless as I felt.

We rushed into the now-empty room together, heading for the docking chute in the floor. All we had to do was step into the hole in the floor and climb down into the Viper below and—

And something was wrong. Instead of an opening, I found nothing but smooth metal.

Tamara crouched beside me. “This looks like it was welded shut.”

I felt along the edges, near where her fingers were probing. It had been welded shut, the metal ruined, melted into a solid hunk.

“The Ministers didn’t want anyone to be able to get into the Viper from the Nameless,” I realized. “If they needed to use the Viper, they could still get into it by traveling through the vacuum, and then just cut the docking chute off.”

“I can cut the docking chute off,” Tamara said, a little dubiously, and I found that she had one of One’s swords in her hand, the white metal of the blade gleaming in the flashlight beam. “But what happens then?”

Then the only way to securely connect the Viper to the Nameless would be a severed hunk of metal sticking to the side of the Nameless a mile away from where we needed. “We’ll have to improvise,” I said.

Tamara Gupta looked miserable at the thought.

We’d survived crazed monsters, a murderous AI, uncountable booby-traps, and the combined might of both the Ministers and the Republican military. The Viper didn’t stand a chance. Lantern-Eyes cut through the seal with One’s heated sword, and then we climbed into the chute. Once we were inside the chute she fumbled with Indigo’s gauntlet until she managed to produce an oil-slick seal, then she stuck her arm out through the seal, charged One’s blade again, and cut the docking chute off from the Nameless. The oil-slick seal held the air inside the Viper, even as that room on the Nameless was decompressed; I climbed down the last few ladder steps and went into the Viper proper while Tamara lay flat on her back and caught her breath.

“Come on, Lantern-Eyes,” I said, while I started up the Viper’s engines for a speedy escape, “it can’t be that bad.”

“Indigo wasn’t exaggerating,” she gasped.

I glanced out the cockpit window as the engines came to life. The Nameless was revolving, and I wanted to keep a close eye on where I was on the ship’s surface, so I came down as near to Indigo as possible.

Between spokes of the great wheel, the dying sun glowed, brighter and brighter still. The cockpit windows began to dim themselves automatically against the radiance, but the sun was still so bright it was almost unbearable, the glow of it swallowing up the shadow of the Nameless.