“Was that woman who escaped a member of your crew?” One asked.

“What woman?”

“The one who vanished into the wall before Two could catch her.”

“I don’t know anything about her.”

“Then she wasn’t your contact aboard this ship?”

Contact? No one had any contacts aboard the ship; it had been abandoned for a thousand years. Unless my suspicion had been correct, and Lantern-Eyes was one of the original crew, made immortal and lost here since time immemorial.

If that was the case, then she would speak Ameng—which meant I was the only person she would be able to communicate with.

“I don’t know anything about that strange lady,” I said. “And even if I did, would you trust me to tell you the truth?”

She looked back at me over her shoulder. In the dark, the only light that illuminated her face was the cold violet-black of her collar light. Her eyes were pits in the underlighting, her high stark cheekbones the gleam of a skull. Immortal, undead patience regarded me. There was no telling how far my imp could push her—or what she might do when I pushed her too far. She was frightening in a way Quint’s Senator had not been.

My foot went through something in the dark, cracking and closing around my ankle like teeth. I stumbled. Hands caught me and hauled me up. The Indigo Minister had stopped me from falling.

One stopped, and so the rest of the line had halted as well. Indigo crouched down and shone his light at what I had stepped into.

Shattered, jagged yellow gleamed; a cage of old ivory, in a distinct and familiar shape. A ribcage.

I had stepped into a pile of human bones.

CHAPTER ELEVEN:

Signs in the Dark

The Indigo Minister gripped my foot and pulled it free of the ribcage. The bones had scored the plasti-leather of my boot, but not punctured through.

I tugged my ankle out of his grip, but Indigo was more focused on the bones than on me. They were old, old bones, meatless and yellowed, curved in the precise and subtle fashion of a musical instrument. Indigo turned them with a fingertip.

I bent down to see them better. There was something weird about the shape of the ribs. “What’s that?” I asked, and pointed to a gap in the cage of bones not far from where my foot had gone through.

“That’s the wound that killed him,” Indigo said.

He had a low, soft voice, like he’d grown up in a library. It startled me. I had expected One to answer. “Can you tell what killed him?”

Indigo turned the ribcage this way and that, with one finger hooked around the bone.

I said, “It’s not some Minister state secret, is it?”

“Not precisely.” Indigo released the ribcage, which rocked against the floor. “Claws.”

This time when I looked at the ribs I saw not just the place where bone was missing, but saw the scarring in the ribs around where something had carved through flesh and into bone. I held up my hand over the wound for scale, bending my hand around until it aligned correctly.