Four distinct claw marks, one for each of my four fingers, with my thumb tucked in. But the distribution was too narrow for the width of my hand.

I glanced sideways at Indigo’s hand, narrow and long-fingered. His hand would be just about the right size and scale. Whatever had clawed into this man’s chest had been human-sized, just with narrower hands than me. What had our ancestors gotten up to, in the final days of this nameless ship?

One flashed an indigo light down at us from her collar-light. The end of her sentence curved up, from a shade at the darker end of indigo to a lighter sort of dark blue. Intonation? A question?

Indigo responded with a full ascending spectrum, from red up to violet. One nodded to herself and said to me, “Get up, Mr. Wren.”

“What do you think killed him?”

“Something a thousand years ago,” One said, and flashed a white light from her collar light down the line. The Ministers started moving again.

“Wait,” I said. Indigo had just let the ribcage fall, rocking on the ground in the dust amidst the pieces of its own shattered bone. I crouched down and gathered up the pieces, setting them to the side, putting the larger chunks of bone near where they should have been, if I had not broken them.

“Is this necessary, Mr. Wren?” One asked.

I swept up a few smaller pieces and set them beside the spine. “I don’t want any angry ghosts to follow me around.”

“The dead are the least of your concerns on this ship.”

The Republicans had a mix of religions, though the Redeemer was the predominant god at the moment; on Kystrom I’d been raised to offer ritual blood to the God Who Shed His Blood For Us, which the Republic in general seemed to think was barbaric. The Chosen were such a small group they were hardly worth mentioning. The Ministers, I’d heard, had no gods at all. I had no idea who these old bones had worshipped a thousand years ago.

I could only offer what I knew. I hoped whoever these bones had belonged to wouldn’t be too offended. I touched my forehead, my heart, then crossed my arms over my chest, the way I’d been taught on Kystrom. A proper blessing for the dead required three people, to form the holy triangle around the bones, but I could only offer what I had, and the only thing I had was myself alone—

A palm touched mine where it hung outstretched. I lost the trail of my prayer, opened my eyes to find that the Indigo Minister had crouched down on the other side of the bones, one hand resting on mine, the other outstretched at his side where the third person should be to complete the triangle.

Two was still imbalanced, but not so much as one alone. Indigo met my gaze with dark, alien eyes until I stumbled my way back into the prayer. His hand lifted from mine when I had finished, leaving nothing behind, not even a trace of warmth.