I could hear Quint behind me, breathing hard, murmuring some litany to herself I could not hear. There was no airflow in a space this narrow, which made it seem even smaller than it was.

Abruptly, ahead, Indigo was gone. My hand landed on gritty debris, stacked thick and impassible.

Quint bumped into me from behind. “Sean?” she said, panicked.

“A minute.” My flashlight was almost useless at such close quarters; the blinding white of it obscured more than it revealed. It showed nothing ahead of me except metal and dust.

I switched off the flashlight and swallowed, shutting my eyes against the afterimages and the dark. I stretched out one hand to feel for the path, wherever Indigo had gone. My hand landed on ragged, ancient metal and soft dust.

There was no passage ahead. Indigo had vanished, and I was trapped.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN:

A Way Out

“Sean!” Quint shouted.

My heart was pounding so loudly I could hear it in my ears. Trapped.

Quint’s hands shoved at my thighs, trying to force me forward. “Sean—”

“A second,” I said, and opened my eyes again. I turned my head, blindly in the dark, and caught a glimpse of a glow. I reached to the side and found open space.

I took a breath and tried to calm my racing heart. “The path turns sharply to the right up here,” I warned Quint, trying to sound calmer than I was. “It’s still passable, though.”

I twisted my body to make the sharp turn, and found that the path didn’t just bend right, it was an uneven S-shape; how Indigo had gotten through this in the first place was incomprehensible. I took a deep breath and deliberately did not think about how there was no backing out now: Quint was behind me, and Benny, and six Ministers all intent on moving forward.

No one had visited this ship in a thousand years, I told myself instead, as I contorted my body to follow the twist in the path, my pounding heart certain that I would become inextricably wedged into this curve and die here like a rat in a trap. This is an archaeological discovery for the ages, etc.

I dug my nails into the uneven floor and pulled my way through the twist. Ahead, I could see a faint indigo glow again. The path straightened out. My arms were not as strong as they had been a minute ago, but I kept crawling.

How far had Indigo said this path went? Ten, twenty yards? It had to be longer than that. The ship pressed down on me overhead, the weight of debris that had not fallen for a thousand years, but hadn’t been disturbed for the same thousand years. What if me shoving my way through, bouncing off walls that pressed in so tightly I had to hunch my shoulders together, was enough to disrupt some fragile balance and cause all that old metal and plastic and carbon to fall? I was starting to seriously doubt, too, Indigo’s assessment that there was enough breathable air here.