I recoiled, crashing into Benny behind me, while something ahead of me shrieked. The sound of it vibrated through my bones like metal dragging over concrete. I tried to retreat, but I couldn’t see the manikin in the dark. I couldn’t even see Benny or Quint, and I tripped over them when I recoiled, the three of us entangled and blind. I heard the air before me hiss, something drawing breath, inches from my face—

Sparks flashed, metal striking metal, and a body shoved me back. My already-unsteady balance collapsed, and I caught myself half on the floor, half on a warm shape that cried out with Quint’s voice. Nothing struck me, but something snarled in the darkness ahead, and then the hallway appeared again in a deep underwater blue. I blinked furiously, trying to understand how the opaque blackness had lightened for me, trying to figure out how to escape the silhouette that stood before me. And then I realized that the silhouette was Indigo, the blue glow his collar-light; he stood between us and the empty hallway where, a few seconds earlier, there had been a creature of tooth and claw.

There was nothing ahead of him now, not that I could see in the dark blue glow. What had that thing been? The shadows were deep; the manikin had slipped away, somehow, but Indigo still stood between us and any possible threat—or any possible escape.

The other Ministers were some distance behind us and still under attack, judging from the barely audible whispers of a struggle in the darkness. It was only Indigo here. I saw Benny lift his braced arm, aiming, for the second time, at the Indigo Minister.

I grabbed his arm and shoved it down before he could fire. The move brought me off Quint and face-to-face with Benny, face deeply shadowed in the blue dark. “He just saved our lives,” I said, lowly enough that only Benny could hear.

“He destroyed our lives,” Benny hissed back.

“We’ll get out of here,” I said. “But we’ll do it without anyone dying.”

Benny sat back, expression stony. I looked at Quint to be sure she’d understood and found her looking at me with a blank expression. Indifference. I think I would have preferred if she’d hated me.

Lights were coming back on, some distance down the hall. The other Ministers had defeated their opponents, it seemed, though there were no bodies that I could see left behind. I wondered anew at what sort of creature could fight a full spectrum of Ministers to a draw. Number One had both knives still drawn, held out like razor wings, and a strangely dark liquid dripped off one of her blades. She flashed a sentence in red light with a slight spectrum increase at the end. A question.

Red replied with a descending spectrum, violet to red.

One had asked Red if he’d found anything, I guessed, and he had replied: No.

Indigo came to stand over Quint, Benny, and me. I stood up, elbow-to-elbow with the Minister, and said, “Did the Red Minister find anything?”