I struggled to catch my breath enough to speak. Indigo waited, dark eyes merciless. I fought the blackness on the edges of my sight, and tried to tell him without speaking that I had tried to stop it. If I’d had a collar light I would have shone a descending spectrum, No, again and again and again. When I finally managed to choke out the word, it came out in Kystrene: “No,” I said, in the language of my dead people.

Something flickered in his expression, deep behind the eyes, like when he’d cut through Leah’s throat and then waited, blade at mine. He lifted his knife away from my chest, released his grip on my collar.

My head slammed back into the floor, lights flashing in my eyes. My eyes were streaming, overcompensating for their scalded dryness, wet trickling down my temples and into my hair.

Indigo grabbed my shoulder and hauled me onto my side. He pulled my shirt up, and my misfiring nerves suddenly got with the program and fired all at once. I cried out in pain. The side of me that had faced the sun was flayed agony.

Something cool and damp misted over my side. Where it touched, the skin went numb. Ministerial burn spray, I thought distantly, was a lot stronger than ours.

The sudden cessation of pain undid the last tether holding me conscious. I was cold all over, frost melting on my skin. My burning eyes shut, and the echoing dark swallowed me like a pit.

“Wake up.”

My eyes opened but I could not see. The sun had burned the sight from my eyes. I panicked.

“Hold still and be quiet.” It was Indigo speaking. Cold fingers on my face moved something from over my eyes, and then I could see the starkness of dark and light, Indigo’s flashlight fighting the dim.

Indigo himself was all contrast too, pale, black brows low over brushstroke eyes. His mouth was set in a line so grim it looked like it had been engraved on his face. He was holding a bandage in his hand, and the medicated smell of it lingered around my face.

My eyes itched, but no longer burned.

“We’re not alone,” Indigo said, so quietly it was more mouthed than spoken.

I curled my arms around my chest. My jacket was hanging off one shoulder, my shirt rolled up. Where I had been burned on my right side I felt nothing but smooth, painless skin, a little rubbery the way artificial skin tended to be. My chest and stomach ached like someone had kicked me hard, but I could breathe and move. Indigo shifted, slipping a hand under my elbow to guide me up, and I moved with him as quietly as I could, tugging my shirt back down and shrugging my jacket back on.

On my feet, the last traces of unconsciousness dripping from me like water, I heard what he had heard: something large shuffling in the dark.