Indigo shut his flashlight off.

There was still light in the room, very faint, coming from behind us. I craned my neck around and experienced a heart-jolting moment of terror that we would be sucked out to space again, this time without return, before I realized what I was seeing: the hole in the hull behind us was sealed up with that oil-slick surface the Ministers had used to enter the Nameless in the first place. Indigo must have grabbed me, cut a hole in the hull, and sealed it up with that substance, and he must have done it in a matter of seconds. Faint orange light filtered through the warping rainbows of the oil slick, and there was no way to tell where in the Nameless we had landed.

Indigo’s collar light was dialed so low it was nothing more than a suggestion of glow out of the corner of my eye. He was inching backward, guiding me with him. Whatever else was in the room with us shuffled closer.

Something hard pressed into my hand, and I closed my fingers around it. Indigo had passed me his flashlight. I’d lost my own in the explosion. I heard the sound of metal against hardened leather. He was drawing his long knife.

The flashlight weighed in my hand. It would bludgeon, in a pinch, but if I broke the flashlight on something’s skull we would have no source of light except Indigo’s collar.

Indigo shoved me, hard, and I landed with bone-jarring heaviness atop something that broke beneath me—old furniture, long-forgotten. Something growled, not like a dog did but like a man did, between animal and language. Someone slammed into a wall, and something crashed and shattered in the room. There was the wet thud of splitting flesh, and a cry of pain that could easily have been Indigo or the… whatever was in the room with us. I grabbed for the flashlight, jarred from my hand by the fall, and flickered it on.

The beam of light caught Indigo leaning forward, keen, and the flash of a pale and long-limbed figure retreating from the light, leaving dark blood behind.

Indigo said, “Run.”

He was already moving with that slippery inhuman speed of his. I had to scramble up to keep him in sight.

The flashlight bounced as we ran, and did fuck-all to illuminate the path, showing floor and door and wall in isolated useless pictures like camera flashes. Indigo led and I didn’t know how, darting this way and that, through rooms upon rooms upon rooms of unknown purpose. And through it all I heard them chasing us, the manikins with their plastic skin and their black blood, nails scraping on metal.

We crashed into them once, in the dark. Indigo’s arm arched, sword in hand; I saw a spine, a back, a splayed limb at odd angles. Something came up behind me and I swung around at it wildly with the flashlight, felt it impact the manikin with a force that jarred my arm straight to my shoulder, and the light went out.