I heard a harsh intake of breath behind me that I knew in my bones was Indigo in pain, and reached out, stupidly, blindly, to find where he had gone. He caught my arm instead. “Run!” he said again, and pulled me along in the dark, the useless flashlight still in my hand.

We stumbled, slammed into walls, but the sound of harsh breathing and nails scrabbling faded until I heard nothing but my breath and Indigo’s, our boots thudding against the ground, until Indigo hauled me to the left so sharply he nearly pulled my arm from its socket and shoved me to the floor.

A door slammed and light ignited in the room; I shielded my eyes but saw Indigo with his hand on his collar light, touching the hidden dials on the side. He was bringing it up to its full brightness, blazing white like a star and illuminating the room we were hunkered in. It chased all the ancient shadows from their rotten corners, and filled the rotting tomb of a ship with brilliance.

The room we were in had been a nursery. The paint-flaked plastic bars of a crib had fallen off not far from where I sat, like a cage split open from inside. I stared in mute horror at a rotting mobile of a smiling sun.

“Is the flashlight working?” Indigo asked. He leaned against the shut door. His hand was bloody, red blood, his physical exertion favoring the iron-based circulatory system over the copper. He’d left little smears on the surface of his collar-light that glowed violet.

To my relief, the flashlight head had simply been jostled loose; when I screwed it back on the flashlight flickered back to life.

Indigo reached up to his collar-light and dialed it back down to a faint glow, wiping away the stains as he did. I said, “How much power does this thing have?”

“It’s kinetic.” He left the door to walk back towards me at the wall. “If it runs low, shake it.”

“And your collar-light?”

He sat down next to me and began to empty the pouches strapped to his belt. His short sword rested across his knees. It was only then that I realized we had both lost our packs of supplies.

“Metabolic,” he said. “It recharges from body heat, electrical impulses across my skin. So long as someone is wearing it, it will work indefinitely. If I die, it will glow for seven days at lowest luminosity, just under two hours at highest.”

So we wouldn’t immediately run out of light. I set the flashlight down, facing the shut door; there was enough spillover glow to see Indigo’s face as he began to set out medical supplies from his pockets. “Do you know where we are?”

“No.”

“How are we going to get back?”

“We aren’t going back,” Indigo said, examining the cut on his hand. It was still bleeding. “We’re going forward, to Mara Zhu’s office.”

“Both of us?”

He set a first-aid machine down on the floor with a clatter. “Would you rather I had let you suffocate?”