“I’m glad you’re not leaving me to be eaten by manikins,” I said.

“Mani—? Those creatures are alive.”

“I know, but they look like manikins.”

“Regardless of what they are or what you have named them,” Indigo said, “you are too dangerous to be left unsupervised. If you try anything else, I will kill you.”

“I didn’t try anything last time!”

“Were you aware of the escape attempt?”

“They improvised.”

“Were you aware of the concealed weapon?”

Benny’s hand-brace. “Yes.”

“You attempted escape. Try it again, try anything again, and I will kill you.”

Yet he’d saved me, when the hull had blown out. I watched him hold the first-aid machine over the cut on his hand. His fingers were trembling.

I said, “Do you think the others survived?”

The first-aid machine sprayed artificial skin over the wound on Indigo’s hand; the bleeding stopped. “Five was closest to the wall. He may not have been able to reach the hull in time. The others likely survived, and probably are together. I can’t speak for your companions.”

Five was the Yellow Minister. I could see his face in my mind’s eye, clearly, drifting through space unable to moor himself to the relative safety of the Nameless. Suffocating as slowly as he burned.

It was not a death I would wish on my worst enemy. I watched Indigo wrap bandages around his injured hand. Artificial skin did not always hold up well under repeated stresses, and it was clear that Indigo expected to need his hands.

I wondered how sure Indigo was that the other Ministers had survived. He was insisting on pushing on, going to Mara Zhu’s office, even alone, so maybe a part of him suspected that he was the only survivor. I wondered how long he’d known the Yellow Minister.

I said, “What about food? Water?”

“I have a flask of water and a few packets of dehydrated food,” Indigo said, still wrapping his hand. “I have some basic medical supplies. But that is all.”

So we had one knife, a single flashlight, a single flask of water, and a few packets of food that needed water to be edible. “There should be water deeper in on the ship,” I said. “Benny thought so. And the cockroaches. They don’t need a lot of water, but they do need something.”

Indigo split the bandage with his sword and began to tuck in the edges. The claw marks on his arm terminated abruptly at his gauntlet, where the hardened material had stopped whatever had lacerated his hand. I didn’t know what kind of claws these creatures had, but I was relieved that they weren’t so impossibly sharp they could carve through Ministerial body armor.

“Don’t worry, Indigo,” I said, while he tucked away the first-aid machine. “We’ll find supplies somewhere.”

“Why are you calling me Indigo?”

I hadn’t even thought he’d been listening to me. “It’s your name,” I said. “Well. It’s the name I gave you. It’s better than Number Two.”