Minister or Republican soldier; like choosing between ground glass or rancid meat for dinner. Neither sounded great but at least one was less likely to kill me later on. I rolled up onto unsteady feet and followed Lantern-Eyes across the room, stumbling into broken metal cribs.

Behind me I heard Indigo getting to his feet. If getting spaced hadn’t stopped him, I wasn’t sure Lantern-Eyes’ smoke bomb was going to do the job. She led me to a rat-hole in the wall, hidden behind the broken cribs, and shoved me down.

“Go!” she barked, the ear-splitting command of a trained soldier, and I looked past her at Indigo striding towards us through the thick mist, collar-light gleaming.

Lantern-Eyes’ hands landed on my back and collar and she shoved me further into the rat-hole. I scrambled, Indigo’s flashlight clicking against the floor—somehow I’d kept a hold of it—and crawled through the wall and out into a different part of the ship. It was a room, I thought. The walls were in long ragged tears, like someone had clawed at them until the metal had given way. That was all I could see in my little beam of light

Lantern-Eyes rolled out of the tunnel after me, reached up and tugged a nail out of the wall. A torn-up section of wall slid down to slam against the floor, totally covering the little rat-hole we’d crawled through. She moved like clockwork, sure and steadily paced. This wasn’t a spur-of-the-moment rescue: she’d planned it.

“Up now,” she said to me, and strode off into the dark as soon as she’d spoken.

I scrambled up, flashlight swinging wildly. “Who are you? Are you really a Republican soldier?”

“I’m a lieutenant. Keep your voice down.”

I couldn’t see the path in the dark; Lieutenant Lantern-Eyes might have been creating the path herself, guiding me into formless dark. She was a quick walker, sure of herself and familiar with the ground. I hurried to keep up.

“I thought you were one of the original crew,” I admitted, obligingly lowering my voice. “You just showed up out of nowhere, and there wasn’t supposed to be anyone on this ship. They were studying how to make themselves immortal here, right? But you’re from the Republic, so you can’t have been here long. Are there more Republican soldiers on the way? Is it because of the Ministers?” Another thought struck me. “What’s your name?”

“Reinforcements will arrive in a few days; the Republic sent me here five years ago to find the Philosopher Stone data, which I know you know something about,” Lantern-Eyes said, “and if you don’t shut up soon, we will both be torn apart by the native species.”

“Wait,” I said. “They sent you here alone?”

From far off behind us, invisible in the dark, I heard a sudden CLANG—as if, say, an angry Minister had been crawling through a tunnel and hit a slab of metal some Republican lieutenant had put there to block his way.