Lantern-Eyes was still on her own, crushing the tendrils that got too close. But the tendrils on the walls and ceiling had traveled past her, and were dangling down behind her—she was trapped.

Indigo sliced at the tendrils on the wall by the lieutenant, his blade shrieking as it scraped down the wall. The tendrils behind Lantern-Eyes went suddenly limp. I smacked aside a tendril heading for my face with the lieutenant’s tablet and kept backing up.

“Work with me!” Indigo barked at Lantern-Eyes. I hadn’t even imagined he could raise his voice.

The lieutenant’s eyes went wide, then narrowed, determination set in place. She swung her club hard into the wall. It clanged like a gong, the reverberations powerful enough I could feel them.

The movement of the yellow tendrils shifted, lightning-quick, heading for the place where her club had impacted the wall. She pulled her club up over her shoulder, and swung again like a batter. The same percussion echoed out, too deep to be heard, only to be felt.

There were no more tendrils around me. Lantern-Eyes backed up, banging her club against the wall, luring the tendrils to the side. Indigo sliced at the tendrils when they got near, leaving piles of severed, smoking yellow on the floor.

We were quite far from the stone thing by now, and it seemed to be losing interest in us—some of the tendrils were retreating, pulled back into the lumpy mass, and the mass itself was roll-hitching itself towards the dead manikins on the floor.

Lantern-Eyes was halfway down one branch of the hall, still luring the last few tendrils away; Indigo was closest to the stone creature, slicing the last few tendrils apart so that they could bubble and sizzle on the floor. They’d drawn quite far away from me in the process.

Which meant that when one of the surviving manikins crept out from where she had been hiding, I was the only target left.

“Uh,” I said, and then my tongue tangled on itself, wanting to call for Indigo, to call for Lantern-Eyes, to call for both, either, neither. I faced down the bloodied manikin crouched down on the acid-scarred floor. Humanoid, but not quite human. The torso too narrow, the neck too long. The manikin was a nightmare of a man, like and not like. She bared her bloodied teeth at me, hatred in her weirdly human eyes.

She was between me and Indigo, me and Lantern-Eyes.

I ran.

CHAPTER TWENTY FIVE:

The Trap

(Featuring: Sean Wren’s Inability to Use a Grenade)

I’d read that humans had evolved on savannahs, running through wide-open fields beneath a blue bowl of a sky; in an open terrain, with nothing to do but run straight ahead, I might have outpaced the thing chasing me. But the Nameless was all narrow halls and broken doors, sharp turns and uncertain footing. This creature had been bred for the close darkness of space; I belonged on an open planet. I stumbled and fell, scrambled up and turned sharply around a corner, losing speed as I did; it followed, nails on metal, nails.