Trapped like a rat. I swung the flashlight over the floor, looking for the brown oval of the grenade, and saw that that thing was in the doorframe. It had stopped running when I had, and it stood there in the doorframe, a shadow in the dark.

I took a step back, felt my heel hit the wall. My chest was heaving. In the room around me, I heard something hiss, like gas through ventilation. The shadow lunged.

I swung the flashlight up and the beam hit the manikin full in the face. It recoiled like the blow had been physical, skidding to a stop in the center of the room and raising its arms to shield its face. While it was stunned I dropped to the ground and groped around for the fallen grenade.

My palm landed on the rough surface of the grenade. I scrambled, pulling it out of the debris-strewn floor. The hissing sound in the room seemed to grow louder, and a strange, metallic scent struck my senses like a ruler slap. I fumbled for the pin, my shaking fingers too clumsy to grip it, going through useless counts in my head. The manikin stepped forward—and fell.

The metallic scent was growing stronger, unpleasant. I watched dumbly as the manikin tried to push herself up on an elbow, climbing for the door, and failed. The hissing sound ceased abruptly, but the metallic scent remained, and the manikin was utterly still on the floor.

CHAPTER TWENTY SIX:

Made of Man

I expected the manikin to lunge up like a striking snake until she didn’t. The hissing of some sort of gas being pumped into the room slowed into silence, but the metallic stench lingered, overwhelming. I wasn’t feeling anything except the urge to cover my nose, but whatever had been released into the air had knocked out the manikin. The same gas as was in Lantern-Eyes’ bombs, perhaps?

Moving carefully—I didn’t know how deeply she was out—I went over and crouched beside her. She was breathing with the metronome regularity of the deeply unconscious. I pressed two fingers to the point under her jaw where, on a human, the carotid would beat. The unsynchronized throbs of two circulatory systems battered against my hand.

Unconscious, but not dead. This gas smelled the same as whatever white smoke the lieutenant had released to stun Indigo. Maybe Lantern-Eyes had found a stash of the canisters on the ship, or she’d taken the gas from traps like this room. It made sense; the ancient scientists must’ve had some way of managing the manikins. This room was obviously a trap; the gas had only released once the manikin had crossed the threshold. It was a remarkably resilient trap if it was a thousand years old, but if it was one of the lieutenant’s traps, I couldn’t imagine why she would use a gas that would only knock out a manikin rather than kill one.

Whatever the source of the trap, I was lucky I’d stumbled across it. It had saved my life—and given me a chance to see, up close, one of the mysteries of this ship.