I’d run off from Indigo and Lantern-Eyes without any supplies. If I didn’t find a source of water somewhere soon, I’d be in trouble.

The room beyond my hiding spot was still eerily quiet, filled only by my gasping breaths. I swallowed and deliberately slowed my breathing, listening hard, but heard nothing in the silence. When I flicked on my flashlight, I saw nothing, either.

I crawled out of my hiding place, limbs still unsteady, and picked a new direction to walk.

I found myself in a hallway, open doors leading off every few yards on either side. I stepped carefully but I heard nothing except my own footsteps padding softly against the ground. The dust seemed thicker here, and I could see no tracks in it but my own. When I shone my flashlight into the rooms around me, hoping for a bathroom or a kitchen or maybe just a broken water-pipe, I found that the rooms were eerily, totally empty—not that everything in the rooms had decayed, but as if everything in the rooms had been removed, or else broken down uniformly to dust.

It seemed almost deliberate.

One of the rooms unsettled me more than the rest. A roughly-shaped mound in the center of the room implied a desk of some kind, and the wall facing the exit was lined with three massive doors. These three doors were in perfect repair, as if they were too massive to be destroyed—or as if whatever had systematically destroyed the contents of the other rooms in this part of the ship had not dared to approach these three massive doors.

If none of the monsters on this ship had dared to touch those massive doors over the thousand years they’d lived on this ship, it was probably a bad idea for me to do it.

And yet, what else did I have to lose? If I was lucky, those doors led to the showers.

Flashlight in one hand, I left the hallway and walked over to the three doors.

CHAPTER TWENTY EIGHT:

Three Doors

I chose the door in the center. The handle was long enough to wrap both my hands around, and Benny’s too, and Indigo and Lantern-Eyes if they’d wanted to join in on my mission to open the mystery door. It scraped against my palm when I grabbed it, and I couldn’t tell whether that was because the handle was rough, or my skin was dry.

The door didn’t budge. I tugged one-handed, then gave up and set the flashlight down to grab the handle with both hands and lean my full weight against the door. Inch by inch, it groaned open. The door was at least a foot thick.

Moving the door stirred up the ancient dust, which was particularly ashy here. It settled on my skin, pulled into my lungs with the air. I started coughing and couldn’t stop; there wasn’t enough moisture in my throat to expel the dust, and I hacked dryly into my hands.