There were at least five of the things heading towards us through the field now, splashing through the puddles that were rapidly forming underfoot. The flash storm was turning dirt to mud. My footing was less certain, my boots sliding. The far wall of the farmlands was getting closer, but it was still quite distant.

“We’re not going to make it,” I warned Lantern-Eyes.

She didn’t falter, her expression determined, and water streaming over her face while the storm roared down on us like a vengeance.

I could just make out the outline of a door in its surface, the door Lantern-Eyes was leading me towards. But even here, the manikins were catching up.

Meanwhile, in the distance, Indigo turned as gracefully as a dancer, the raindrops turned to crystals in the glow of his collar-light. He wasn’t having any trouble fighting off the monsters.

Claws and pale flesh and snarling; rain glistened and mud splattered as something hit Lantern-Eyes full in the side and took her down. I shouted and threw myself, without thinking, at the tangle of Lantern-Eyes and manikin; hairless flesh slid beneath my grasping fingers and something sharp bit into my leg. I kicked and rolled, grabbing at the monster, feeling it squirm beneath me. I had to get it off Tamara. When it turned around in my grip, it would disembowel me.

A loud crack right beside my head, more piercing than thunder. I blinked past the suddenly still corpse in my arms to find Tamara Gupta, rain sticking her hair to her hollowed cheeks, breathing hard and holding her bloodied club. The manikin was dead. “Take this,” she gasped, and produced an improbably large knife out of, apparently, thin air.

I took it. “Where were you keeping this?”

“Do you ever shut up?” she demanded, and hauled me to my feet without letting go of her club.

We ran again, full-out for the far wall and the little door. The other four manikins were closer. We’d barely survived one; Lantern-Eyes had given me a knife but that didn’t mean I could actually use it.

“We have to call for Indigo,” I gasped.

“Are you insane?” Lantern-Eyes snapped. “He’s a few hundred years old; he’s known you for a few days. If he comes over here, it’ll be to kill us, too!”

That might be true. He’d promised to kill me often enough, especially if I tried to escape—which I had. And yet he’d saved me when the hull decompressed. He’d stepped between me and the weird rock thing. He’d offered me his hand when I’d been paralyzed with fear in the tiny tunnel.

Tamara and I slammed into the far wall together, right beside the little door. Before I could push myself up she was moving, grasping the handle, water streaming down the wall and over her hands. She turned the handle—and the door did not move.

Locked, or simply rusted shut. I looked back at the field and found four pale figures emerging from the grass, long limbs rising rain-slick, metal glinting at their nails. And, far off behind them, the flickering blue glow of Indigo defeating his opponents single-handed.