I wasn’t content just to drift.

I dived in for the extra momentum, to get a little deeper. The rope around my waist tugged, then slackened as Kenny fed me extra length. I’d decided that I wasn’t disobeying the spirit of my parents’ order if I was being careful while I swam, and with boyish reasoning, Kenny and I had decided that a tether would make the whole endeavor perfectly safe.

The water got darker the deeper I went. There was an aching pressure against my ears and in my head. The walls of the creek on either side of me were spotted with underwater plants, clinging to outcroppings in rock. This deep underwater it was more like flying than swimming. I dove deeper and deeper, until I could see a marvel below me.

The creek was not narrow all the way down. It opened up into a vast cavern, so deep I could barely see the bottom, so wide I could not see the sides. This little creek was bigger than any of the others in my part of Kystrom, but only a little of the dark water showed on the surface.

Then, as I hovered there with a rope around my waist and the marvel of the river visible beneath me, a dark current came. Fast and inescapable, the river coiled around me and dragged me down.

I burst free of the surface, coughing and gasping. The river was colder than I remembered, the field darker. And it was arms, not a rope, that gripped me around my waist.

“Be quiet,” a familiar voice said in my ear. Indigo. I was not on Kystrom; I was on the Nameless.

We floundered together towards higher ground, huddled on wet, rotting floors. Somehow, I’d managed to keep a hold of Tamara’s enormous knife. I put it into my belt while I did a quick accounting of myself. I still had my notebook (waterlogged and ruined), the flashlight and the tablet (both waterproof and still functional, to my relief), along with the bottle of water and ration packets I’d taken from Tamara (wet), and the knife she’d given me (wet and bloody).

My flashlight was off, making the only light in the room Indigo’s collar light. I didn’t recognize the space we’d been washed into. I didn’t see Lantern-Eyes.

Something crackled from a room away, followed by a loud POP and a white flash.

“The water is shorting out electronics,” Indigo told me quietly.

“Where’s Lantern-Eyes?”

“I don’t know. We have to be quiet. The damage to the ship may attract the autorepair. We need to get to Zhu’s office before it does.”

My head was still spinning from my near-drowning experience. Then Indigo’s words caught up to me: Mara Zhu’s office.

He didn’t know.

I coughed. “Have you found the other Ministers yet?”

Indigo shook his head. Amazing how he could be nonverbal, yet still terse. “They are outside the range of my communicator.”

“Communicator?”

He touched his collar-light.

Of course. Why make a communications device that could do only one thing? They might as well carry around flashlights. Indigo’s collar-light looked a little small to contain a short-range radio as well as a power source and a light source, but Minister tech was centuries ahead of humanity’s. That was why humanity’s breakthrough on FTL engines had taken them so much by surprise.