Kenny and I said not another word. We watched the body of the drowned deer as it was carried away, slow and peaceful, on the calm still surface of the little creek.

The white belly of a deer rose from the depths of Indigo’s eyes.

“You won’t tell me,” he said.

I swallowed, remembering all too clearly Lantern-Eyes’ warning: Indigo was hundreds of years old. He didn’t care about me. “I won’t. And if you want to find the Stone, you have to keep me alive.”

“Lives depend on the Stone.”

“Yeah,” I said, thinking of Benny, thinking of the little bomb nestled up against my skull. “Mine.”

“You…” Indigo began, and then fell silent all abrupt, his head turning sharply to the side.

I was about to speak up, question his odd stance, but then my less-acute hearing picked up the same sound that had distracted him: a buzzing hum, like a swarm of bees, growing louder as it approached. The Nameless’s autorepair.

I clapped a hand over my own mouth to muffle my still-harsh breathing. Indigo wordlessly touched the light at his throat and dialed it down, down, down, into darkness.

We sat there in the invisible black. I was more keenly aware of the sounds: the ragged edge to my breathing, the buzz and hum growing louder, nearer. Indigo was a faint warmth beside me.

Something landed on my shoulder. I felt its slight weight through my jacket. The buzzing was all around my head.

“Indigo,” I whispered, and Indigo’s collar light glowed back to life.

They were small, very small robots. Nanotech. They must be controlled by the ship’s computer—the AI that ran the autorepair. Lantern-Eyes had had an uncharacteristically evocative name for the AI, hadn’t she? She’d called the computer the Dreamer.

The Dreamer-bots were each the size of my fingernail, or smaller. They hung in the air, surrounded by a blurry halo that I knew must be their little wings moving so rapidly my eyes could not make them out. They darted back and forth with the quick, steady movements of bumblebees.

I glanced over at Indigo and found that while I had a few of the Dreamer-bots hovering around me, he had a veritable cloud surrounding him. For whatever reason, they found him more interesting.

Something touched my hand. I flinched, but five little sharp pinpricks latched onto my skin, and the Dreamer-bot did not shake free.

I would have made Lantern-Eyes proud: I lifted the hand that had the Dreamer-bot clinging to the skin, and slammed hand and bot into the ground. The fragile metal shattered like chiton, and I felt it scratch my skin, but at least when I lifted my hand there was nothing clinging there anymore.

The Dreamer-bots around me hummed, all in unison, like a song or a war-cry. Then, as one, they rushed my face.

Maybe Lantern-Eyes wouldn’t be all that proud of me, after all.

“Sean!” I thought I heard Indigo say, which was obviously me hearing things, because even if Indigo were willing to address me informally he certainly wouldn’t pronounce my name in the correct, Kystrene way. I couldn’t trust my ears, anyway—solid and wriggling, the Dreamer-bots crawled inside my skull.