“It’s okay,” he translated softly, when I tugged his arm again, and guided me to the side, through a different passage.

We had not gone far from the heavy footsteps before I smelled something acrid. The air was heavy, and the space in front of my flashlight swirled with particles. “What’s going on?” I whispered to Indigo.

He spoke just as quietly as me. “The water from the burst pipe flowed mostly this way. I believe it damaged the electronics.”

Which meant even more Dreamer-bots ahead of us. I could only hope that if there were any ahead, they were wandering around independently, not swarming for a taste of my blood.

A few steps further and Indigo reached back, found the switch on my flashlight, and shut it off. I opened my mouth to object but then I saw what he had seen: there was a faint and intermittent glow coming from up ahead, lightening the air.

We walked around the edges of that glow. More and more of the space around us was illuminated as we advanced, and I realized that we had ended up in some sort of server room, quite large, and full of old server towers striping the room like bookshelves. Most of them were dark, no longer functional; others were so much rubble on the floor.

Suddenly I was airborne, and then landing on the ground with surprising gentleness, braced by pressure at my shoulders and hips. I was too startled to speak, but tried to push myself up. A hand landed heavily between my shoulder blades. “Be still,” Indigo murmured.

He’d knocked me down, presumably to stop me from being seen by something. From my vantage point on the floor, I could see nothing except broken metal and plastic, illuminated palely by Indigo’s collar-light and whatever other light source was flickering so sharply out of sight.

Something hummed. The humming swelled, then ebbed, moving away.

I pushed myself up; this time Indigo let me, though he kept his hand on the back of my neck anyway, uncomfortably close to the implant. If he moved his palm up a little bit, he’d be able to feel it, and then I’d be facing potentially deadly questions. I opened my mouth to say something, but his thumb and forefinger dug hard into my skin.

Not safe, then—not altogether. I swallowed, and followed when he moved, creeping across the debris. Between the piled shelves of servers, I glimpsed a source of brilliant light.

The lights I’d seen, it turned out, were electrical fires. A cloud came between me and the fire and then the fire went out as the Dreamer-bots repaired it. These bots seemed more interested in repairing the overt damage to the ship than investigating us, but there was no telling how long that would last.

Indigo stood up. I followed suit. Upright, we stepped over the debris-ridden floor, crossing through the narrow alley of partially-destroyed servers. Indigo paused at the end of one. I peered over his shoulder and watched a swarm of Dreamer-bots pass, humming softly, hunting fires in a mechanical library.