“She’s already dead. If they realize we are here, they will kill us also.”

“She’s not dead.” I shook his arm; he rocked back and forth with the motion, dark brows jolting up in surprise. “She’s right there; she’s fine. We just have to get her attention.”

“How? The soldier—”

“Tamara,” I said, and Indigo paused, like he thought I’d said a word in Sister that he was unfamiliar with, and was working to translate it in his head. “Her name’s Tamara Gupta.”

“Tamara Gupta cannot see.” Indigo spoke her name like he was handling a grenade. “If you shout out to her, the computer will hear you.”

“Then we go over to her and get her out of there,” I said. “You saved me from those things.”

“There is no point. If we go over there, the machines will attack us all.”

“Then you can fight them off!”

“I am not invulnerable,” Indigo said, another dark-water current surfacing, low and harsh. “I can and will be overwhelmed. I can’t die yet. I need the Philosopher Stone first.”

“So leave,” I said. “Go find the Philosopher Stone. Good luck without me.”

“I can find it without your information. You’ve told me it’s in a lab.”

“But not which lab. Feeling lucky?”

“I prefer a gamble to certain failure,” Indigo said.

He was supposed to be partly human, genetically speaking. I thought I’d seen something like humanity in him before. “You fought alongside her before,” I said.

“When the alternative was certain death,” Indigo said. “If our places were exchanged, she would make the same choice I am making now.”

He didn’t know that, I wanted to say, but the truth was he did know that, and so did I. I knew, too, that if I died here it would probably screw over Benny, wherever he was, and that whatever Indigo might do with the data would probably screw over every living human in the Republic and the free colonies and all sorts of other distant, intangible possibilities. I looked at the real and tangible Tamara Gupta on her hands and knees in the midst of certain death, shaking with terror, but still determinedly searching for a weapon and a way out.

I said, “So would I.”

When I looked at Indigo again he was watching me with an expression I could not name. “I could knock you unconscious and drag you away,” he said, with absolutely no sentiment in his voice.

“Please don’t,” I said. “It’s not too late to save her.”

He watched me, as impassive as one of the metal statues ringing the blinded Lantern-Eyes like spectators to an execution. Then he sighed. “Step quietly,” he bade me, and stalked down the path between the servers, moving towards Tamara. I hurried to follow.

Lantern-Eyes’ search for her weapon and flashlight had taken her a little bit away from us. Indigo stopped at the end of the shelves and crouched there. If we kept going forward, we would lose the scant shelter of the shelves, and be out in the open for the computer of the Nameless to catch. Dreamer-bots hummed on the other side of the room, busily repairing a server fire that made the whole empty area glow. Lantern-Eyes’ good hand, bloody-knuckled, groped along the ground.