I matched the gear to my memory of how the clock had looked when I’d taken it apart, and slotted it neatly back into place. “Your sources were right.”

“My boss and I realize that intellectuals like yourself are not swayed by financial offers—”

“No, I like money,” I assured her.

Quint leaned forward, that fussy hair of hers swinging against her temples. “That ship has been left undisturbed for a thousand years. It’s a treasure trove of historical and archaeolinguistic knowledge. And you could be the first to discover it. Whatever knowledge you want to bring back, whatever research you wish to do—it’s all yours. All my boss wants is this one piece of data.”

“And what is this data?”

Quint’s eyes brightened with the pure, treasure-gold gleam of avarice. Obviously, she had been authorized to answer that question this time around.

Reverently, she said, “It’s the Philosopher Stone.”

CHAPTER FOUR:

Sean Wren and the Philosopher Stone

Once when I was a kid on Kystrom, a Chosen woman stopped me in the street.

Before the Ministers killed everyone in my hometown and took over the rest of the planet, there were a few schools of thought regarding ancient history. Most viewed the arrival of the alien Ministers, a thousand years ago, as a random act of destruction, as unstoppable and meaningless as a natural disaster. That was what I’d been taught in school, how my parents had spoken of it; how I’d thought of it, too. Some radicals had claimed the coming of the Ministers had been a blessing for humanity, pointing out how cleanly and clockwork society allegedly ran in Maria Nova, where the Ministers still had control of the human population. I couldn’t think of those radicals, now, without bitterness—traitors that had welcomed the slaughter of my home, the subsequent surrender of my planet.

The Chosen thought differently than both.

“Boy,” the Chosen woman had called me, long before a three-foot growth spurt made me tower over everyone I knew. “Are you Chosen?”

The Chosen had nearly been eliminated by the Ministers more than once in their history, a singularly unlucky group. If all it took to count as Chosen by a deity was a run of serious bad luck, I should qualify for membership now.

But then: “No,” I’d said.

The real Chosen had stricter bars for entry, of course. Then or now, I would never count as one of them.

My answer had not been the one the woman had wanted. I saw her hesitate. But the road was empty, the sun was going down, and she seemed in a hurry. “Would you help me?” she asked.

I agreed, and she handed me a jar of ash.

“My family is away, and I can’t do it for myself,” she told me. The jar sat heavy and cold in my palm. “Put some on your finger and mark my head.”

I knew then that it was a repentance day for her. The Chosen believed that the Ministers, who had appeared so abruptly and out of nowhere, had been sent by God as his vengeance. The Ministers were not living creatures, the Chosen said, but avatars of divine punishment. Ministers could not go to Heaven or Hell, they had no souls, they existed for nothing but our suffering. The Chosen repented in order to convince God to take the Ministers away. This Chosen woman needed to be marked, but she was not allowed to do it to herself. I was the only one around.