The humming sound approached, louder and louder, like static swelling.

I heard a sound like raindrops on glass as first one, and then another, of the nanomachines landed against the sheet of metal concealing the entrance to our vent.

CHAPTER FORTY:

Babel

The humming continued for a long time outside the entrance to Tamara’s hideaway. At some point after the end of the first hour, the unremitting terror remitted, transitioning into a weary dullness. Indigo sat facing the covered opening with his sword in his lap. Tamara sat in mirror of him beside the covered opening. She’d lost her club back in the server room, but she had yet another improbably large knife, which she’d also drawn from someplace unseen on her person.

I didn’t like waiting. I did like to cut waiting short by doing immediately whatever it was I was waiting to do, whether friends, family, and strangers liked it or not; barring that, it was a solid time for a nap. If those things somehow managed to figure out where we were hiding, it might even be therapeutic for Lantern-Eyes to swing that knife around.

In short order, I fell asleep.

I dreamt I was back on Kystrom. That by itself was not unusual; I often dreamt I was on Kystrom. But though this place had the clarity of a memory, I could not recall when I had been here before. It was a field in the early spring. It was warm out, but there was still snow mixed in with the grass, melting in the sun.

Brigid, I remembered suddenly. I’d had a fight with Brigid—a bad one. I’d imagined she would never speak to me again. Stupid of me to think that. I couldn’t even remember anymore what we’d fought about. I’d been standing out in this field, alone and self-pitying, and Brigid had come to find me to apologize.

I was in the field now, but my best friend and sister wasn’t here with me.

“The Philosopher Stone,” someone said.

I turned in the field. Mara Zhu was standing uphill, staring over my head. She said something in another language, too fast for my sleeping brain to understand, but I knew it was Ameng.

“Slow down,” I told her, because the only words I could recognize with her talking at that speed were death and sorry.

“What the hell is she saying?” a more familiar voice asked from nearby. Lantern-Eyes was sitting in the grass a few feet away. She looked even sorrier in the sunlight than she did in the dark; pared down to bone, no more flesh to wound. Five hundred pounds of stress and anger packed into a hundred-pound bag.

“I can’t tell, she’s talking too fast,” I explained.

Tamara Gupta looked at me oddly. “What?”

I always dreamt in Kystrene. It seemed in the dream I’d spoken in Kystrene as well. Lieutenant Gupta, of course, spoke Sister. “I can’t translate it,” I said, trying for Sister, but somehow all I could get out of my mouth was Kystrene.