I didn’t expect to have what I had with Benny with Lantern-Eyes and Indigo. The idea was absurd. Benny was basically family to me; we had Kystrom in common, we had Itaka in common. We’d known the same people in our childhood, spoke the same language in the same way. That kind of shared experience was something a Republican lieutenant and a Minister could never equal. They could never even come close. Lantern-Eyes, Indigo, and I would always be enemies, unlike me and Benny. But my arrangement with Benny, way back when, had proven one thing: when you’re alone in the middle of danger, you don’t need to know each other, or even like each other, to make an effective alliance.

Lantern-Eyes gave me a look that was part irritation, part weariness, and all hard determination. “What do you expect from this, Sean? You know he and I can’t let the other walk away.”

The sweep of her good hand marked out Indigo where he sat beneath a strip of emergency lighting, his sword on the ground at his side.

“Whether we like it or not, we have a truce in this room.” Indigo spoke with the authority of a man who knew that, should the discussion go south, he was the only person with a proper weapon. “I’m willing to let the truce last long enough to hear the terms of Mr. Wren’s arrangement.”

So I was back to Mr. Wren now.

“And if I’m not willing?” Tamara said, and by the time I’d turned away from Indigo, she had drawn her gun.

The gun. I’d forgotten about Tamara’s one-bullet gun.

She trained that gun on Indigo, one-handed, steady as a rock. Indigo sat against the wall, no discernable tension in his frame, four feet away from a bullet in the heart.

The way they stared at each other suggested they’d briefly forgotten I existed. I tensed, shifted onto my heels. Like I could do anything; what, jump in front of the bullet? “Hey, guys,” I said, and laughed a little, nerves jangling. “We don’t need—”

“Could you really outrun my bullet?” Tamara asked.

Curiosity shaded her tone, like color revealed by the fading of shadow. I bit the inside of my cheek against the imp that urged me to speak.

“I have no need to outrun a bullet that won’t be fired,” Indigo said.

For four or five more beats of my rapid heart, Tamara stared at him, jack-o-lantern eyes intent; then she snorted and lowered her gun.

“All right, all right,” I said; the words leapt from me, driven by anxiety demons. “Can you two stop trying to kill each other and just talk for like five minutes, please?”

“Convince me,” Lantern-Eyes said, but she was tucking her gun back into her holster.

Annoyance hit me like a surge. “Convince you? Come on,” I said. “If you didn’t already know what I’m about to suggest, you wouldn’t have let me start talking. We’re all fucked. You,” I gestured at Tamara, unrelentingly determined and absolutely unbreakable in her oversized uniform jacket, broken arm notwithstanding, “have been here for years, and you can’t find the Philosopher Stone—and even if you did, you wouldn’t be able to fight those things off long enough to get to it. You,” I gestured to Indigo, still and calm in the same way as thunderclouds at night that have yet to break, “don’t know where the Philosopher Stone is, or how to get there, and if you keep wandering around aimlessly those things are going to tear you apart. That’s assuming,” I added, to them both, “that the sun doesn’t go and do us all in before any of us can get the Philosopher Stone.”